Hello all you beautiful people!

Many things have happened in the last (checks calendar) 9 days. Boy howdy, it’s a lot! But first, please donate to those in Minnesota who are standing against ICE. And no: I don’t believe that the administration is pulling out of Minnesota, despite yesterday’s announcement. If anything, they’re going to increase their violent tactics.

Okay, now that you’ve donated, here’re some the mid-month update!

That’s right! It’s not a drill! I finally suffered through the last of that darn cold and

https://gettingthesciencewrite.com/Celiacs-in-Fantasy/

It’s kind of shocking that I didn’t write a post specifically on this yet, despite having my diagnosis for 3 years now (well, 3 years as of Valentine’s day 2026). And I’m glad I did; I learned some fun new biology and history facts

Behind the scenes fact: I do my own coding for my website, which has its pluses and minuses.

After much consideration, I’ve decided to start a patreon page. This is one type of monthly tip page that you can . You can donate up to $3-$25 a month to help me produce more scicomm projects or teaching materials for scientists!

I’ll post the link first before I discuss why I choose this route monetarily.

Why did I go Patreon?

I have an answer up on Patreon, but I’ll give my newsletter folks an answer with even more context: I want to keep my scicomm as accessible as possible. Everything that I’m doing currently is done , and that was done intentionally. The blog was a hobby during my graduate program, and there was no reason to monetize it. When I started my newsletter, I did so mainly to keep family members updated on my life status, and it’s grown from there. And YouTube doesn’t pay me a cent with my content unless I have a ridiculous amount of viewers, which I knew would be the case when I started posting.

In short, all of my scicomm work was done when I had a decent income and reasonable hours. That’s not the case anymore. I’m balancing so much in terms of side-gigs that I barely have time to do the scicomm that 1) I’d like to do, and 2) I need to do to bolster my resumé. And since my scicomm

Therefore, in order to spend more time on scicomm, I must increase the priority of my scicomm…. Which means getting money from it in some way. There are ways to get money out of your scicomm work, and I will be doing a newsletter post on that in the future. However, there’s a slight problem with me monetizing my blog.

The problem: I can’t go back and monetize my work because that would screw over all of my current readers. That’s a great way to destroy my tiny readership. And locking any of my work behind a paywall goes against how I’ve been working for the past 6 years.

My solution is the “tip-jar” that is Patreon. I may set up a Ko-Fi site at some point, which is a slightly different tipping site, but Patreon is the one I’m more familiar with and thus will start with. It allows me to keep everything free and accessible while also helping me pay the bills :)

If I can get enough money per month through Patreon, I can start turning down tutoring and dog walking jobs, instead turning those reclaimed hours to scicomm work hours. I’m not expecting to get a solid income (let’s be honest with ourselves here), but if I can reclaim even two hours a week, that’d make a huge difference! Mainly because I wouldn’t have to travel to where I work, which adds on a minimum of 1.5 hours of travel a day.

So, if you enjoy my scicomm work and would like to help a girl out, please consider signing up for my Patreon!

I’m teaching myself animation. This took me a week. Therefore, you get to appreciate the glory of this 5 second logo animation!

It’s glorious!

If you’ve made the decision to do scicomm, it then stands to reason that you should find folks who are already doing the science communication gig. I’d honestly start here before the next step that we’ll discuss in the next newsletter, Finding Your Niche.

Find what type of content makes you excited!

Scour LinkedIn for folks with the “Science Communicator” title in their name. Type it into Instagram and see what you get!

I have some starting points for you depending on what platform you’re going to be exploring:

TikTok: The.plant.prof, mellythesciencegeek

Instagram: Thatscienceillustrator, Whitecoatartistry, itsthegarbagequeen

YouTube: Dr. Simon Clark, Marine Mumbles, Science&Sorcery, TierZoo

Podcasts: Ologies, Mission: Responsible

Blogs: https://www.fromthelabbench.com/from-the-lab-bench-science-
blog/tag/science+communication

These are all just starting points. I’ve barely touched the surface of the list that I have of scicommers! You can look at who all of these scicommers have worked with as well to expand your list!

But the point of this exercise is to find specific inspiration.

I hope you have a fantastic Valentines day tomorrow!

(Is there an apostrophe in Valentines? Valentine’s? Which is it?)

-Becca