Profile

Vasily Sysoev is a PhD student working in the Ephrussi Group at EMBL Heidelberg.

Diary

December 2013, Moscow, Russia

During the Christmas holidays I was visiting my family in Moscow. I used this opportunity to give a couple of lectures to high school students about topics related to my work, and to tell students of my old university about the EMBL PhD program.

Before this trip, I gave a lecture at the Helmholtz Gymnasium in Heidelberg. I was talking about DNA sequencing techniques and about the discoveries that were made possible through the development of this method. I read my lecture in English, but since the class where I presented was taught biology in English they had no problem comprehending it. I introduced the pupils to currently available sequencing techniques, briefly discussed the Human Genome Project and then focused on advanced applications that allowed us to study the organization and functioning of the genome, such as chromatin immunoprecipitation and ribosome profiling. Although this was my first such experience, I received good feedback from the students and teachers, who found that the topic was very relevant to the school curriculum.

During my Moscow vacation, I gave three lectures on the same topic in three different schools. My first audience was pupils attending an extracurricular biology club in Moscow School #57 where I graduated. As some of them were already preparing to study biology in Moscow University, they easily grasped the presentation and we could go deeper into advanced details. I later discussed my PhD project with some of the students and found that they were really interested to find out more and asked lots of thoughtful questions.

The following two lectures were given to a broader audience. Nonetheless, I felt that these pupils were not less interested in the topic than those who attended the biology club. To my lessons in Jurgis Baltrušaitis School #1247 and Nikolai Bobrov School #1429 teachers invited interested students of grades 9 – 11 (year 11 is the last year in Russian schools). Although the students were a bit intimidated by me as a stranger, the discussion that I could initiate during my lectures showed me that my audience had good knowledge of school biology. Later, I learnt from the teacher that talking to a practicing scientist sparked the students’ interest in biosciences and that the teacher had to answer many questions on the topic that I presented on during the following lessons. The teacher was hopeful that lectures by visitors like me would happen more often.

Giving lessons in German and Russian schools was a very useful experience for me. I practiced my skills of conferring complicated information in an accessible form and learned something about school education from an educator’s point of view. According to the teachers’ responses, my school visits stirred enthusiasm about natural sciences among the students. I will definitely use similar opportunities to give more lessons in schools in the future.