It’s not a great feeling, turning 5,700 students away. Their teachers, 60 of them, wanted to take part in I’m a Scientist and I’m an Engineer this November but there wasn’t the funding to accommodate them. Sadly, it’s not the first time.
The graph shows the number of class places requested by teachers (box outline), against the funded places we were able to run (colour-fill) for recent events. In fact, demand has exceeded places available for the past 13 events; and in 9 of those we could have run double the number of zones we did.
Double the number of young people seeing that scientists and engineers are normal people like themselves.
Double the number of scientists and engineers taking part in “the best crash course in science communication”.
The Wellcome Trust, the British Psychological Society, and the UK Space Agency are among the funders this November. If you are interested in getting more chemists, non-biomed scientists or engineers in your field involved in outreach, if you think more students should get the opportunity to find out what science and scientists are like then please write to someone with an outreach or widening participation budget and ask them to consider working with us. Get them to have a look at fund.imascientist.org.uk and contact Shane.
