Reflections on being an Ogden Blogger

NB. Apologies, this was meant to be published a little while back! However due to lack of internet whilst on holiday, followed by a mad rush to move back up to Durham and into my new house and the setting up of internet there I've only just had the opportunity to post! 

It was only when I’d got back from being on holiday that I realised that the Blogden year was over! If you’ve been following this blog, you may know that it was started as part of the Blogden, a blogging scheme run by the Ogden Trust. The Ogden Trust is an organisation that promotes Physics education through a variety of schemes. I first became involved through a teaching internship in 2013, and then went on to win the competition to become an Ogden Blogger!

So how has it gone? Well, this year has been fairly tough for me. I suffered from quite a lot of ill health, which made completing blogs a lot more difficult as I couldn’t look at computer screens without feeling sick and getting headaches. As such, my blog posts at the start of the year were posted at more random time intervals. I also had a pause during the exam period, as I really needed to concentrate on studying. However, overall I did manage to get an average of one post every fortnight, even if they were occasionally posted in quick succession when I’d had to catch up a bit!

Despite all that, I think it has gone pretty well! I don’t know how many regular readers I have had (if you are a regular reader say hello below in the comments section – it would be nice to hear from you!), but pretty much every post I’ve done has gathered some interest from many different places across the world (which I think is very cool!) A few statistics for you:

As of 20^th September 2014 (when I collected all the stats together!)

Total Page Views: 1565

Month with the most page views: March - my post about being a female in a STEM subject"I'm not an anomaly - I'm just me!" gained quite a lot of attention!

Post with the most page views: According to the "clicks" on individual posts "How to... Cope with Physics exams" gained the most views! Hopefully it helped some people out whilst they were studying!

Post that generated the most comments/ reaction:This depends on which platform! "How to... Cope with Physics exams" (above) generated the most interest on blogger itself, however "Best bits of being a Physics student" got the most reaction on twitter!
Reader statistics: Most people were from the UK (1200 ish) but I also had readers from USA, Canada, France, Russia and many others (Just over 20 different countries in total)! Sometimes it looked like my blog was being linked to from sites across the world which was quite exciting even if I couldn't track what they were saying about it!

What would I do differently if I could do it again? I think that posting more regularly would be a good idea, as it means that people would know when a post was going to arrive rather than it just appearing randomly! That was all part of the original plan, (unfortunately life got in the way) but it’s definitely something I’ll work harder on in the future. I also need to get more to grips with Twitter – I just never remember to post anything interesting I think of, so whilst it has been a good way to help publicise my blog most of my tweets are just shameless self promotion! However, in mildly exciting news, I did get featured in a collection of science Haikus submitted by twitter users to Popular Science which was quite exciting!

I’ve really enjoyed the experience overall and am definitely going to keep blogging. It’s a good space for me to collect my thoughts, and hopefully interest a few people along the way! If there’s anything you’d like to hear about let me know. I plan to carry on blogging about general life at university and any tips I have along the way, as well as blogging about Physics. The next year at university promises to be a lot more interesting for me, with bigger projects to complete and new things to learn about. I also plan to blog more about my life outside of Physics as apparently some of you find that interesting!

Thank you all for reading, it’s been lovely having you!

My next blog post will be on starting university - a daunting prospect for many! Whilst I know lots of people have already started on Freshers week I also know plenty more haven't, and I plan to cover time beyond freshers week too! If anyone who reads this has any questions please do let me know!