Suze won the Energy Zone in June 2011, here’s what she did with her money:

With my winnings, I funded myself to go to the BIG Event in 2012. It was in York, and I met lots of like minded people, from professional science communicators to science educators. I had decided by this time to do the INSPIRE course at Imperial which is a science communication heavy PGCE for post-docs, so my trip to BIG combined with lots of encouraging words from some of the teacher-trained people at Life in Newcastle at the British Science Festival 2012 encouraged me to accept the place I was very luckily offered.

Since going to BIG, I have continued to collaborate with many of the people I met there and have gone from strength to strength in terms of sharing my science! I remember a couple of days before the reception at Wellcome in 2012, I took part in a Tell Us Your Dissertation competition in two minutes. Public speaking at the time made me so nervous I thought I may pass out. I used to get the same feelings at conferences when presenting papers too.

Not one to get caught out my something as silly as fear, I tried to confront it head on, and through taking part in the two minute thesis explaining competition accidentally made eye contact with Steve Cross, public engagement superhero at UCL. He only knew who I was through cheer leading the UCL competitors involved in IAS, but signed me up for a Bright Club, and all the other wonderful things that followed. I got on board with the Science Showoff team, which have me lots of new experiences and insights I to how events are set up and managed, how other acts ‘sell’ their science, and how lovely it is to be able to encourage people to give it a go, having genuinely been just as nervous and inadequate-feeling myself before I started doing this.

Without IAS, Steve, UCL’s Bright Club, and other really lucky things happening, I wouldn’t have become this science-sharing-Suzemonster that I am now. IAS was like the nucleation point of my super-saturated-Suze crash into the world of science communication, and being able to attend something like BIG (which is ridiculously expensive if self-funded!) was invaluable to my development.