Meet the WISE 鈥� Sanne Deijkers
We want to put our members in the spotlight! For the Meet the WISE series, we interview WISE members in different stages of their career across the university. We hope that their stories, experiences and career paths can be an inspiration to other women at 果冻传媒.
Hello! Could you please introduce yourself and the research that you're doing?
I'm Sanne Deijkers, I am a PhD student at Applied Physics and Science 果冻传媒, in the Plasma and Materials Processing group. I work on atomic scale processing of two-dimensional materials, transition metal chalcogenides specifically, for nanoelectronics. Because that's hot and happening.
I'm actually doing a special five-year project, where not only I do research, but I also spend 1/4 of my time on educational tasks, ranging from helping out at a course as a teacher, to developing new courses.
How did you learn about this five-year PhD, and how did you get in?
You have to get your PhD position first , and then the five-year PhD has a separate process of admission. I heard about it when I was doing my master thesis. It was sent around to all master students, because it was newly introduced. One of my friends started doing it. I also applied for it, and I had to write a motivation letter. And, of course, discuss it with my PhD supervisor.
So you are involved in education. How do you like it?
I love it. I really like the combination of helping students, and guiding them to become not only better physicists, but also better people. And combined with state-of-the-art research, I think it's very cool.
How is the gender ratio in the courses that you teach, among students and teachers?
It depends on the course. In the first-year bachelor course, I think that about 20% of our students are female. In our teacher team we have four teachers: two women, two men. We always strive to have at least one female teaching assistant (TA), but that doesn't always work out. Two years ago, we had two females as TAs, so we had a team that was 50-50 male-female. We made teacher-TA duos consisting of one male and one female to show to the students that there are male and female physicists in our departments doing research and education.
What got you interested in science?
I'm just interested in the world. I'm curious. At school physics always interested me, and I continued with it. It helps that my father is a physics and mathematics teacher, and that both my parents are fond of the STEM fields. They offered the opportunity: if you want to try, you try. If you don't, you don't. I didn't feel particularly motivated by others, or stimulated by the environment, but I also didn't feel that I was being stopped.
Do you have a female role model or mentor figure?
Not really, to be honest. I think it's just my whole family, who stimulated me to do what I wanted, and to not be held back by gender stereotypes. Some people were more important, like my history teachers in high school. They knew I really liked history and they really appreciated me being in their class. But my teachers said: maybe you should not do history, maybe for your development it鈥檚 better to go for STEM, because you'll probably be happier there. I really appreciate that. They looked at me as a person, and not my gender. That's how it felt for me.
What is your experience with WISE events?
I went to the WISE annual event last year. I found it quite useful and nice. I like the concept of these events of WISE and WomenNetPhysics. I like that it opens up the floor to discuss and learn more, but it also sometimes creates a negative atmosphere, like everything is wrong. Things do go wrong, but we should also focus on moving forward and creating opportunities, and how to get solutions. So only having women at these events doesn't work. We need to have mixed audiences. I know that at WISE events you try to have mixed groups.
I think the main problem we have to fix is that we don't have to force ourselves to be better than the men that are doing the same job.
Do you have an advice for students that would like to start a PhD?
If you want to do it, do it. Don't let others stop you. You can at least try. What's the worst that can happen? It sounds very rational. I know it feels more emotional than that. But the worst that can happen is that you quit after your first year. If you would do another job and you quit after a year because it is not a good match, everybody is like: good for you. But with a PhD and everybody is like: oh, you didn't finish your PhD. No, it's the same.
When kids are exposed to science at early ages, they might be more interested in it at a later age. You are involved in several outreach activities, such as the Amber comics. Please tell us about that!
In the summer of 2023 I attended a on science communication for physicists. Because I like outreach, I like telling people what I do, but I wanted to get better at it. We were the team of four, one post doc and three PhDs, all female by happy accident. We had to come up with an idea to pitch and develop during that week. So it's not that you get some skills and then you never use them, but you implement the skills right away, which I really liked. We wanted to reach children, to inspire them that it's okay to do science, even though you might be a minority. And that's how we came to the topic of comics. In the end of the summer school, we won the pitching contest.
We hired an professional artist that can actually draw - because I really can鈥檛. And then we came up with these stories where Amber, our main character, encounters something in her daily life. For instance, she is playing volleyball with friends and afterwards they have a drink from glass bottles. She discovers that, if you blow over it, you get a different tone depending on how much apple juice you have left. And she's like: 鈥淲hy? How does this happen?鈥� And then their referee comes over: 鈥淚 do a PhD at the University X and I learned about this. This is how it works.鈥� And then Amber is like: 鈥淥h cool. So if I drink different amounts, I can make different tones. Maybe we can make a song鈥�. And then the story ends, showing that even your referee at your volleyball or football game in your spare time can work as a scientist.
They are one page comics, and we have a where people can read some. The comics are in five languages: Dutch, English, German, Russian and Persian.
How will you get these comics to the kids?
Yeah, that was a real challenge. We started a project in the 1st grade of high school, so 12 year old students. They had to make their own comic about Amber in several weeks. First they had to think about a phenomenon and then look up how it works. They also had to set up their own experiment and then draw a one-page comic about it. The kids can work in teams and use each other's strong points. We published the comics of all the students on the website as well. That's really cool.
Now we're talking to other physics and science teachers in The Netherlands and we approach organizations that spread newsletters across high schools as well. In this way, we hope to spread the word. We want to show kids that science is for everyone.