Hosting Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

The Equality and Diversity Unit welcomes Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock for her public speaking masterclass

As well as being one of Imperials Alumni Maggie is also the new presenter for the BBC astronomy series The Sky At Night to add to her extensive list of television appearances, and you can see why.

Meeting Maggie for me had to be the highlight of the day as she is kind outgoing and overall friendly nature she automatically makes you feel at ease no wonder television bosses can’t get enough of her!

Maggie was joined for the training session by Victoria Prichard who also is very lively and friendly and has been on programmes such as Hollyoaks, Emmerdale and Doctors. Victoria is also a voice coach and communications trainer it was a real treat to have her at Imperial.  To round off our talented trio Paul Bader the creative director from Screenhouse productions lent his expertise in an exciting and approachable manner.

After the introductions Maggie gave an insight to her personal history from graduating in 1994 to owning her own company.  The purpose  of her delivering this training is because she wants to get people excited about science, as scientific men’s achievements are widely celebrated this course was aimed at scientific women as their achievements tend to take a back seat.

 Maggie demonstrated this point by showing an image where on a wall of successful scientist not one female was shown, she then gave a list of inspirational scientific women from Hypatia one of the first female scientist to the likes of Marie Curie and Jocelyn Bell. 

I can say that after those demonstrations and showing a Dilbert cartoon where it is depicted that becoming an engineer was a negative instead of a positive, it seemed to spur the candidates on to wanting to help get the message out there about their work  and how they are perceived.

Following on, Maggie went through a SWOT analysis of public speaking which shows the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that can come from public speaking.

 Just before lunch Victoria Pritchard took over to help make the delegates more aware of themselves by having the delegates fill in a pyramid scheme in parts to show how much communication is verbal, non-verbal and how it is delivered.  

She then went on to stand everybody up for an interesting clapping exersise which has to be done with passion and with direct eye contact, this was to show how you are received when talking or presenting. Paul followed on to discuss about presenting in any audience and then each delegate had the oppertunity to present themselves on camera and watch themselves back.

 Overall it was an intensive but highly rewarding day with a wide range of activities and discussion to help you be aware of yourself, your story and how you present and come across to others.  All the delegates really enjoyed the day and seemed to get a lot out of it which is reflected in the reviews.