Milestone: 5 Years of STEM Communication

I recently had the pleasure of helping a new cohort of Science Communication Fellows prototype their activities before they go live on the museum floor. If you are in the Seattle area and have not had a chance to interact with a Fellow as part of the Meet a Scientist program at the Pacific Science Center, I encourage you to do so. (Check to see if there is a similar offering in your area!) These happen most Saturday afternoons and are free as part of your admission ticket. You'll discover what cutting-edge research is going on and you'll be helping the fellows out by building up their communication skills. Win-win!

When I think back to some of the most rewarding and useful things I did during my graduate school training, I have to rank this program as one of my top 3. I was terrified about giving presentations and I knew I had to do something about it or else I would suffer in the long-term. The workshops helped prepare me to engage technical and non-technical visitors of all ages, develop analogies about research concepts and details, and go with the flow of topics that visitors brought up. In time, it became exciting to have chances to iterate quickly and try a new analogy or modify how I delivered a story to the next visitor that came to my table, most of the time within minutes. It was refreshing to have chances to listen to people about what they considered were interesting topics which helped me guide our discussion further. Other times, interactions were very short and I had to be ok with distilling a message down to a few words.

This training definitely came in handy during my time at Metis (presentations galore!) and I certainly look forward to using these skills throughout my professional career.