the National Medal for Museum and Library Services is the nation's highest
honor for libraries and museums that are serving their communities and
exceptional ways Pacific Science Center Director Bryce Seidel and community
member andrea rose nichols traveled to Washington DC from Seattle Washington to
receive the National Medal and spoke to IMLS about how the museum impacts the
community Pacific Science Center is the first institution to open its doors from
day one as a science that our Science Center is a place that is a non
collections based institution dedicated to helping people learn about the
wonders of science through interactive inquiry based learning the mission is is
quite straightforward but not necessarily easy to do the mission is to
inspire lifelong interest in science math and technology the function of that
is really to help people understand how exciting science can be in math can be
without being intimidating we live in a society where people's experiences in
school often are not good in particular in the early years and they they feel
they can't do science where in reality science is really part of our culture
it's part of our life so the role of Science Center's is to some fair degree
to help young people imagine what they could be when they're older and to help
older people keep up with what's happening in the world of science with a
rapid rapid rate of change we have discovery core is a program in which we
bring in teens high school age to the science center they begin as volunteers
but many are able to quickly move on to the payroll we have about 80 teens from
43 high schools involved in the program now many of them would be what you would
consider to be kids from at-risk communities from underserved communities
I began volunteering in August of 2007 with a discovery core program it was the
summer before my junior year you can start from the summer before your
freshman year all the way up to your senior year and stay until you graduate
from high school which is really unique for Team Development Program and through
the course of it you get to work on the floor teaching
visitors of different ages all about science and things that you're
interested in as well as things that they're interested in there's also a lot
of extra opportunities like workshops and internships you can work with
different departments in the Science Center like the animal care department
or guest services or the planetarium just to get a really broad idea of what
science is about and how the teens can actually fit into science first thing we
do is teach them how to presented some science and as they get better at it
they can learn more topics and work from a cart or ultimately as andrea is done
become presenting the stage shows of the sorts of things but really what we're
also doing is we're teaching them how to present themselves when I started I was
really shy I was outgoing but only with really close people I was really not
very fond of strangers or starting conversations with people I didn't know
and discovery core actually helped me become more confident in myself and my
ability to talk to people they start you out by having you shadow people who are
really good at what they do and know how to teach visitors and talk about certain
topics and then they expand it from there you go from one on one
conversations and when you feel comfortable with that you get to start
presenting activities and to larger groups and then as you develop and
progress you can go to larger and larger groups and become more and more
confident and for me it was public speaking that I really gained my
confidence in I still work at the Science Center I'm in the adult science
interpretation program which is a lot like discovery core but we have a couple
more things that were able to do like LiveScience presentations it's what I do
I actually do a live snake show which is completely different than when I started
I didn't like reptiles I didn't like public speaking now I go in front of
groups of about 200 people present snakes and prevent live science
demonstrations about chemistry and all these different topics it turns out to
provide life-changing experiences many many of the kids had come in become
fascinated with science and they choose to go on to college when they hadn't
even imagined going to college it's absolutely a remarkable program I'm so
so proud of what the kids that come through
that program do