There are 20 000 STEM students in imperial. Many of them will become researchers, and even if not, all of them want to make a difference in their field.
But if all those imperial students truly want to make a responsible impact, they would benefit greatly from learning more about engaging ‘the public’ with science.
So, we were thinking, why don’t we all take some of the stuff that we have been learning in our specialised course, and give them this additional dimension next to their studies?
So, with this in mind we are starting Imperial’s first science communication society. We believe that our knowledge is useful to every student, and the more people that know about science communication, the more useful science will be for our society.
The first goal is to bring every student interested in exploring science communication together. We will organise fun interactive workshops, talks from your favourite celebrity scientist and an annual symposium. We also want to assist student communicators in their own projects and ideas during brainstorming sessions.
Apart from skill-building in young communicators, we would also like to help motivated science communicators by connecting them with professional science communicators and bodies such as ABSW, PCST, etc. There are avenues to set up a mentor-mentee programme for more tailored support.
We believe that communities can make a difference. We found that student science communicators are sort of fragmented across the university; we hope to bring them all under an umbrella to critically think about science communication as a field and its evolution.
While we are cooking up a lot of big events, we can also start small, turning ideas generated in our class into pilot projects. Besides our events, we can also discuss important issues in science communication, like why science communication does not get the same kind of traction in universities such as Imperial, where every time you have to explain what science communication is whenever you introduce yourselves.
We are generously being funded by two professors who would like to see visionaries thinking about science communication, public engagement, and open science, to address the global challenges of the present: misinformation, inequities of climate change, public health, ethics of science, etc., across the world.