Experts frequently asked questions

What kind of questions will I get?

What do I do about problem questions, or ones I’m worried about?

What’s your moderation policy for questions?

Time commitment

Live chats

How do I embed videos from YouTube in my profile?

Do I need to do any IT checks?

How do I keep in contact/Get in touch?

What kind of ASK questions will I get?

It can be absolutely anything about your job or career – moderators will take out clearly nonsensical, or gratuitously rude questions. The moderators send each general question that comes in to relevant experts, or the students will ask questions directly to you through your profile page. You receive an email notifying you about new questions to answer.

What do I do about problem questions, or ones I’m worried about?

Questions put through to you will be heavily careers-focused, but if you get any question you are concerned about get straight in touch with us if in doubt.

What’s your moderation policy for questions?

All questions are moderated before they are sent to you.

Moderators:

Merge (deduplicate) very similar questions, but allow some questions which might appear similar, but make slightly different points.

Remove rude or offensive questions, but allow challenging and irreverent questions.

Allow questions which may be unclear – you can start dialogues with students to clarify them.

Will not correct the spelling, grammar or punctuation of any students questions.

Time commitment

This will be much, much less than a normal school zone, so don’t worry about answering mountains of questions. We are moderating every question so it gets sent to the most relevant people out of the 100+ in the zone. Any week you could expect maybe between zero and ten ASK questions, depending on how students are using the site.

The students asking the questions will really appreciate your answers, however, so if you can write back within a day or so, they will be thrilled.

Live chats

You will get emails about new chats. Some will be lunch time drop ins, where any student and expert can log in and chat. Others will be for Careers Fairs with set times to sign up for.

On the day of the chat,  go to the CHAT page a few minutes before your session time and the chatroom will be open.

Live chats are text only, a bit like Whatsapp or Facebook. You don’t need any special software or anything, just your computer and access to the internet. See an example of a chat here.

How do I embed videos from YouTube in my profile?

To embed a video from YouTube, or individual photos from a Flikr account, you’ll need to use the embed shortcode around the link URL:
1. Paste in the URL of the video;
2. Make sure the URL is not a link. It should not be underlined. If it is, click the link once to make it active then click the break link icon in the toolbar (it looks like a broken chain);
3. Put (embed) before the link and (/embed) after it but use [square brackets] in place of the brackets.

Do I need to do any IT checks?

No, not really. The site’s very simple. It uses HTML and some JavaScript. We may use Java to run the chat page, but no Flash and no plug ins.

It uses cookies.

It has been tested on all major browsers (even, shudder, IE6) and should be fine on machines running Windows, MacOS or Linux.

If you can access the site, edit your profile and answer questions then everything is working fine.

If you can, come to one of the drop in chat sessions to say Hi, and just check that you can use the live chat. Rarely a corporate firewall or similar may block the live chats. This is more common with school firewalls, and far less common since we got better live chat technology. But best to find out in advance of the first chat booking!

 

How do I keep in contact/Get in touch?

Email is the best way–  Antony and Katie will get back to you very quickly. If it’s technical, contact Emily.

Please get in touch if you’ve got any questions not covered here, or you need help with anything. You can do this on twitter, to @imascientist, by email on admin@iasuk.ddev.site, or on 01225 326 892. We’re here to help!