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| Group photo of participants, outside of the Museum of Science & Industry (Chicago). |
Have you ever experienced workshop whiplash, in a good way? It’s a term I just came up with to describe what I’m feeling after attending the “Empowering Diverse Voices to Communicate Science” supported by the AAPT. I had applied for the workshop on a whim, not fully knowing what to expect. It sounded interesting, fit into my schedule, and offered travel support, so I took a chance on it. Now that I’m home (after delays from the CrowdStrike debacle), I can’t believe how much I learned in just one day, and I’m eager to follow up on so many opportunities!
The workshop was organized by six scientists from across the US representing academia, national labs, and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and career levels from graduate student to CEO. The overall format of the workshop was four independent sessions all clearly focused on the “empowering diverse voices” theme. The evening and morning before the session began, organizer Sherry Yennello (Texas A&M University), led us in some communicating and networking activities that established a collegial and supportive atmosphere that endured through to our trips home.
I’ll describe the sessions in reverse chronology because the first ended up being my favorite (though they were all very useful). In the final session Katelyn Alley (University of Oregon) explained the importance of contributing to Wikipedia and started to guide us through the process of contributing and creating new pages. Unfortunately setting up our accounts hit some snags, so we weren’t able to accomplish much, but it was enough to inspire me to consider a Wikipedia workshop for my own students. Prior to that, Prof. Malika Jeffries-EL (Boston University) led us through exploration of the entire social media landscape, and convinced us that yes, we really do need our own websites and social media accounts! She covered so much, though, that there wasn’t time to put her suggestions into practice during the workshop, which would have been helpful. Prof. Shelly Lesher (North Carolina A&T State University) used her podcast My Nuclear Life as a case study for how to think about our own science outreach and communication projects. A high-level takeaway from her workshop is to call it “public scholarship” to help our departments and institutions appreciate the value of these activities.
My favorite session was led by Dra. Nicole Cabrera Salazar, founder of Movement Consulting. I was familiar with Movement and had participated in several remote workshops a couple years ago, and my high expectations were blown out of the water! The topic was “Pitch Perfect: TED talk-style elevator speech”. Nicole guided us through creating a mood board, how to approach creating a pitch, sections of an effective pitch, the importance of timing, and several rounds of ruthless but invaluable practice. Each of us even recorded our pitches, a process that went surprisingly smoothly – too bad we didn’t have time to watch them all! I also would have loved to have craft materials available for the mood board, just to amp up the personalization and *something* of the session. I would highly recommend this workshop as a phenomenal experience for scientists at all levels, both to empower individuals and to foster networking within a group.
I only wish the workshop was longer! Collaborative time for the last two sessions was cut short to keep us on schedule, and even then we ended up with very little time to explore our host venue, the Museum of Science & Industry. It would also have been amazing to incorporate work-life balance discussions into the workshop. Informally I learned about other participants’ personal/family lives affecting their careers (for example, having a child has been shown to alter a woman’s career in STEM more than a man’s). As a small first step, how awesome would it be to have a workshop for women in science that explicitly included children, especially at a science museum?!
My three takeaways:
- More workshops like this, please! The boost I got from meeting so many amazing women, each impressive in their own way, was invaluable.
- Funding for these types of workshops is essential, both to encourage participation and to make their professional value explicit. Possible sources include NASA’s Topical Workshops, Symposiums, and Conferences and The Heising-Simons Foundation.
- Take a chance on an opportunity that interests you, even if you don’t know where it might lead!
Last but not least, a huge thanks to the organizers:
- Robin Bjorkquist, Seattle University
- Beth A. Cunningham, American Association of Physics Teachers
- Jessica Esquivel, FermiLab
- Priscilla Lewis, COACh, University of Oregon
- Stephanie Lyons, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Sherry Yennello, Texas A&M University
And to Kathy McCloud, NSF Program Director, for her support of the workshop.
