Raising aspirations for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
As a child I was always curious to understand how everything around me was created. I asked lots of questions like: ‘how the Earth works and how we interact with it?’ and curiosity about our planets’ past brought me to this course – Palaeontology. I love learning more about how prehistoric life forms used to live under different biological conditions.
Studying Palaeontology is fun! Through every lecture, I feel as though I'm learning something new and I get excited. I believe that it is so important to find out about the processes that happened to our environment and how everything connects, and what are the impacts and interactions with our species. My programme offers many field trips, which change up the routine of the lectures and labs. I had the opportunity to visit geologically or Paleontologically important places like Dorset – Durdle Door, Isle of Wight, Wales, and Germany. I have also had the opportunity to discover different worlds such as micro-fauna under the sea, in the sediment through microscopes or mega-fauna that used to thrive and live under other rules and biological conditions, for instance dinosaurs and reptiles.
Our world is now going through unstable times. As scientists we need to be logical and rational to influence the common ideology and make people understand the aftermath of each big decision that is taken, support the critical thinking and most importantly we need more people influencing this area and bringing these topics to the next generation!
While I hadn’t heard of the STEM campaign before, I believe that more and more women in these kind of careers is always going to be an advantage for sciences to go further.
This blog post was written by Stavroulla Vasileiou, Cyprus.