Tips from awardees

Here at the Academy, we ask our awardees what advice they’d like to share with others, when their project has come to an end. As projects are often very different to each other, tips range from the practical to the vague, and can either be very specific or much broader in scope.

While not all advice will be relevant for every project, it’s always good to learn from others so, here’s a rundown of our top tips from our projects just gone:

• Try giving newly-trained engineers opportunities to put what they’ve learnt into practice straight away.
• Meeting other science communicators and seeing other types of public engagement first-hand can provide valuable inspiration to engineers who are just starting out in public engagement.
• Diversity is good. Try including engineers from a variety of backgrounds, for example both industry and academia in your plans.
• Working with multiple partners is challenging, but can help to achieve more than you could on your own. Successful partnerships require good planning, regular contact and compromise.
• Recruiting engineers is hard on short timescales. It’s even harder in the summer months of June to August.
• Artistic outputs take time!
• Try to have an achievable goal for engineers to work towards – a film for example.
• Be flexible to engineers’ time.
• Peer support is good.
• Little extras such as free buses can really help to get schools on board.

A bit of a mixture there then. For more top tips the British Science Association have a whole wealth of information from projects across engineering and science on their collective memory website.

Is recording engineering?

As well as funding public engagement activities through Ingenious we also offer Public Engagement Fellowships for individual researchers. The scheme is currently closed while we review just exactly we want the Fellowship to support (our very own engineering Brian Cox perhaps?) but that doesn’t mean our current Fellow has stopped too.

The man in question is Jez Wells who is an audio designer and engineer over at the University of York. Jez is trying to answer the question ‘Is recording engineering?’ and is looking at how similar the two disciplines actually are.

Jez is blogging all about his Fellowship findings on his blog (where he also gives a much better explanation of his work than I have). But if your interest has been piqued and you’re around York on Tuesday 28 February he’s also giving a talk at the University which you’re more than welcome to go along to.

Paperwork

I spent most of last week printing, collating and hole punching.

This isn’t because I work in a reprographic department, but because we’re in the midst of review season for our public engagement grant scheme Ingenious. I’m pretty new to this all (I only started at the Academy at the end of last year), but I’m told that I’ve actually had it quite easy. While in previous years every application to the scheme would be printed out multiple times, this year we’re also doing electronic versions – cutting down on both paper waste and paper cuts.

In any case by the time March arrives we’ll have 20 or so brand new engineering engagement projects funded by the Academy, and I’m pretty excited to find out what they will be. Over the last five years of Ingenious we’ve funded more than 50 projects which have each in their own way tried to get people involved in and excited about engineering, while also building up the communication skills of engineers.

I won’t attempt an exhaustive list right now but in the next few weeks or so I’ll be blogging about some of the projects we’ve got running so far. So if you’re an engineer you can find out the type of exciting stuff you can get involved in and if not, you can maybe pick up some ideas and inspiration. However in the meantime you can also find the list of funded projects from last year on the Ingenious website.