Read our school visit diaries!
7 - 8 February 2008
Veres Pálné Gimnázium, Budapest, Hungary
Julianna Oláh
I was more than happy to go back to my secondary school as a SET-Routes school ambassador. I was strongly motivated by the fact that the school "Veres Pálné Gimnázium" got its name from Pálné Veres, who fought for the rights of women to study and was a pioneer in establishing higher education for girls in Hungary. She was convinced that women possessed the same capabilities as men and that erudition enriched our thoughts and freed us from prejudice and idleness. In 1869, she founded the first secondary school for girls in Hungary, which was later renamed after her. I believe that Pálné Veres' ideas strongly resemble the aims of the SET-Routes programme evoking a symbolic link between Veres Pálné Gimnázium and SET-Routes.
The class Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
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I started to organise my visit to the school by contacting my former teacher, but unfortunately she had retired. Therefore, I turned to the headmaster, who welcomed me wholeheartedly. She helped me choose the classes that I was to visit. Our aim was to talk to children aged between 12 and 15. I met their class tutors and we agreed that I would join their lessons. However, when I visited the school as an ambassador in February 2008, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with the chemistry teachers. It turned out that they were really interested in my work and would have been very happy if I had come to their chemistry lessons.
Before starting to prepare my visit, I gathered information on the average knowledge of chemistry of 15-year-olds. I found that the largest part of the curriculum is taught in later years. I was also sure that students had never heard of computational chemistry, the field I am working in, and I also expected some resistance against pure chemistry, as my younger cousins and their friends think chemistry is beyond their depth!
Therefore, I decided to design a presentation bringing chemistry 'closer to life' , to emphasize its importance, the areas in which it is indispensable and the types of jobs one can get with a degree in chemistry. It would be about 35 minutes long, followed by a ten minutes discussion.
At the very beginning of the presentation, the class tutor introduced me to the students. I started by introducing SET-Routes and showed them a photo of the school ambassadors and a map of the countries that they would visit. I wanted them to realize that they were part of something pan-European and that they were really important. After this, I described my struggle to choose between becoming a Latin teacher or a physicist, finally ending up at the University of Technology of Budapest studying bioengineering. I showed them pictures of university life and of chemistry laboratories, emphasizing the importance of computers in many fields of chemistry. I did this, on the one hand, to create the basis for talking about computational chemistry and, on the other hand, to tell them that what they study in the informatics lesson can be applied in other fields as well, in physics, chemistry or even biology.
Crossword Puzzle Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
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To keep the students awake, I had prepared a cross-word puzzle in which they could see a part of several objects, and they needed to fill in the name of the whole object in the crossword puzzle. Groups of four competed against each other and the best three groups in each class won a treat - English chocolate. Finally, I explained the connection between chemistry and each of the objects.
The next part of my presentation focused on research. First of all, I elucidated the meaning of "research", what it was and why people wanted to do it. I explained that I started to do research in a real research group during my university years. Then I moved on to explain what a PhD was and how one could obtain it, and why I chose to do one.
After this I gave the students some basic ideas about computational chemistry, that we use computers to study molecules, their structure, polarity and other properties. I showed images to explain the concept of electronegativity and how we can understand the dipole moment of a water molecule and how it can be visualised. This was a really lucky choice, because the students were studying the topic at the time of my visit. I talked about reaction mechanisms and showed a movie of the reaction that I studied during my PhD.
Before moving on to my current work in Bristol, I briefly highlighted the relevance of computational chemistry in the pharmaceutical industry, as I worked for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Hungary for nine months after finishing my PhD.
Pálné Veres' statue in Budapest Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
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The last third of my talk focused on my current research interests: modelling enzyme reactions. I explained that proteins and enzymes were built from smaller building blocks and that they play very important roles in our body. As I have been studying cytochrome P450 proteins, I explained that they are found in the liver where their role is to metabolise foreign molecules and drugs. I mentioned the problems that can arise when different drugs interact with each other and how grapefruit juice can alter the effect of drugs. Finally, I described to them how the enzyme I work on is organised and showed a movie of the events that may take place in the active site.
Before concluding, I spoke about the other activities that we do for our work: summarising our results in articles or presentations, writing books, participating at conferences and cooperating with Hungarian and foreign colleagues. My last slide included photos of my favourite activities: swimming in the sea, sightseeing, cooking and collecting beer labels.
The discussion after the talk started quite slowly, but there were several students who were really interested in the process of creating new drugs and vaccines, asked what it was like to work for a pharmaceutical company and also how to study chemistry so that one would not forget after a very short time.
I really enjoyed my visit, although in the beginning I was really anxious. I was happy that the students enjoyed the crossword puzzle and followed the talk with interest. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and openness of the teachers and their efforts to make me feel at home. I hope that I managed to bring chemistry a bit closer to everyday life and to show that researchers are like most other people. You do not need very special talents to become a scientist; the most important thing is real interest and commitment.