Week 1 as a Naked Scientist

The Naked Scientists are an award-winning broadcast organisation that produce weekly shows, articles, news stories and special podcasts. Thanks to funding from The Royal Academy of Engineering I am about to embark on an 8-week internship with them - keep reading to find out how I get on. 

The week before I was due to start at the Naked Scientists, I was at conference in Rio de Janeiro on the subject of Chemical Challenges in Renewable Energy. At the conference, I met a previous Naked Scientist, Ben Valsler, who was able to give me a bit of an insight before I started. I’m very glad for this; as he warned me that I would be starting very much from the word go, including helping out for their live radio shows on Sunday evenings. It was pretty exciting to hear about all the different things I would be doing, but it did involve some last minute rearrangements as I’d only planned to live in Cambridge Monday to Friday! 

So, arriving in from Rio at 17:30 the day before starting was perhaps an error, compounded by traffic on the motorway from Birmingham, meant I arrived half an hour late and without the one thing I needed (my passport) on my first day! This all turned out to be fine and I was quickly introduced to one full time member of the team (Graihagh) and the 3 other interns who had been there for varying periods of time already. We’re based in a large country house, Madingley hall, in a nice green area north west of Cambridge.

Every Monday morning there is a group meeting run by the producer for that week to determine which news stories will be covered. They then get distributed among the team. You might get a topic that you will end up leading an interview on, or you might be asked to research a paper that someone else will cover instead. Either way, you start by trying to get in contact with an author for the paper. This can be challenging if they are working in a country with a considerable time difference! You then need to have a conversation with them and work out if you think they are suited to being an interviewee. Can they describe their research clearly and enthusiastically? Before agreeing to definitely interview them, we ask for a sound check, so that the listeners will be able to hear them clearly.

In my first week, I wouldn’t be interviewing anyone for the show, so I did a couple of research calls to “scout out” potential interviewees for other people. I was lucky, as both of the people I contacted were happy to talk and very good at communicating. They also sent through pretty good sound checks.

My job for the week would be to write one of the short news articles and I found the most challenging part of this choosing a topic! Overwhelmed by the number of new articles published this week, by the end of the day I had only managed to get my shortlist down to 5.

Tuesday morning saw me return to my shortlist and get started on my news article. I needed to contact the paper author and arrange an interview. I would then record the interview so I could have accurate quotes, and get some practice in using the studio and editing for next week.

My usual inability to make decisions struck again, and so I made two article frameworks and sent off emails to the corresponding paper authors. One of them was pretty prompt at replying, so I arranged to speak to him on Wed afternoon. 

I then went down to the studio (out of the estate, and just down the road) to have a look as another intern went down to do a recording. It’s a small room in the zoology building, with a microphone and some sliding knobs. It looks complicated, but when you know which buttons to press, it actually is quite simple. The key point is to make sure it’s recording properly!

All of the shows are transcribed, and it’s our job to check through them before they go online, to make sure they match the audio that accompanies them. 

I also had a meeting with the managing editor, Chris, who ran through the day to day runnings of the group, and asked me whether I had any specific aims for the placement. It was good to talk to him, and it seems that the opportunities available are limitless!

The Naked Scientists have a group meeting every Wednesday morning, to discuss the previous week’s show and the items for the coming weekend. This was really interesting - hearing what Chris and his team want from a topic, and the different ways they can be presented. I mentioned that I had felt a good pre-arrival intern guide would have been great, and so managed to get myself assigned the task of creating one! I also arrived in to an e-mail from the other potential interviewee, so ended up deciding to make both of the news stories into articles.

For everyone else, the rest of Wednesday was a day of editing like mad to get the news articles finished before the deadline at the end of the day. I finished off my news articles and in the afternoon had my first interviews. The first one was a bit of a disaster: I had no idea I started every question by saying “Umm... So...” and how having a microphone in my face would make me unable to talk normally. But once that was over, the second one was much more relaxed and I was able to have a really interesting conversation with the researcher.

Thursday for me was my first chance at editing – I went through both of my interviews and took out all the “umm”s and “so”s from both me and my interviewees. This is a strangely satisfying experience when you get it right and just as frustrating when you don’t! The challenge is getting a 15 minute interview down to less than 5 minutes of airtime. I was quite pleased with the work up of my second interview by the time I was finished, and wished I had recorded it properly so I could submit it as a news article. It has made me look forward to next week’s opportunity. I also did some odd bits to help out other people, like booking a meet and greet for one of our guests who will be speaking live from a different location on Wednesday, and trying to track down some information from a researcher in France.

During my time here, one of the permanent staff Georgia will be acting as my “mother hen”. Essentially, she will be my first point of contact if I have any questions about anything. On Thursday afternoon she was able to listen to my interview and also read my two news articles. She was very positive about them, but also gave me some really useful feedback. It’s only when you go through something with someone that you really understand what kind of output they are looking for. After some edits and hunting for pictures, my articles were ready to go online – you can find one on why cavefish have no eyes here and another one on a record breaking artificial leaf here. After this week, I really can’t wait to get started next week on a piece to go into the news.