Do you have a burning question that’s never found an answer?

Have you ever wondered how sparrows survive the cold prairie winters, or why we get dark circles under our eyes, or why storms on other planets (like Jupiter) last for hundreds of years while storms on Earth last only weeks?

Here’s your chance to ask the question and have it answered by an expert on the Quirks & Quarks Question Show – recorded live on UBC campus, 8 March 2010.

Submit your questions here.

ScienceGirl caught up with Dr. Catherine Anderson at the Geneskool summer camp at AMBL, a fun outreach program where students get to try molecular biology techniques. ScienceGirl asked a bunch of questions about what Catherine likes best about her job in science.

ScienceGirl asked: What is Geneskool?
The Geneskool summer workshop is a week-long program where high school students collect evidence at a crime scene on Mondays, analyze their evidence Tuesday to Thursday, and then present their case on Friday. It is a lot of fun! We have just finished our first week for this summer and every group convinced a jury with their evidence that their suspect was guilty.

Did you like Science in highschool?
I didn’t like science in high school. There was all this great information at the end of the textbooks but we never got there – too busy memorizing lists of boring stuff. I liked the material, just not the classes. Once I got to university, I loved the freedom to think about all these great experiments.

What kind of Scientist are you now? What do you do for a job?
I’m trained in Medical Genetics and most of work now is teaching. I teach for the faculties of Dentistry and Medicine at UBC. Plus, I run education programs for Genome BC, including the Geneskool program.

What do you like best about your job in Science?
I love the variety of my job; I learn something new every day. There are so many great things happening in science and I feel lucky to have the job of understanding and explaining new ideas.

I also love the flexibility of my job. For example, I can rearrange my schedule to allow me to visit places like the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica.

Jennifer Gardy is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia. Today, she talks to ScienceGirl.Org about how communication is important for a scientist and how some people do it for a living!

Communication skills are required at every step of your research. First, if you’ve got a hypothesis you want to test, you need to be able to explain it to your supervisor and to the agencies that fund research in order to get the money and permission you need to move forward with your experiment. During the project, you need to be able to communicate with your fellow experimenters to make sure things are running smoothly and everyone’s on the same page. When the project is complete and you’ve made some great insight, you need to publish your result in a scientific journal so your colleagues can benefit from the knowledge you’ve discovered, and you often travel to conferences to give presentations on your work. If what you’ve done has an impact on the public, you’re often asked to talk about your work to them too, on television, through newspaper articles, or in public lectures.

As you can see, communicating science can take many forms – from writing a proposal or a journal article to talking to an audience of fellow scientists to explaining your work to a public who is not at all familiar with what you do. While this communication is a huge part of what scientists do every day, science communication can also be a full-time job!

Many scientists find the communication aspect of their job so rewarding that they decide to embark upon a science communications career full-time. For those that choose to make this switch, the career possibilities are endless.

There are traditional science communications roles to fill – things like a newspaper reporter or a writer for a science magazine like SEED or Discover, but there are many other roles that you might not think of right away. Some of the scientists I know have gone on to produce and host science television shows, coordinate communications efforts for the agencies that fund science research, or run a science journal like Nature. I’ve even met a few folks whose job is to design the exhibits for science museums – how fun!

No matter whether you’ve got your eye on a science career or a science communications career, it’s well worth honing your communication skills at the same time you’re expanding your scientific horizons. Get as much practice in writing as you can – volunteering at school newspapers is a great idea – and make sure you’re comfortable with public speaking, as scientists do a lot of it! Try taking on teaching responsibilities, like leading younger students in science experiments, and don’t be afraid to take risks and be creative in how you explain science concepts. Above all, remember that science is amazingly fun and interesting, and always strive to bring that excitement to your science communication endeavours!

Featured in this booklet are some of the UNESCO-L’Oréal International Fellows. These highly talented women are a vibrant reflection of the diversity found at all levels of modern science: diversity of research subjects, diversity of approaches, and diversity of the profiles of these young women who have in common a passion for science.

Jody Wright is a PhD student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia. ScienceGirl says thanks, Jody, for telling us what it’s like to be a scientist.

I had fun playing a game with the two classes I visited. The game was to try and list as many three letter body parts as we could up in 5 seconds. Eye, Ear, Lip, Hip, those are just a few! How many more can you come up with?

Illustrations by Cornelius De Witt. 1959. Golden Press.

The point of this game was that we worked together we came up with many more answers (one class came up with 13). That’s exactly what I love about Science. It’s all about working together. When you’re sharing ideas and working collaboratively, you learn much more. One of my favorite parts about Science is talking to people who have different expertise sets and sharing ideas to get a deeper understanding of the answers to our common challenges.

Illustration by Mark Witton

Often when students are thinking about science in school, they’re given advice that they should try volunteering in a lab.  The idea is that you can see first hand what it’s like to be a scientist and chat to the real people who do science.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to find volunteering opportunities.

ScienceGirl would like to suggest an alternative.  If you post your questions here, she’ll find someone who works in a lab who can answer your questions.  Use the “Comments” button below … and ScienceGirl will reply online.

I’m thinking back to the first lab jobs that I had.  I worked for small biotechnology company growing cells, and in another research lab collecting DNA samples.  I asked all kinds of questions: About what is was like to be a scientist?  About how companies work?  About where people went to school?  About what they were reading?  About cells?  About DNA?  … the list goes on!

So, what kind of questions would you ask?