My First Meeting

Yesterday was the first meeting with my lecturer (Professor Steve Miller) about everything, and my chance to find out a bit more about what he expects from me in terms of a finished and handed in piece of work.  I’ll summarise the main points below:

·      Design and pitch a museum exhibition

·      Theme: Meteorites/Asteroids and Related Impacts/Death of the Dinosaurs

·      Date of pitch: 23^rd March 2011

·      Date of final “hand-in”: end of April 2011 (tbc closer to the time)

·      Pitch to include: Presentation with visual aids, also written up as 1000 words

·      Final “hand-in” to include: Evidence of research and thought process, as well as final designs and content

There are two reasons we chose asteroids and their impact hazards as the theme.  Firstly, Steve is teaching a lecture course this term called “Popularisation of the Physical Sciences” within which he is going to focus on the case study of the asteroid impact causing the death of the dinosaurs, so from his point of view it makes sense if I’m focussing on an area he’s familiar with so it’s easier for him to mark.  Secondly (and a huge piece of luck for me), I spent last summer as a volunteer for the Education Department in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG) and did various work for them, including a bit of research on asteroids, meteors and comets for future programmes of theirs.  I’m hoping that research will be a good starting point for the content of this exhibition, and if nothing else it’s given me great background knowledge which will make any further research much easier.

(On a side note, if anyone is in London then the Royal Observatory, Greenwich is a fantastic place to visit – especially if you have the chance to see one of their live planetarium shows, called Sky Tonight Live.  The presenters there are lovely people and really know their astronomy so it’s well worth going.  The website is here but to be honest it’s not that helpful and pretty slow at the moment so hopefully it’ll be tidied up soon.)

The last important thing we decided is that I should imagine the exhibition is for a particular room at the ROG, partly so I can focus on a particular institution’s audience and partly so I have a specific space to work with.

Unfortunately I’ve got two pieces of other coursework due this coming Monday so I couldn’t spend the rest of this afternoon focussing on this, but I did speak to someone I know from the ROG and hopefully I’ll meet with their Exhibition Department next week to find out a bit more about the process that turns an idea into a finished exhibition.  I’ll ask them if they’ve got any official guidelines and how I can begin to form a budget so I can keep those things in mind instead of getting carried away with weird, wonderful and (unrealistically) expensive ideas!