Meteor

Per Meteor tradition, our last episode for this season was an open Q&A. This week, we tackled some questions and provocations from y’all! They fit into a loose theme of sustainability, including topics like: Aaaaand, we got a little personal with some family relationship strategies that we thiiiink could have relevance for scicomm professionals. Here are the two resources we mention in the...

A quick opening note: Our last episode for this season will be an open Q&A. Send us your questions, ideas, puzzles and dilemmas by September 6. We’ll fit in as many as we can for the September 8 episode! The whole upper rungs of mentoring, on the scicomm career ladder, are missing. Is it a question of relationships? Resources? Respect? Or is it that beyond-beginners need different kinds of mentoring and our profession just isn’t structured to provide it? Either way, where do mid-career...

A quick opening note: Our last episode for this season will be an open Q&A. Send us your questions, ideas, puzzles and dilemmas by September 6. We’ll fit in as many as we can for the September 8 episode! In scicomm, it’s inevitable to run into some expertise questions. There’s the matter of whether one has expertise in science, how that compares to the expertise of others, whether one feels confident in their own expertise, and how expertise is and isn’t respected. So, this week, we tackle...

First, a reminder - applications for the first cohort of SciComm STEP are due TOMORROW: August 19, 2022! Listen to this episode for details and visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step There’s a lot of jargon in science, so it’s no surprise there’s also a lot of jargon in scicomm. We’ve been chatting… aaaand ranting… about scicomm jargon for a while. So we thought we’d go out on a limb and say what jargon we think works, what matters, and what jargon debates...

First, a reminder - applications are open for the first cohort of SciComm STEP! Listen to this episode for details and visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step There’s a nuance to scicomm careers that can really bog down your mental energy…and even complicate how you think about your own identity. That is: doing scicomm well often requires taking on the identity and ‘voice’ of the organization - or project, place, or even species - that you’re representing or...

First, a reminder - applications are open for the first cohort of SciComm STEP! Listen to this episode for details and visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step Visibility can mean influence, access, and power, which can lead to a sort of visibility monster issue (cue the Genie in Aladdin). Basically, visibility is often shorthand for credibility. But, we think there should be more to it than that. So this week, we tackle things like: Dig in for...

First, a reminder - applications are open for the first cohort of SciComm STEP! Listen to this episode for details and visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step We’ve been talking a lot, without the recording button on, about when it’s time to stick our necks out to try to spin a negative situation into something positive. Basically, when’s it time to raise a ruckus?!? And how can we make a totally-outta-line request or situation into something that jives with...

First, a reminder - we launched applications for the first cohort of SciComm STEP last week! Listen to this episode for details and visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step Now, change is basically a whole genre of opinion pieces, workshops, and podcasts right now. But, there are some specific, mid-career scicomm aspects of change that we want to tackle. So we’re putting a Meteor spin on it this week, talking about: Our theme this season is saying yes makes...

First, a reminder - we launched applications for the first cohort of SciComm STEP yesterday! Visit our website to apply! https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step Now. Collaboration is about so much more than finding people to collaborate with. There are hard decisions we cannot put on autopilot, no matter how a collaboration arises. Our theme this season is saying yes makes room for action, accountability, impact, and yep, even hope in the realm of scicomm. So, this week, we’re...

First - two big announcements: Now, we’re gonna say it. Finding and picking your people is not just nice, it’s crucial. There’s not enough time in the day, or energy in our overwhelmed, burnt-out selves, to compromise about who we spend our time with. [And yes, we know it’s an enormous privilege to get to work this way! Some of us have a lot of obligations that don’t leave room for choosing who we work with. Family. Finances. Friends. Still. We’re finally at a career stage where we can...

In this episode, we’re really talking with you about scicomm. We are answering YOUR questions, and we’re excited to rove widely through topics and questions you’ve sent us. We touch on the big picture and the nitty gritty of: Our hot takes? We also shout-out The Writer’s Co-op (https://www.thewriterscooppod.com/), a podcast about running a freelance writing business. We mention TWC while talking about career transitions including freelancing. While we’re on break, TWC might fill the...

We (Bethann and Virginia, not the collective ‘we’) actively resist the notion of “work-life balance”. It has too many vibes of work and life being mutually exclusive, as if they’re balanced against each other on a scale. And, in a lot of #SciComm, work and life are already so stinkin’ integrated. So, we lean into the framework of “work-life harmony”. We aim for getting work done and fulfilling ourselves along the way. This gets complicated when we’re doing scicomm for someone...

Our last episode for this season will be an open Q&A. Send us your questions, ideas, puzzles and dilemmas by November 22, and we’ll fit in as many as we can for the December 2 episode! There’s a lotta baggage around being someone’s partner, especially a wife, especially in science. These issues leak over into scicomm for many folks, whether you’re a ‘science wife’ or navigating some other kind of partnership. This week, we tackle: Dig in for yourself: Take some time to yourself today,...

Our last episode for this season will be an open Q&A. Send us your questions, ideas, puzzles and dilemmas by November 22, and we’ll fit in as many as we can for the December 2 episode! There's a whole sticky mess of having time vs. making time, and it can drag you down, make you question your sense of accomplishment, and even put you at odds with folks you care about. This week, we tackle some ways of re-thinking time, timelines, and commitments. There’s the friction of timelines in...

No one can decide what you do for free but you. Volunteering is often a portal into relationships and career experience. It’s also a way to give back to our community or professional environments. But, unpaid labor is often exploitative (or not possible for some of us). It’s a rotten conundrum. ⚖ An equitable system should do away with volunteer opportunities and every opportunity should instead come with payment or other meaningful compensation. 💸 However, we gotta recognize that the...

Being a good person means helping people for free and being a good business person means NOT helping people for free. So there has to be some kind of middle ground here for professionals. But how do you decide who you help and when? Saying no is complicated. You’re weighing a lot: When navigating this obstacle course, we assert: Audit your own process: Who are the last five people you said no to helping for free? What did they have in common? Do your answers match your goals? BONUS! 🎁...

We are going to assume that #1: you agree that we could all benefit from expanding our networks, but #2: there’s a cultural treatment of networking as if it has a bad aftertaste. 🤢 There are some real challenges here: Examine your own feelings about networking: How do you get info about people you don’t already know? What concrete steps can you take to build on that? We propose: https://thesiswhisperer.com/2020/02/05/academic-spy-networks-and-why-you-need-one/ *** Join this...

We have a love/hate relationship with branding, as in: we love to use branding to share the goods while we loathe some aspects of the system branding happens in. But we talk to lots of people who feel that branding themselves or their work is moldy-peach gross. Plus, branding seems to run counter to traditional science assumptions: We get where that comes from. We were trained that way too. But we say NO to those assumptions. We argue that: Examine your own relationship with...

Instead of CVs and resumes being a tally, how can we think differently about CVs and resumes to get an extra career boost out of them? Lately, we’ve tried: Two tips to shift the way you present yourself in just a few minutes: Knowing your "why" is adjacent to setting attainable, measurable goals and will set you up to productively work more on this later. *** Join this conversation: follow us here and say hello (we’d love to know how reframing your position title impacts your sense of...

How can we set and use scicomm goals so they lift us up instead of drag us down? We suggest: How to get started setting your own goals in just a few minutes: Knowing the why is adjacent to setting attainable, measurable goals and will set you up to productively work more on this later. *** Join this conversation: follow us here and say hello (we’d love to know your why!) on Twitter with @MeteorSciComm (https://www.twitter.com/meteorscicomm). Listen to the full episode...