Kentish Town Young Farmers visit
On 22nd August, the widening participation team had the pleasure of welcoming 26 young people (aged 7 - 15) who currently volunteer at the Kentish Town City Farm. They help out by cleaning out animals, taking them for walks, feeding them and generally ensuring they are happy, they are taking time out of their weekends and holidays to look after these animals.
Therefore, it is clear they all have a genuine love for animals, which may progress into a career working with them, possibly as a vet, vet nurse, or bio scientist.
We hosted a day of fun activities for them to experience what its like to be studying for an animal related career, starting with a look at what each of the positions do. Then we headed to the lab to hear from Dr Charlotte Lawson and Elaine Shervill, where the volunteers had the opportunity to stain a set of real tissue samples, then look at them under the microscope and figure out which organs they came from. This was a pretty hard task but they managed to get them all correct!
Afterwards they split up into two groups (goats and lambs, as named by the farm), and half headed down to our museum to do an anatomy quiz with Andrew Crook, our head of anatomy. Here they were asked to pick up the (real) bone specimens, and walk around the museum to try and find similar structures to find out what bone, and hopefully what animal it is.
The other half looked at clinical skills such as gowning, animal bandaging (using our very reliable toy animals), as well as learning to use our stethoscopes and blood pressure monitors. Then of course the groups swapped round so that everyone had the chance to try out all of the activities.
The volunteers were very positive about their visit, which for many was their first trip to a university. We hope they learnt new skills which will help develop their love for animals into a career.
Kentish town city farm is a free entry local community charity, check out their website here