skip to main content

REBECCA VARNEY

  • News
  • Research
  • Outreach
  • About Me
  • Resources
  • News
  • Research
  • Outreach
  • About Me
  • Resources

Outreach:
 Science Outside the Lab

Letters to a Pre-scientist, and Strange Selfies

12/6/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Each year I participate in Letters to a Pre-Scientist, an amazing program where you are paired with a younger student (5th-12th grade), and exchange 4 rounds of letters facilitated by their teachers. The letters have themes like "overcoming obstacles", but you also just talk about their goals and struggles, and try to encourage them to dream big. It's a super inspiring thing! My current pen-pal is passionate about math, dancing, puppies, and pizza.

But my pen-pal asked how big a supercomputer was. So I did the sensible thing: I emailed and got special permission to go into our cluster and take a picture. I have probably done stranger things for outreach, but this definitely was one of the weirdest. But now I can tell her "yes, bigger than a desktop". 

I'm grateful to be working at a university that would embrace the chance to make a child laugh and learn at the same time. 

And for the record, supercomputers are kept very cold. I'll be here with my hot tea.

Learn more about Letters to a Pre-Scientist, and sign up to be a pen-pal yourself, here:

 https://www.prescientist.org/ 🤣
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    University of Alabama and Community

    Tuscaloosa, Alabama

    Archives

    January 2021
    April 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    October 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Contact Us

UA Logo
Equal Opportunity | UA Disclaimer | Site Disclaimer | Privacy | Copyright © 2017
 The University of Alabama | Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 | (205) 348-6010