Well well, chastised into action once again! I’m ashamed to admit that it’s taken another email reminder from Blog HQ to prod me into fulfilling my commitments. Shame on me. How on earth has two months gone by since my last post?

Well, as you may have seen on Maciej’s latest post, this blog site can now claim to be “double-award winning”. At the recent EduStyle Awards in Chicago, Imperial Student Bloggers site walked away with the prizes for both “Best Student Blog” and “Most Innovative Website”. Great, eh? Of course, this has really very little to do with us bloggers, and a great deal to do with the Imperial College Communications Division who have put in so much hard work in getting this site looking so good and working so well. Massive congratulations due to them, and good CV points for us bloggers. Who would’ve though it, I’m a regular contributor to an award-winning blog!?

So, what have I been up to recently?

Well, the last couple of moths has seen the end of our third term which obviously brings with it a slew of deadlines. The two most important of these were for my two practical options I’m taking this term: website and exhibition design. Basically, for each of these, we had to produce, from scratch, a design for a site/exhibition that was either to do with something we had produced or something that we were interested in. Hopefully, I’ll bang out a blog post soon that outlines what we produced for both of these projects, but quickly, I made a website (that will hopefully go live soon) that displays our group project from last term (which I also hope to describe in a blog post…) and an exhibition all about the science of intelligence. Both of these projects took an extraordinarily long time to produce, but I was really happy with the results. Again, I promise to describe these in more detail soon! You have my permission to end me rude emails if I don’t get round to it.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on my dissertation. This, I’m afraid to say, is a fairly dry affair. It’s all about the relationship of expertise to society. My project aims to look at the reasons why scientists believe that science needs to be communicated to the public, and then contrasting these beliefs with the way experts in other fields (particularly finance) problematise their relationship with society. See, I told you it was dull. It’s involved a great deal of library time, and now I’m sitting down and trying to thrash out 10,000 words in time for the deadline. But there’s one things that’s trying to do its best to stop me from achieving this (apart from my unbelievable ability to procrastinate, and obviously not this blog…): placements.

As you may have seen from Annabel’s blog, all of us on the Science Communication and Science Media Production MSc’s get the chance to do a placement somewhere in industry fro an indeterminate length of time. Jacob, for instance, got to do a couple of weeks at The Guardian (see some of Jacob’s handy-work here). I’ve been lucky enough to actually get a couple of placements, one working for a month as a copy writer for Seven Stones, a healthcare advertising agency, and another working for two months (with Annabel and another of a our colleagues) at the Mekong River Commission in Laos, SouthEast Asia. My ad agency placement kicks off very soon, and will be really full on, and the MRC  placement starts after the dissertation deadline. Although neither of them have started yet, all the interviews, articles and personal statements needed for these have been quite time consuming!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I hope it’s enough to explain why I’ve not posted in a while! However, as a way to make up for it, and as a further aid to putting off my dissertation, I promise to do the posts I’ve promised above very soon!