I'm a Scientist and I was the first evicted. :(

Well the first eviction in the zones was yesterday - and it was me. I'm not going to lie - it's not nice loosing, whatever it is, but intellectually at least I know it doesn't really matter. I took part in I'm a Scientist to engage and talk about science with lots of kids - and I did that whatever the outcome of a bunch of pre-teen and teenagers voting in a popularity contest. I look forward to getting the numbers of kids we engaged with later in the week, and I look forward to giving my typing hands a bit of a rest! ;)

So that's me gone, and oddly two of the other scientists have grown mustaches. They may regret those photos later in life! ;)

I'm a Scientist, and I'm getting a bit tired!

Just over half way through I'm a Scientist, and my fingers hurt from typing. It's been interesting, and the moderators keep reassuring us the kids get a lot out of the Live Chats, so I'm keeping at it!

 Live chats are a bit like being shouted at by a room full of 13 year olds (actually they are exactly like that in electronic form). There are some idiots, some who shout loud (CAPS!) to get attention, and some great questions if you can find them. It's not for the faint at heart, and I decided that the best policy was to ignore my fellow scientists (sorry guys) and focus only on answering interesting questions. I've had some fantastic interactions that way - even if they are all becoming a bit of a blur. I think I've done 11 of them so far. That's 5 1/2 hours in the last week. Right! ;)

I've taken a similar tack with the offline questions. I mostly answer those that interest me (although I have gone through others just to get them off my list of unanswered questions). I'd prefer to answer them first (or just by myself), but we have some very keen PhD students in our zone with what seems like endless time, so I'm usually not able to, but instead just ignore the other answers and pretend like they don't exist (again sorry my fellow Space Zone scientists). One of the other guys in the zone says we've had more than 400, and I think I've answered more than not - so 200+ questions done.... right! ;)

The first eviction is tomorrow at 3pm - ironically when I'll be physically in front of a room full of 9 and 10 year olds. At least I won't be worrying if I got kicked off - that'll have to wait! ;)

I'm a Scientist, what have I let myself in for?!

On Monday I will start my (up to) two week tenure on "I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of here!". I agreed to do this as it seems like an excellent public engagement program. It's an opportunity for me to interact with many more school children than I could by doing my own visits, and it sort of sounded fun.

For those of you who haven't heard of this, it's a Wellcome Trust funded programme (and in addition my zone is sponsored by the Institute of Physics). We sign up for 2 weeks, and answer questions and do live chats with the students in our zone. They can then vote for us, and during the second week the scientist with the least votes will be eliminated - one each day. The last scientist remaining gets £500 to spend on science outreach (I propose to buy a telescope for our Astronomy in the City events, and some solar system models to give out on school visits).

Anyway right now I'm a bit terrified about what's coming! So far we've had in our zone, 20 separate requests for live chats (each 30 minutes long). That's 10 straight hours of live chat (over 2 weeks) if I could even do them all. We're assured we don't need to sign up for all of them, but I didn't get to be a scientist without being just a little bit competitive, so of course I want to do as many as I can!

I'm not really worried about interacting with the kids - I think that'll be fun (and I expect also challenging). What I am worried about is the amount of time it will take given all the rest of the stuff I should get done in the next two weeks. I'm also a bit worried about how I'll feel if I'm the first person voted off! ;) Conveniently those two balance quite nicely - in that I'll get more time for the rest of my job if I do get voted off early at least!

Anyway stay tuned. If I can find any time I'll blog about how it's going! ;)

If you want to check me out on the site - here's my profile which will also link to all the question I answer.