Read our school visit diaries!
Catherine Tiligada
Greek-French School "Jeanne d'Arc", Piraeus, Greece
(18 December 2007)
École Saint Joseph, Peyki, Greece (20 December 2007)
Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
 |
For my SET-Routes activities, I contacted the heads of two schools. They were very helpful and supportive of the activities that I had proposed to them.
I visited the Greek-French School "Jeanne d' Arc" in Piraeus and my former high-school "École Saint Joseph" in Peyki, on 18 and 20 December 2007, respectively. In both events, I gave a talk to students, aged 15-17, on the everyday life of an academic researcher. The talk consisted of three parts:
- Overview of the organisations participating in SET-Routes, giving examples of achievements and an outline of successful researchers, focusing on women Nobel laureates
- Definition, scope, means and outcome (scientific, social and personal) of research, focusing on biomedical sciences and eventually pharmacology
- How women scientists juggle with time to be good researchers, teachers, mothers and housewives, and the rewards gained by this effort: cost to benefit.
Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
|
The teachers gave me one and a half school hours. Thus the talks were of about 30 minutes duration, but there was rather limited time for questions and general discussion with the students at the end. I started by introducing myself, mentioning that I had graduated from the same school and then I referred to the above points using simple language and examples from everyday life. I explained how and why I moved from Greece to Britain as a student and back to Greece as a university teacher. By introducing a simplified version of drug discovery through basic research, I went on to explain how a laboratory is organised (some of the students had the chance to visit the laboratories at the Department of Pharmacology); the effort PhD students and Postdocs put into research, the challenges we all face and, finally, how results are presented in meetings and publications. At the end of my talk, I explained briefly how woman researchers manage to be scientists and mothers at the same time.
Feedback from students
Being an academic for quite a few years, I did not have the chance to talk officially to high-school students before. Therefore, the school ambassador activities made me realise that the majority of children - some of which may be students entering university in the next couple of years - think that science is a rather "distant" job. Consequently, the most interesting part of the visits was the feedback that I got from the students who answered the questionnaire that I had handed out.
Please click on the photo for a larger version. |
|
All the students liked the slides I had prepared, yet many of them thought that music should accompany the animations. During the general discussion, most questions concerned the path one has to follow in order to be able to pursue a career in science and technology. Some of the students' recurring questions concerned the differences in scientific activities in various countries, giving the impression that they thought that research is performed only in famous institutes. While most of the students would have liked to have had more time for discussion, only a very limited number - surprisingly mostly girls - stayed longer to talk to me at the end of the visit. About half of the students thought that the presentation was very simple and comprehensive, while the other half mentioned that it was rather difficult to understand most of the terms! Interestingly, the majority of girls did not like me referring to family. The most impressive piece of information they said they received was the "dual therapeutic and toxic effect of drugs" and that the "internet was discovered in Europe".