Will you be our next Public Engagement Fellow?

Thinking of taking the plunge and applying to be a Wellcome Trust Engagement a Fellow? You’ve come to the right place! Earlier this week, five of the seven Public Engagement Fellows, past, present and future, locked themselves in a room at The Trust to share perspectives on Fellowship life. The others sent thoughts on postcards from New York and somewhere deep within the BBC’s extreme health and safety training course (don’t ask!).

Erinma Ochu, a Fellow exploring citizen science, based at the University of Manchester, spills the beans.

Once the fellows get started, we can’t stop talking about our “life-changing Fellowship journeys” as Roger Kneebone, Professor in Surgical Education at Imperial College likes to call them. We’ve done our best to squeeze our long chats into a useful insight into what it means to be a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow.

It’s about you!

The official blurb says the scheme “champions the public engagement leaders of tomorrow by fostering the most promising developing talent” and is “ looking for individuals with a strong track record of engaging the public with ideas around biomedical science and/or medical humanities, who want to make a step-change in their careers”.

Kevin Fong, consultant anaesthetist at University College London Hospital and TV presenter, was one of the first Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellows. He believes the fellowship is designed to improve you, your position and your capabilities in the world of public engagement. “In that sense the outputs are, in my humble opinion, less important than where the fellowship leaves you at the end.”

Dr Richard Barnett, writer & historian of medicine, agrees with Kevin. “Receiving a Fellowship opens a door to the Wellcome Trust’s astonishingly diverse resources – not only in the sciences, but in the medical humanities, public engagement and policy-making. Every Trust person we’ve encountered has been enormously supportive, encouraging us to take our ideas in all kinds of unexpected directions.”

Science communicator and presenter, Greg Foot, says it’s important to focus on how the Fellowship can produce a huge leap in your skills, experience and profile to achieve a step-change in your career. “It’s a chance to step back, reassess priorities and get support for that” he says.

Try new things!

Award-winning Poet, Lavinia Greenlaw, says “I’ve had to remind myself that my fellowship is not about stepping up engagement, but doing focused, innovative and risk-taking work which will develop my career in this context”

Kevin agrees, “I failed at quite a lot of stuff during the fellowship but I wish I’d tried and failed at much much more”.

“I definitely didn’t do enough of that” he says, advising new Fellows to “take risks – do stuff that you likely couldn’t do under the terms of any other grant. Stuff that is waaaaaaaay out of your comfort zone. To me that is probably the best use of the project funds”.

The Wellcome Family

Although Engagement Fellows are not Trust employees, we are part of the Wellcome family.

We have access to the Wellcome Collection, Library and The Hub (when it opens), as well as a pass to the Wellcome Trust building.

You have the choice of working wherever suits you best and there’s the option to work from Wellcome Trust HQ. If you work within the higher education infrastructure it’s likely that your colleagues won’t understand what your fellowship is for, or what you are doing… but that’s okay. This isn’t like any other academic fellowship! “And yet, it does carry a lot of prestige in your institution” says Roger.

Staff at the Wellcome Trust have all the connections, knowledge and experience you have dreamed of. Not just in science, but also in the arts, broadcast, interactive, and education and learning. It can be useful to talk to them if you can steal them away from their other work. The Trust can also help you promote your public facing activities, via their blogs and social media, and sometimes through the media office.

My own top tip is to have lunch with the Wellcome Graduates. They invite you to relevant events and are generally a very helpful and inquisitive bunch.

Who should apply?

There are official criteria and guidelines you should check out, but as in our experience as fellows, we think it would suit someone who is:

• Passionate about engaging people with biomedical science in a myriad of ways, using known and yet to be invented ways of achieving that. Your passion will shine
• Self-motivated and a self-starter
• Creative and reflective
• Not afraid of embracing the unknown
• Able to fail and learn from failure

 Remember

• The Fellowship is open and flexible, make it your own
• Think about your development and your future
• Use the resources available to you and take some risks
• Fellowships are not about specific projects. If you have a great project check out their other public engagement funding schemes.

A Community of Wellcome Fellows

 ‘The fellowship offers fantastic resources for you to take your practice to the next level’ says Artist, Alasdair Hopwood, whose Fellowship was awarded last year but begins in August. ‘I’m delighted to have received a fellowship and to be working closely with other recipients of the award’.

 Existing Fellows are exploring how to become a community, greater than the sum of its parts. So far this has involved informal dinners, sharing perspectives and getting to know one another. We look forward to welcoming the next batch of Fellows and sharing your life-changing fellowship journeys.

 Find out more about becoming a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and how to apply, check out the Wellcome Trust site.