I signed up for a 1 day science communication training session at UTS last week. With engagement and communication there is no way around practice, so I am thankful to have had an opportunity to revisit tools for science communication formally (quite a bit of time has based since the McGill Liber Ero training). As I am working on a “new” project, I really benefited from a little help developing a clearer story on how to explain what I am doing and why.
The training went through how to structure a media story (need to out all the important info in the 1st sentence or 2), and zoned in on something that had come up in past training as well: write down your 3 “must air” messages and really stick to them. I also got to do a mock radio interview (which I will say was not perfect but better than when I tried a year ago). Right after the training I actually worked on a little story for the institute newsletter, and the piece came out today. What a great opportunity to try and apply what I had just learnt!
Twitter also brought some resources for science writing (templates), and an interesting article on a legal case arguing, in my very layman’s terms, that previously non-point source pollution can/should be regulated as point-source to reduce downstream nutrient pollution in Iowa.
Today (tomorrow depending on the time zone) our big grant application for the P-FUTURES project is due. It has been quite an adventure to put together such a big (and very international) application. I have not only been learning about proposal writing from a scientific content perspective, but also a lot about the more administrative, legal, and political side of things (in particular spending a lot of time creating a 3 year budget with multiple institutions with different currencies and ways of working). I can’t wait to hit the submit button in a few hours after all of our team’s hard work.
Sustainable Resource Management Lab 