REMINDER: We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Applications are live right now on our website (MeteorSciComm.org)! 🥳 In this fast-paced episode (with a few audio flickers, boo Wyoming wind that knocks out the internet), we make this honest podcast about scicomm with impact a bit #overlyhonest. We tackle: Why we think academia s…

First - two big announcements: Our last episode will be a Q&A- send us your questions, ideas, puzzles, and dilemmas by December 1st. We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Applications are live right now on our website (MeteorSciComm.org)! 🥳 Truly, yelling and naming is how we process, cope, and then work toward action and change…

First - two big announcements: Our last episode will be a Q&A- send us your questions, ideas, puzzles, and dilemmas by December 1st. We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Applications are live right now on our website (MeteorSciComm.org)! 🥳 Wanting to get paid real money (plenty of it) is OKAY. Full stop. And, we argue it’s also…

First - a big announcement: we’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Applications are live right now on our website (MeteorSciComm.org)! 🥳 Articulating and providing evidence of success is reliably hard in scicomm. At the systems level, it can feel swampingly abstract. That’s why concrete examples are super useful. So, in this epis…

First - a big announcement: we’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Applications are live right now on our website (MeteorSciComm.org)! 🥳 In the mid-to-advanced career stages of scicomm, we’re all routinely making things up. But even if we’re good at that, we can’t accomplish real scicomm systems change solo. So, this week, we get…

First - a big announcement: we’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! 🥳 Apply here Dealing thoroughly with a system -- enough to rise to power within it -- can prevent us from changing it. How? The system keeps us too busy. Or, we get recognized for being able to navigate the system, and thus get asked to do the work of navigating i…

First - two big announcements: In Season 3, we’re digging into systems and what we think about as we consciously try to change them. We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Join our email list for a ping when the application goes live November 1st! 🥳 Today, we’re getting real: Doing big things, like trying to tackle systems-level …

First - two big announcements: In Season 3, we’re digging into systems and what we think about as we consciously try to change them. We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Join our email list for a ping when the application goes live! 🥳 Today, we’re reckoning with reality: lots of us have anxiety about our careers. And that’s pro…

First - two big announcements: In Season 3, we’re digging into systems and what we think about as we consciously try to change them. We’re running another cohort of SciComm STEP next spring! Join our email list for a ping when the application goes live! 🥳 There’s a lot going on underneath the phrase “scicomm system”. Today, we're taking a look at t…

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: Does scicomm have to make money? [Spoiler: we have lotsa thoughts on this!] What scicomm tools are you loving right now? [We talked about time…

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 tha…

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…

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… a…

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 scicom…

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 ofte…

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 positi…

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 aspec…

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 thi…

First - two big announcements: Season 2 is all about finding hope through action and saying yes. ✔ We’re running the first cohort of SciComm STEP this fall! Listen to this episode for details and join our email list (https://www.meteorscicomm.org/scicomm-step) for a ping when the application goes live! Now, we’re gonna say it. Finding and picking y…

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: How we approach the on-going work of staying on top of convos around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion and how they …

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…

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 …

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 f…

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 op…

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: You might need to make money, or typically do make money, from this …

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: How do you find people, or pick people to contact? Especially if you’re offering even a pipsqueak-sized platform or you’re inviting …

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: Results are supp…

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: Using these documents as self-assessment tools to encourage positive self-evaluation Crafting our own job titles and definitions of ourselves so they reflect our motivations rather than the task…

How can we set and use scicomm goals so they lift us up instead of drag us down? We suggest: Clearly articulate your goals from the beginning of any scicomm project or whenever you have an inflection point in your career. Give yourself permission to give self-reflection the time, energy, and respect it needs to serve you well. Allow yourself to use…

We want to talk more with fellow science communication professionals (like you!), and we have lots of opinions! We think scicomm needs: More funding, A reliable way to hold people with power accountable, Leadership and development opportunities that extend beyond basic skill-building, More integration between practice and research, and Buy-in and f…

Where are mid-career science communicators (like us) supposed to go to level up? We crave deep conversations about advanced scicomm so we can grow and check ourselves when people disagree with us. And talking to each other and our peers helps us grow. So, we are opening up our conversations so that we can learn from folks with other perspectives an…