Dr Kirsty Ross, Public Engagement Professional @ University of Strathclyde

Hello to everyone at St. Joseph’s primary school. My name is Dr. Kirsty Ross and I am a public engagement professional at the University of Strathclyde. Now a public engagement professional is a pretty new career; it didn’t exist when I was at school, it didn’t exist five, ten years ago and essentially my job is a real mix of lots of different things. So I go out to schools, I design activities about the amazing research that’s happening at the University of Strathclyde, I train my researchers and how to do public engagement, travel all over Scotland. Essentially getting the chance to share the awesome science and awesome research that’s happening. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be with you in person today and that’s my favourite part the job is actually coming in, speaking to students in schools.

I’ve been asked 00:52 - to sort of talk about why I got into science. I’ve always really been interested in science. Originally I wanted to be a florist when I was in primary school and then I wanted to be a midwife and then I eventually decided that it was a toss-up between doing science and biology or physics or engineering. I ended up doing biology and I have never ever regretted it. It’s a great subject to study if you keep asking teachers “why?” and you get to find out the answers! It’s brilliant; you get to work at the cutting edge of science.

01:26 - Because when you do get to university and you’re talking with your lecturers, you realise that they are they don’t know the answers they don’t have all the answers and that’s what research is all about. It’s finding those answers and pushing what we know just that little bit further on. And for those of you who’ve never seen one before this is a thesis. In fact this is mine and so you see it’s basically a book. Lots of different pictures. You’ll be quite pleased to see that it’s single sided and double spaced so it looks more impressive than it probably is.

So basically you just write it up into a 02:02 - very, very, long book with lots of graphs, lots of pictures, lots of referring to other people’s research in the literature so that’s what a literature review is. So just flick though all those pages and yeah so that was my thesis. .