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Utrecht University is a first port of call for secondary school students doing a profile paper. For many students, a fixed part of their research project is interviewing an expert. And the university has plenty of those!

“What I like most about helping students is getting them to think: what do you think the solution is? How could we research that? By asking these kinds of questions, you can spark their minds and stimulate their curiosity. You really have a dialogue. That is the added value of such an interaction, because a lot of substantive information is also on the website,” says Aike Vonk. She is one of the Utrecht researchers who is approached several times a year by secondary school students writing papers on plastic soup, in response to the website she created with myths and information about plastic soup. “The appointments I have with pupils are always very similar: they have very specific questions about the origins and consequences of plastic soup. And they hope to hear from me what the solution is. That is sometimes a disappointment for them, that I don’t have the solution,” says Aike.

The appointments don’t take much time, says Aike, at most half an hour each time. “This makes it a very accessible way of public engagement: you talk about your research with another target group, show them how science works and can contribute to solutions. And you give them an idea of who or what a scientist is. Sometimes I have very nervous pupils in front of me, who have to giggle and can’t get out of their words. To them, I really am a researcher. But I am also just a human being. It’s nice to be able to show that too.” Kyan, Bram and Renske form one of the groups that approached Aike. “We were doing a project on sustainable water management, where we came up with a solution to the plastic soup. We had already done quite a bit of research, but from Aike we learned that microplastics are a bigger problem than you might expect,” says Kyan. “I think what helped us most in the interview was the information that the plastic soup is a problem you can’t solve overnight. That you don’t just solve the problem by shovelling everything away. This interview really gave us a better understanding of that.”

Text: Maartje Kouwen