Earlier this year I moved to Cardiff from the US. The move was prompted by my partner's career, which meant that I arrived here without a job of my own. In the states I had been working in various capacities at science museums and planetariums and had come to see myself as someone deeply enmeshed in those overlapping areas of informal education, museum work, and science communication, but didn’t have any contacts to speak of in my new home. Fortunately, the founder of museumexpert.org, a group I volunteer with, put me in touch with Colin Johnson, the now retired former CEO of Techniquest. (My contacts had contacts at least!) Following a meeting over tea at the Millennium Center in Cardiff Bay, Colin very kindly helped provide me with a list of resources, including the website for the BIG STEM Communicators Network and introduced me to Wendy Sadler, another Cardiff resident and long-time participant with BIG. This was how I learned about the BIG Event and the serendipitous fact that this year the conference would be held in Cardiff!
Especially without needing to worry about travel costs, I decided that it would be worth the investment to register for the event so I could start building more connections of my own amongst the sci-comm community here in the UK. I quickly decided that one of the best ways to ensure I would be getting some opportunities to really meet and converse with others was to run a session. (That running a session also meant a discount to the admission cost may have also had some influence on the decision making process.) The process for submitting a proposal was extremely straightforward and months before the BIG Event even happened, it helped to propel me towards making more connections here. Ashley Kent, the event coordinator for BIG, helped Rowena Fletcher-Wood, a sci-comm freelancer who had proposed a similar session, get in touch with me and we decided to combine our ideas and also seek a third collaborator with local ties to where the event would be held. Rowena was able to make a connection with Thomas Woolley, a researcher and head of outreach for the maths department at Cardiff University, and the three of us were able to put together our different areas of expertise and put together what I think was an informative and entertaining session about running STEM-based mystery-themed events from varied perspectives.
Already having met, virtually or in-person, Wendy, Ashley, Rowena, and Thomas, I went into the BIG Event without that sense of dread one has when they don’t know anyone at a party. What I wasn’t expecting, was just how open, inviting, and *familiar* this party would be. I’ve been to conferences filled with sci-comm professionals before, in particular ASTC conferences, so I was expecting to encounter an assemblage of enthusiastic professionals from a wide range of positions within their careers who were excited to discuss everything from facilitation techniques to evaluation methods to how to make things literally explode in the most educational ways. And those expectations were met in spades at the BIG Event. In fact, I’d say that the level of enthusiasm and dedication I encountered surpassed my expectations. While most attendees at ASTC are there to represent their institutions and perhaps participate in a little professional development in relation to their specific roles within those institutions, a large percentage of the attendees at the BIG Event were freelance or ran the equivalent of a little mom-and-pop sci-comm shop. They weren’t just there to fulfill an obligation for their jobs, they were there because this was their vocation and their passion!
The other thing that surpassed my expectations was that sense of familiarity that I alluded to earlier. I have had countless friendly conversations at other conferences, but the BIG Event felt like the first time that I was truly being welcomed into a community. Every morning there was a group meeting filled with welcoming announcements and humorous moments, such as reprimands for individuals who had lost their name badges. I felt encouraged to speak up if I had questions or could provide tips for navigating around Cardiff. From the very beginning it was clear that there was a sense of easy comfort in the event that was underscored by a lack of formality in the interactions. To help foster that sense of community, there was scheduled time for a structured mingling event and many scheduled coffee breaks with both time and space provided for some unstructured mingling. Additionally, there were well-communicated plans for after hour meetups at pubs. And rather than small groups or cliques grabbing corner booths in the pub, a mass flock of conference attendees would take over the beer garden continually squeezing closer and closer together to make room for both old friends and complete strangers. Whether it was in a session, at a tea break, at the pub, or during the dinner party hosted by Techniquest, every single person I sat next to was welcoming and not just friendly, but curious and ready to share ideas and learn new ones. Just last week I was volunteering at We the Curious in Bristol and found myself sharing information about the effects of aging on the brain with the visitors there that I had learned during a casual dinner conversation with a neuroscientist at the BIG Event.
Over the course of the three days of the conference, I attended sessions about enhancing accessibility during shows and workshops, how to get involved with science festivals in the UK, how to reconsider the purpose and value of evaluations, ways to incorporate a diverse range of researchers and their work into science shows, and got an immersive look at what’s involved with running a mobile planetarium. All of it felt incredibly valuable and just the knowledge gained from the sessions would make the BIG Event worth attending, but it is feeling welcomed into this community and now knowing dozens more passionate sci-comm professionals, many of whom have already reached out over Linked-In or the BIG channel on Slack, that has made me feel confident in my assessment that attending the BIG Event was the best decision I’ve made since moving to the United Kingdom.
