So, What do You do Again?

My current title is Science Outreach Administrator.  The title is in no way helpful to explain what I do.  What I do is rather hard to explain because it covers a lot of areas, and each area needs its own explanation to really understand what I do.  I, in no particular order:

• supervise college students (this semester there are 13 students I’m supervising) who teach younger kids (from six-year-olds up through high schoolers)
• travel and do presentations with our portable planetarium
• host (mostly middle and high school) groups and do presentations in our cadaver lab (this year so far I have hosted over 630 high school students)
• educate educators on how to more effectively teach science and loan equipment to help them along the journey
• and a whole host of other things.

This post falls into the “other things” category.  Tuesday, the culmination of many hours of work paid off.  I certainly couldn’t have done it without the help of many, many people.  There were five departments involved, around 150 people attended, and a few hundred dollars spent to make the Science Open House a success.  The open house is a “show and tell” event for George Fox families put on by all the science departments (physics, engineering, math, biology, and chemistry – we even snuck in a little earth science).  Here are some images from the night.

There was the cute and fuzzy…

…and the creepy crawly.  This is our campus chaplain’s hand.  Way to go!!

There were many willing volunteers, albeit crazy.

And “science” food.  I know you want some of that.

Ice cream a la liquid nitrogen.

A very popular demo of ferro-fluid and microwaves.  If you haven’t seen the ferro-fluid, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Fancy machines, big boy toys really.  Big and small boys liked stretching the rod (in the middle) until it broke (that’s steel, folks).

Professors were animated and excited.

Heart rates were measured and changed using a flip table.

Chemisty was in the air.

Pyromaniacs were encouraged.

Volcanoes were set off.

I was a giant dork.

The finale light show really took my breath away.

And the laser light show was excellent.  I kept expecting cell phone swaying since everyone was singing along with Fireflies, by Owl City.

I couldn’t have asked for a better night, or for better help.  So many people made this night great.  For example, as I was checking to be sure everyone was finishing up, the students who had been serving food all evening had started cleaning up and were DOING THE DISHES ALREADY.  Although I was beat, I was also unbelievably blessed.

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)