Ever thought about talking to school students about your work and wondered if its for you? PhD student Kerstin Schmidt has been giving it a go...

During the first year of my PhD thesis I came more and more to realize that it is important to communicate my own research to others and to raise awareness of scientific questions. With this in mind, I seized the opportunity to join the schools’ outreach project run by the Dresden International PhD Program. I was quite nervous in the beginning. How would the students react? Would they like it? And would I be able to pass on some of my enthusiasm about molecular sciences to 15–16 year old students who are just about to decide what they want to do with their lives?

Mouse embyronic stem cell colonyThe challenge was the following: 10 minutes, four students each round – “Tell them something interesting about the mouse as a model organism“! For sure, everybody knows what an adult mouse looks like and so I decided to focus on mouse development instead. To start with, I showed each group of students some mouse embryos dissected at different stages during development and let them guess how old the embryos were. When I told them that a mouse develops from an embyro to an adult in only 3 weeks, the students were quite stunned by how much the shape of the embryo changes from day to day. They readily identified some prominent organs like the liver and the heart, giving me the chance to ask where those various tissues actually originate from. Then I used a poster to help me explain the answer, introducing the blastocyst stage embryo and pointing out the “inner cell mass“ and its pluripotent character (read more about the the embryo and embyronic stem cells in EuroStemCell’s fact sheet). To finally get the story wrapped up, I talked about the uses of mouse embryonic stem cells (something they had already heard of from the news!), especially for genetic engineering purposes, and presented a completely blue embryo made by inserting a label into the DNA of the embryo’s cells.The timer goes off, groups swap!

Are 10 minutes really enough to make a difference in the biology-starved minds of school kids? I think yes! The students’ feedback in the end turned out to be positive. Some students realized they had to learn more in their English classes, others even got interested in studying science and going into research! Nevertheless, the lack of time for follow-up discussions and questions was indeed a downside. Luckily, in a couple of weeks we will visit another school and have the chance to improve the time-management and leave some space for more personal discussions and questions at the end.

Was it worth it for me? Yes! I learnt quite a lot from the experience: both personally and professionally. It is very rewarding and wonderful to see how everybody benefits from such an event: the students, the teachers and of course yourself as a scientist because you are forced to step away from the miraculous depths of your own project and look at it from a different angle! My New Year’s Resolution for 2012: inspire and be inspired!