PhD student David Pollard was a finalist in the ESRC Writing Competition 2017, which aims to encourage and recognise the writing skills of ESRC-funded students.
The brief was for students to write a short 800-word essay about how their research makes sense of society. David wrote an essay entitled 'Understanding the forgotten decade', which discusses how societies have generally not understood what the role of teenagers should be and as a result have neglected them both socially and politically. He argues in his essay that recent advances in the field of adolescent psychology can help us understand how to deal with many important issues ranging from the legal drinking age to the problem of so many adolescents joining ISIS. The essay earned David a place in the final 12 of approximately 280 entrants.
The finalists were hosted by SAGE for a publishing workshop in London, before being taken to the Royal Society Wolfson Library for an award-giving and networking event. The judges represented the Association of British Science Writers, the BBC, the Guardian and SAGE. David commented that “it was a fantastic event, and a great opportunity to meet lots of interesting people who also believe that scientists have a responsibility to share their work with the public.”