LIZ SEWARD grew up wanting to be an astronaut but settled for a job testing satellites as a thermal engineer at Astrium, a space company. Today, however, the 29-year-old with a masters degree in space science and physics is a marketing manager.

She made the change from science to public relations after spending seven weeks working at the BBC on a media fellowship run by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The scheme is designed to teach practising scientists about

the way the media works rather than to persuade them to swap jobs, but Seward's increasing interest in the written side of science had been leading her towards a change for a while.

[]As a thermal engineer, her job was to make sure that satellites would be able to cope with extreme temperatures. “We need to be sure that even if it ends up in the Sun for a time it will survive,” she says.

After a couple of years she was seconded to Astrium's future projects group and eventually moved into a permanent role writing and managing proposals. “I started on the technical side doing thermal engineering work on the Mars Rover. Then I got into strategy.”

It was around this time that she heard about the media fellowships. “I thought that they sounded really interesting but I wasn't sure that I was eligible because I worked in industry rather than as a research scientist,” she says. After checking that she could apply, she filled in the forms and was offered a placement at BBC News Interactive.

Writing her first story, about how dinosaurs ran, she found herself fascinated by the modelling techniques used by the scientist behind the research. “Actually, though, the story was that T. rex could run faster than a footballer. That was my first lesson - that the story is not necessarily what you think it's going to be and that you always need a hook.”

She is full of praise for the way that the journalists could condense an entire story into four sentences for Ceefax, but wasn't tempted to quit science and join them. “But it did make me realise that I wanted to do something in the communications field,” she says. “I enjoyed taking something that's very technical and explaining it to a non-technical audience. I decided that I enjoyed the communication side far more than sitting behind a computer reading spreadsheets.” This could have put her in a bind, given that she was employed to work on spreadsheets, but on her return to work her boss put her forward for a marketing role.

Now, seven months after her fellowship, she is writing press releases, co-ordinating conferences and generally working to tell non-scientists about the work being done by Astrium's technical experts. She doesn't miss hands-on science - but if an opening on the astronaut programme came up, she might be tempted.

www.the-ba.net/mediafellows