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Believe it or not, we have been around for four months already, bringing you a variety of stories every Sunday. And although we have started out with certain topics and categories, our plan was never to stop there. In this News post, we bring you a look into our future prospects – new categories and new writers – by summarizing our past and current efforts.
So, let’s start with a brief overview of what we’ve done so far. Until now, the categories we offered were Presenting Alumni, Science Shoutout, Understanding Science, DIY Science, News and, starting in Issue 4, a new category called My Project, which I will touch upon bit later. We created these categories to set the stage for what we wanted our blog to be – on the one hand giving you snapshots of scientific stories we are excited about, while talking to you and understanding how S3 changed your life on the other.
So far, we’ve had four alumni stories, coming from various different stages of an academic career: bachelor’s, master’s, PhD and PI, as well as one coming from someone following a non-academic career. To complete the set, we will bring you interviews with high school students and postdocs. As Ivana and Nikolina’s co-writer of these stories, I can say how much I appreciated having a nice chat with someone I had never met but shared experience with, or even just catching up with someone after a few years. It’s amazing how inspiring and exciting you all are and please, keep on bringing your love and passion for science!
Next up, we have Science Shoutout, a category designed to bring some new books to your attention, to expose you to new ideas and share links to podcasts or other articles you can use to get your own dose of science. We’ve had two excellent posts written so far, one by our bachelor’s physics student Laura, and the other by our machine learning postdoc Sebastijan, proving that there are no boundaries between fields or academic seniority, and that anyone can join us to write a story.
I found Understanding Science to be one of the most time-consuming but also one of the most fulfilling categories to write. As writers, we try to make the language simple enough for anyone to understand, even those of us working in completely different fields. Ivana shared her love for immunotherapy, Laura wrote about terraforming Mars, while Mario Borna brought us very relevant topics from computer science – tracing contacts and algorithm bias. There are many different topics we could discuss, but for the time being we go after our own passions. But we welcome any new ideas!
My personal favorite are our DIYs, as the whole idea is to understand certain scientific concept by doing experiments at home. And I think that our short catalogue of homemade lava lamps, bubble cyclones and a virtual bean machine has made for an interesting start. So let’s take a moment to thank Ivana, Laura and Mario Borna for creating those starting materials.
And while I hope all of you share my enthusiasm, I would like to know how much you do. So how about you help me out and tell me that you are listening, that you are enjoying something (or not) or suggest what we could do better? To do that, please fill out our short (2 min) fully anonymous survey here.
While you’re doing that, let me properly introduce our newest category – My Project. In short, this category is one we hoped to develop in our first few months, with the main goal of alumni taking the lead to tell us their scientific stories. We, the EVO Editorial team, started this blog, writing our little scientific stories of interest, but we want to explore our entire network to find people who would like to contribute to it as well. And Matija was an excellent choice to start with, having recently finished his PhD and having a long-standing S3 history, as well as knowing how to make a topic understandable to any audience. And I must say that I am looking forward to peer reviewing the scientific stories that are yet to come, so if you feel like you want to share yours with us, let us know!
On top of that category, we’ve got something new brewing at the moment. We are establishing Study Abroad, a category where Nikola, the latest addition to our team, will take you by the hand on a tour towards getting into the best universities in the world. It will be organized into sections like applications, interviews etc., currently focusing on a few countries around the world. Now, you can probably imagine that this task is colossal, and one which requires in-depth research depending on how much detail we want to go into. And that is where we would love to get some help from you!
Are you currently an international student? Or you are just very familiar with admission systems in your country? And that country appears to be one of the following: US, UK, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Finland or Denmark? Or perhaps you have an interesting experience of studying in another country? If your answer is yes, please get in touch with us to help in our research that coming generations could benefit from.
And this is where our short overview ends. Hopefully, in a few months, we’ll be back and extend it with more categories and more stories to tell. So stay tuned, read our new material, ask us questions, or simply join us on this amazing journey of bringing science to everyone.