Last week in uni was the assignment that I’ve been most looking forward to (and simultaneously the most nervous about); our big broadcasting project.
For the project, we had 4 days to film and edit a 5-7 minute TV piece, with camera equipment and support from the Films@59 studio in Bristol.
And here’s the result:
Continue readingThis post follow part 1, where I looked at the type of videos and channels appearing on YouTube searches for science communication.
While there’s a lot of science content on YouTube, and relatively strong content communicating science, there isn’t much about science communication itself. There are videos for non-scientists about science, but not about scicomm. A Crash Course or RiskBites equivalent for science communication doesn’t exist.
The obvious question is; should that content exist? To me, the answer can only be yes.
One reason is my personal experience in discovering science communication. I didn’t find out that science communication existed until a few weeks before I graduated with my BSc, while I was already researching psychology-based Masters courses. The second I came across a description of UWE’s scicomm course, I knew it was the Masters I wanted to do, before I’d even read any more about what scicomm even was.
Follow-up to this post.
The previous post was at the end of last year, and my end of year reflection post kind of build on what I was already thinking in that post. In the last few months, where gaming was and where it should be is something I’ve been continuing to think about.
The main catalyst beyond the posts was in January. I had a conversation happen that was very much not what I’d hoped, and made me doubt everything, and feel pretty bad. This was right in the middle of January, while a few of my assignments were due. I let feeling bad about it take over, and dealt with everything by isolating myself from people and gaming instead of doing my uni work. For one of my essays, I didn’t put anywhere near as much effort into it as I could have, and ended up submitting it late. That meant the highest mark I could possibly get was the minimum pass mark- made more annoying by finding out later that it would have received a Merit.
We’re already in the final block of another module- this year is going so quickly.
I’m kind of disappointed that Writing Science is over so quickly, as it’s been my favourite module and I’m enjoying working with everyone.
It certainly went out with style though.
Thursday started with us all getting our magazines back, and being able to see each other’s for the first time. Seeing what everyone else had developed was a good experience, especially the differences in style and audience. I found this one incredible- if it was a published magazine in a shop, I would have bought it.
We had already got our marks and feedback, so I already knew that we’d done well. But I was surprised by what happened next. Our lecturer opened with “I’m going to embarrass somebody now”, then was really complimentary about our magazine, saying that he’d worked on professional magazines that weren’t as good. According to him, I have a talent for design.
Continue readingThe sheer amount of publications, information sources, and people that I follow has become too much to read, and too much to mean anything. Continual anxiety means I’m struggling to focus on anything useful, like uni work or project planning. But trying to escape or get ideas by reading non-uni media isn’t helping at all.
Between my Twitter feed, Medium recommendations and Pocket list, there’s almost 1000 items of “do this to be happy”, “do this to be better”,”here’s how everyone else is succeeding”, and “you need to care about this”.
This week I handed in my third piece of coursework- a group project to create a science-based magazine- which was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had with a uni assignment.
After bouncing facebook messages around the group, and continually uploading revisions and comments, we eventually got a final set of pages we were happy with. Off to print them out then- which was surprisingly difficult.
No printers open in UWE that night could print the A4 pages properly, so we eventually found the low-tech solution of printing each page as on A3 and guillotining them down to the right size. Which would have worked well if I had any hand-eye coordination.
Apart from the myriad of issues actually getting the thing printed, I’m really happy with how the magazine turned out. Seeing it come out on proper paper, and how well the photos and colours work, it looks even better than on my laptop screen. It looks really professional, which isn’t how I’d normally describe anything I made, so I like the contrast.
Some ideas from the drafts made on the first day- mostly the teal, purple, and orange colour scheme, and the file-divider-style sidebars- stayed during the entire process.
However, while the first-day drafts were very sparse, the final layout contained many more ideas and tried out different styles to suit the article.
Mostly, it all looks varied, but still looks like it belongs to one coherent magazine. Ultimately, I’m really happy with it (despite the annoyance of finding a typo 5 minutes after hand-in) and I’m hoping we get a good mark for it.
Everyone has a level of physical health which changes over time and as a result of circumstances.
A minority of people are at their peak of physical health, the healthiest they could possibly be.The majority of people are generally healthy: they don’t have to worry about their physical health as everything is working well enough to live their life.
Minor physical health issues such as colds or aches and pains, are common. They temporarily make life doable but more difficult. People with longer-term minor issues learn to adapt and accommodate around what is tougher for them- perhaps they can usually function at 95% of the generally healthy level .
Major physical health issues can make normal life very difficult, requiring someone to change how they live for a bit and often need a recovery time/ gradual return afterwards.
Then a small percentage of people have chronic, severe physical health issues that mean they either cannot function in a typical life at all, or they need to adapt almost everything about their life to live and function.
So, why did I just write that? Everything I’ve just said is common sense, and it doesn’t need saying.
But try it again, swapping physical for mental…
I finally got a phonecall back from the CMS, but it wasn’t the phonecall I expected.
In the last appointment, C3 seemed like she understood what I meant and was happy to talk to her team about sorting out what I can do next. But the phonecall was a lot more negative.
Firstly, she said that she didn’t want to progress further as I only met some of the criteria and not others. Considering depersonalisation disorder (the closest thing I could see to my experiences, and what I wanted to focus on) is basically defined by experiencing depersonalisation that causes negative effects and isn’t caused by anything else – in other words, exactly what I experience, and what I tried to explain to her is probably the thing underlying everything else- I don’t really see how she could have reached that conclusion.
Yesterday, Xbox sent out round-up emails with stats about our year in Xbox. Usually, I’m interested in that kind of thing, but reading these stats was uncomfortable.
I’m in the top 5% for amount played, at about 1500 hours in 2015. I honestly didn’t expect to be that high a percentile, more like 15/20%. That number annoys me- at least 1/3 of those hours happened as deliberate escapism or inertia. What could I have done with them instead?
The first argument I’m using to justify it is “I don’t play as much as my friends do”. This is kind of true as amongst my group I had the lowest hours, and some had double the hours I did. However, the gap between my time and theirs is smaller than I expect. I’ve been the last person online at night quite a lot, even on nights where I was intending to do something else.
Continue readingYesterday, I finally had my appointment with C3.
Leading up to yesterday, I’ve been nervous about going back, more so than if I was seeing a stranger. The nerves are mostly from not knowing how she would interpret me, based on her unexpected assessment last time. Because all I remembered from before was the more negative parts, like the conversations I ended up confused by and L’s reaction to meeting her, I was expecting a bad experience. Instead she was friendly, and she remembered me to some extent; asking about church and uni.
Continue reading