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Share Your Science: Outreach with Dr. Laura Good


As a collaboration between CORE and GEODES, Dr. Laura Good, Education Manager at Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and director of MARINE (Monterey Area Research Institutions' Network for Education), put on a much-anticipated seminar guiding us through science outreach on November 15. Through activities, discussions, and knowledge shared from her experience in marine education, Dr. Good instilled in her audience an excitement about how and why science communication beyond simply talking to other scientists is an important responsibility.

Dr. Good highlighted the need to build trust between scientists and the public, to break away from the stereotypical scientist image: just Google "scientist illustration" and her meaning will become immediately clear. Most depictions show males, nearly all are wearing white lab coats and are handing some kind of laboratory glassware filled with brightly colored liquid. This image is not very approachable or relatable. How does what this person does relate to the real world? Why should the average person care? Should the public trust what they say? A crucial step to improving this relationship is enhancing communication between scientists and the general public, which requires us, as young scientists, to make an effort to share our science.

Above image credit: Dribbble

Effective outreach does not require reinventing the wheel. Spare time is usually a rare phenomenon in a graduate student, so Dr. Good encouraged us to reach out to existing outreach frameworks in our community to enable us to share our message without having to come up with a whole new platform to do so. Listing science outreach efforts in the Santa Cruz area and beyond yielded a list of many opportunities to get involved: Science Sundays at the Seymour Center, lab open houses (such as Moss Landing Marine Labs' or MBARI's), Science on Tap talks (put on by WiSE - Women in Science and Engineering), Skype a Scientist, the UCSC Arboretum, university newsletters, and many more.

Dr. Good challenged us to come up with personal outreach goals that were SMART - an acronym sourced primarily from the business world which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. This transitioned us from hypothetical thinking to setting tangible goals, even if they are small, to get us going. Some examples attendees came up with included taking an Instagram-worthy picture to share through the USGS's social media page and giving a public talk for Science on Tap located at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz.

Despite what impostor syndrome may lead us to believe, each of us are an expert in something and have a sphere of influence, be it a family member at Thanksgiving dinner who wants to know how ocean currents work or a researcher from another country interested in a method you developed. You do not have to have a decades of experience to have a message worth spreading, that you SHOULD spread, so get out there and share your science!

 

A huge thank you to our guest speaker Laura Good for leading this seminar and thank you to the EPS Department, OS Department, Lagunitas Brewing Company, and Woodstock's Pizza for sponsoring food and refreshments.

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