How does one get involved in science policy?
Branwen Hide
Thursday, 05 March 2009 09:39 UTC
Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to a handful of PhD, undergraduate and a few early career researchers about science policy and my experiences in this diverse community at the Females in Engineering, Science and Technology career luncheon (FEST is a University of Oxford student society). Many of the participants asked what I did on day to day bases, how to go about getting a job in this area, how to find out more about science policy and the opportunities there are for scientists. I directed them to the usual things (such as the schemes where you can work at POST and read appropriate material to name a few).
But I was wondering what other people thought; how you may have got involved in policy and to what extent; did you leave research all together to pursue your interest or are you able to do them side by side.
Any thoughts would be help full and I will feed your comments back to the students.
Thanks.
-
Replies
-
Quite a few of our journal editors have gone on from Nature to jobs in science policy. I think their jobs put them in touch with scientists and others in, say, government departments or research councils, so networking naturally occurs. Some people do get involved with schemes too, such as RiSi (the Royal Instiution one) – volunteering for such events can lead to opportunities I am sure. Most of these organisations (research councils et al) have their own newsletters – students could subscribe to those – they often feature awards, projects, or allow submitted articles – another way to make contact, network, and find out more about how the organisation works. One of our editors, while she was a student (undergraduate) and before she applied for and got a job at Nature, was an “explainer” at the Science Museum in London. This was good for her c.v. even though (I think…could be wrong) it is a voluntary role.
-
This is also not an exact answer, but there is an interesting related post and discussion going on in NN New York. Ian Brooks, in the discussion, refers to a blog post he wrote on careers, which also is relevant. Sort of. (ie not policy specifically, but many good points which are applicable.)
-
Thank you. I will forward it on.
-
Hi Branwen
I was chatting to a number of undergrad and postgrad researchers at the DH all staff event last week – trying to find out how they had gone from science into policy.
It seems that most people get into it by doing summer or sandwich placements during in between study.
There are apparently plenty of placements around, and it seems that if you approach a Directorate you would like to learn more about, then they are often quite open to setting up shadowing or mentoring opportunities with policy teams or with analysts. However, there is a difficulty in that placements tend not to be advertised in the obvious places – like on the Civil Service Gateway. The adverts are usually emailed out to university career services. Once on a placement it also seems to be relatively easy to hop about within the Department gaining experience in different teams. I was chatting a girl who got to try her hand in Lord Darzi’s Private Office just because she was bold enough to ask!
The interesting thing is that the Department of Health is really gunning to get their stakeholders into placements, so that they will have a more productive relationship with them when they go back out into the field. It seems that stakeholders who have worked within Government make better engaged clinicians and healthcare scientists if/when they go back to working outside Government.
I have already been conversing with a few colleagues about getting a ‘heads up’ on good placement opportunities so that we can post them here.
-
