In The Word of Obi-wan Kenobi, “Why, Hello There!”

Wild to see you here! If you signed up to hear about grad school life, all of my wild projects, and

Welcome to my experiment.

Yes, experiment, because I’ve never done this before! I mean, I write all of the time, and have my own blog, “Getting The Science Write,” but I don’t think I’ve written in a way that directly addresses my audience like this.

Much of what my newsletters will entail will be updates on grad school life (so we can finally answer the dreaded question, “When will Becca graduate?”), current scicomm projects with some behind-the-scenes info, and maybe some cycling/book info!

Newest Blog Post is Up!

In case you missed it, I’ve already put up the blog post for the month of March!

Dragon Feathers

It’s on the shorter side of my blog posts, but it was so much fun to write!

How Goes Those Youtube Videos?

This is a question some of you may have, if you follow me on Instagram. You may remember that in spring of 2023, I had plans to make some “how to write science” videos. Unfortunately, that also happened during my celiac disease diagnosis, and so the videos fell to the wayside.

You’ll be happy to know that I am currently working on the scripts right now for those videos! However, they are the last on my list of projects to focus on, so we haven’t made too much headway with drafting video scripts. However, I am making headway on one of the concepts of the video, as you see below:

My plan for the video series is as follows: have the first set of videos cover the nitty gritty of how to write, like sentence structure, tone, word choice, etc. Then, I want to have a series where I go through various science communicator books and do videos on how the scientists choose to write about their research/area of study.

(Plus, it gets me reading more science communicator work, which is a huge bonus!)

You Mentioned Other Projects?

I did! I currently have a couple I’m juggling besides the video project! I will always have my blog that I’m working on for monthly posts. Outside of that, I’m writing a DnD module for Science and Sorcery, a group of science communicators who play Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) for charity.

This is the same group that I played for last year, once as a player, and the other as a Game Master. The videos are available via the links.

And speaking of Science and Sorcery… I’m taking part in another charity DnD livestream with Science and Sorcery on April 13th! I’m a player in one of many Science and Sorcery livestreams that weekend; I’m luckily on a Saturday game, which means folks in the US can watch in the early afternoon and not deal with work simultaneously.

I’m so excited to show the character I made for this one-shot! More on that in April!

Oh, and I’m writing a fantasy book now. I’m currently on chapter 10. This was an accidental project, but it has now become it’s own major entity in my life (and since it’s so science-y and has a biologist/chemist as the main character, I still consider it part of my scicom work at the moment). I’ll have to have a whole newsletter focusing on this particular project, because there’s a whole story as to how this novel started.

How’s the PhD Coming?

I recently survived putting on a “How to Present Your Science” workshop series, some back-to-back presentations, and am setting up for a thesis committee meeting for the first week of April. Grad life has been hectic.

And I still don’t have a good estimate for when I graduate. My program will let me graduate once I meet the publishing requirement; 2 scientific papers. I currently have 0 published, so an exact date is up in the air. I’m hoping to have my first paper submitted by this fall.

Welp, that’s all I have for the “maiden voyage” newsletter! Thank you all so much for coming along with me for this tiny experiment of mine, and I’ll see you all next month!

-Becca