We asked Stephen to tell us about winning I’m a Scientist, and here is what he said…

Hey guys,

I want to start off by thanking everyone involved in the I’m a Scientist – get me out of here competition, from the other Scientists: Saoirse, Dervil, Moises and Pramod, everyone was great and I’m sure you can agree we got some great answers and fascinating insights into their work. The next people to thank are the organisers and moderators who really are the people who make all this happen and have worked around the clock during the competition.

But of course, the biggest thanks must go to all the schools who took part, you guys rocked! I don’t think any of us scientists were quite ready for the great, wonderful, and sometimes weird questions you guys had for us, with a lot of you doing your homework and coming up with tough ones! You guys really got engaged and it honestly surprised me. I thought that because we had the primary schools we would have it easy… boy how I was wrong!

I really enjoyed taking part in I’m a Scientist and am sad that it’s over, from the endless string of ‘ask’ questions which no matter how many I answered never seemed to get any shorter (apologies if I never got around to them all), to the hectic but brilliant live chats where we defiantly all had a good laugh and fun. I really did enjoy telling tales of some of the things we get up to as scientists and giving you guys an insight into what being a scientist is like.

One thing I got asked a lot in the competition was ‘how smart do you have to be to be a scientist?’ or ‘do you think I/we could be a scientist?’ so I wanted to leave you guys with a good message and with a quick google I think I found the perfect one:  

Science is a way of thinking much more then it is a body of knowledge
-Carl Sagen

This says that you don’t have to be a genius or great at remembering things to be a scientist, that’s not what science is about. Science is about being interested in finding things out and asking questions! From what I could see you guys defiantly can do that! So, keep asking questions, keep doing experiments and you all can be scientists!

Thank you all,

Stephen