The female academics of the Lego Research Institute take on the challenges of modern academia. 79 Photos and videos Are you sure you want to view these Tweets? Viewing Tweets won't unblock @LegoAcademics. Loading seems to be taking a while. Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information. Add a location to your Tweets When you tweet with a location, Twitter stores that location. You can switch location on/off before each Tweet and always have the option to delete your location history. Turn location onNot nowAnyone can follow this listOnly you can access this list Here's the URL for this Tweet. Copy it to easily share with friends. Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen. Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
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Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.We all know that life in academia can be exceptionally rewarding, but like every job, it comes with its own set of weird and wonderful problems. Whether it's an experiment that fails, a grant that's rejected, or maybe you've just run out of synonyms for the word "results", don’t worry, this Twitter page gets you. Created by archaeologist Donna Yates, the LegoAcademics page is a nod to all the trials and tribulations that academics experience on a daily basis, and it somehow makes them less tragic and more hilarious, by acting them out with toy figurines. Started in 2014, the page now has over 56,000 followers, and follows an all-Lego, all-female cast of Dr Red, Dr Gold, Dr Grey and Dr Black. "People follow them with a sense of delight because they are normal office frustrations," said Yates in an interview with New Scientist. "The bigger point is that we show women scientists going through this, and that’s part of the excitement surrounding the Lego set and the account - not just the academic jokes, but the fact that these are female academics in normal academic situations, being normal scientists."
The LegoAcademics Twitter account was inspired when Lego launched a range of female scientists back in 2014, called the Research Institute. Created by geologist Ellen Kooijman, the set included figurines of a female chemist, paleologist and astronomer. The Research Institute collection sold out incredibly quickly, but Yates managed to grab one, and has been using it to create hilarious Lego situations ever since. Check out our favourite tweets below, and follow LegoAcademics on Twitterhere. — Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) March 30, 2016Dr Gold’s current grant only pays for the time she spends applying for other grants. — Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) September 9, 2015 Flextime: @LegoAcademics assert that 'working from pub' is a productive alternative working arrangement. — Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) January 8, 2015 The academics have taken the concept of interdisciplinary research a bit too far. Dino insists on being first author.
— Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 8, 2014 Dear IT, Thanks for the swift reply, but Dr Black has a PhD in Computing: she's tried a restart already. Lego Academics Twitter Account Illustrate Life in Academia9/03/14 6:00am With over 34 thousand followers, it's likely that you're already following the excellent Lego Academics twitter account, which'll celebrate its one-month anniversary next week. If you aren't, you should. The account was created by archaeologist Donna Yates, who uses the new women of science LEGO sets as playful images to accompany painfully true descriptions of academic life. Yates told New Scientist how the account came to be: The Lego arrived in the post while my colleague and I were working on a load of paperwork that I had completely messed up. We were annoyed, and it was rainy and horrible out, so we started playing with the Lego. As the day went on, we started expressing our frustrations. I took some pictures of the characters with my phone and put them on my Twitter account, and people reacted quite positively.
After I walked home, I realised I had left my keys in the office, so I walked all the way back in the rain. While I was walking I had the idea of making a separate Twitter account for fun. And it became surprisingly popular. Here are a couple of our favorites, but there are many more great scenes available at the account.Just days after the release of Lego’s much-anticipated “Research Institute” set of female scientists, the inevitable has happened: meet @LegoAcademics, a Twitter account that uses the posed legos to reenact daily life in academia. Its creator, Donna Yates, is an archaeologist who studies the looting and trafficking of goods from archaeological sites for the Trafficking Culture Project at the University of Glasgow. Her cool-sounding job is “bursts of Indiana Jones… embedded within a lot of normal academic stuff,” as she told the Post in an email from Glasgow. Also, it’s the job she’s wanted since she was a toddler. Yates drew on the her own real life work experiences — including the perilous Friday hangover leading into a weekend of work — to craft scenes using the new STEM legos.
She believes this authenticity has helped the account catch on – it’s attracted more than 10,000 followers since Yates’s first tweet on Friday. Her most popular scene so far? Three academics frustrated over spending so much of their time on paperwork, rather than on their actual research; it’s been retweeted more than 1,000 times. She explained: “This scene was ripped from real life: the Lego set was delivered to my office right when my office mate (another female academic) and I were filling out our performance evaluations: a slow, frustrating task which was keeping us from what we really love, namely our research. I think that scene struck a chord with other academics because it was brutally realistic. We’ve all been there, and been there more often than we want.” Her second most popular image? Her take on “Publish or Perish,” which involves a giant lego dinosaur terrorizing the academics in a re-enactment of one of the most high-pressure aspects of the job. That, too, struck a chord.
Plus, it has a dinosaur. /a5333nDd4F — Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 8, 2014 Yates, an American based in Scotland, said she bought the new Lego set in a fit of “nerdish glee” as soon as they were available earlier this month. That nerdiness is fed by two streams: her career as a woman in science, and her childhood love of Legos. But Yates, like many young girls who weren’t really into the “princess” thing, had trouble finding toys marketed to her gender that she could relate to as a kid. Legos, for a certain generation of those kids, was a wonderful, open toy with endless possibilities: “I was the sort of kid who begged and begged for a telescope and constructed extensive models of the Pyramids at Giza out of Lego,” Yates said. She echoed the complaints of many women over what Lego has done more recently to target girls (until, that is, the company approved the three newly-released female scientist toys). In 2011, for instance, the company released “LEGO Friends,” which, among other things, featured female figurines going to the mall and baking.
“I was sad to see that their “girls” line had lost most of the creativity and fun, essentially becoming toys that little me might have played with but would never have related to. It sort of felt like losing a beloved childhood memory,” Yates said of Lego’s more recent attempts to market their toys to girls. The new set, she added, has “made some amends” on that front. “Beyond being a positive image of successful women in science, they are toys that little me would have related to.” The University email server is experiencing technical problems. Please try again later. We appreciate your patience. /53x7mHd55M — Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 11, 2014 Her photos use the real figurines from the set, with some supplemental accessories and faces to increase the diversity of expression and look of the scientists. “I got a few extra heads (I wanted some with no makeup), a few extra bodies (I wanted some without the pinched in waist), and some more hair (I wanted some short hair and grey hair),” she said, adding, “a bit more variety for the academic women rather than just the long hair/make-up scene.”