A Thing I Did
So last Saturday I went to an open house for my school at a nearby museum (my school is literally next door to the World Museum in Liverpool so we have a strong partnership with them.). My advisor asked me to help so I went and I got assigned to the guy who runs the DNA lab.
And you guys, I was not expecting this to be a positive experience but it WAS. So like at the beginning the first person that came in he talked at her and she got kinda bored and let her kid pull her away even tho she clearly was interested in the subject so I was like “dude you’ve gotta dumb it down. I’m not saying lie or give incorrect info, you’ve just gotta be more on their level” (I literally said dumb it down). He was like “no it is what it is I’m not gonna do that”. But as the day wore on more people came and we both started talking and we kind of settled on a mutual spiel about the lab and about genetics as we talked to people and found what worked and what didn’t. So two good things happened:
1, I talked to a bunch of kids about how much I love science in general and THIS science in particular and why and I saw their brains start going and there was this one middle school girl who was like “I love science and history” and I was like “come to anthropology we have both but also cookies”. And I was like “do you like math?” And she had an interesting answer. Instead of saying yes or no, she said “it’s hard”. So I was like “yeah but it really feels good when you figure it out after struggling with it, right?” And she was like “*nodnodnod* YES”. So I was like “yeah sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes stuff that’s hard is still fun and is worth it”. So we talk some more about science and I’m ngl this is the first time I felt like by being a woman in science I got to show little girls that they could BE women in science when they grew up that it was ok and it was allowed and they could be curious and love it and it wasn’t a boy thing. And I got to see adults get really interested in it too and got to talk about this thing that I deeply love.
2, at the end of the day the prof was like “you were right, I get what you were saying now, I did need to dumb it down”. Like by the end of the day he was talking to me like an equal even tho he’s a prof who has been a prof for YEARS and I’m just a masters student he was interested in my life and my plans for my future like he wanted me to be a colleague. Idk man I just wish I’d gotten a chance to work with him because he was really interesting and willing to let me be smart. That’s really rare in old, male profs. I just wish he was in a field closer to what I want to work in because he’s in bioinformatics, but that’s not really what I want to do. Too much math not enough lab work. Not enough about the anthro side of it for me. But he was like “have you considered bioinformatics?”. And anywa it was really gratifying.











