 In fact, a picture of the spring in perspective. Last year, I was the only postdoc in the entire university, as far as I know. The biggest draw to come to Western was my mentor, my research advisor, Kevin Covey. He's been an amazing mentor both for research and also for life and for life balance these last few years. The other big reason was my life. This is where we want to live our lives. So Western is the only other university, large university, within plausible driving distance. So I've had a lot of questions from people asking me what it's like to be a postdoc at a smaller university. And my answer is actually it's really good. This university and the physics department has a big teaching focus, and so I have access to a lot of really incredible students. So I know that in lots of these videos I talk about how much my students inspire me and impress me, but it really is true. And the students here have been really excited to do projects. Alright, it's a great place to work. I would 10 out of 10 recommend it. And now it's time to actually go to my office and get some of that work done. Okay, so basically we've been doing like a lot of science communication. I've slowly gotten the students that work for me in the fourth season to almost run like a machine. It's awesome. That is awesome. Yeah, so that's going well. But we're now presenting this like model of the class we made, which is very modular. It's like one week as we talk about policy, another week we talk about blogs and blogs. Another week we talk about press releases. I can say that if I'm going to have anything smart to say about it. You're going to say great things. I'm going to say I've been doing this. Yeah. Hit that subscribe button. Yeah. Right. This module, what do I want to say, format to this class is something that can be really taken to other universities. What's the end game? I don't know. Do you want a minor in science communication? Yeah, so the end game is that it's, we want a science communication minor. If not like focus or something in some of the sciences. We as scientists, you know, we're not taught like basic social science of like how people believe you and like how to navigate through different audiences. Share an idea like without using jargon from only your field. We're not taught that. We're not taught that. The dead cat. This is a dead cat. That's what it's called. So it would go on your boom mic. There are long boom mic dead cats and what you do is you only use them for when there's one. Okay. So put it on the mic and then. Yeah. You can't hear that. No. Podcasts and videos. We have Vixia's and this is my giant thing over here. This is what's fun about my class. It is a camera. It's a baby camera like so. Pop open. Look at that. That was a nice sound too. Are you going to have them vlog? Are they going to do a vlog this quarter? They have a option to vlog or to podcast. They have an option. They have to pick which one. So I'm going to come talk to Gina's class about vlogs. Yes. Hopefully they will then all vlog. They'll probably all podcast because I podcast. That's fair. I'm doing all this stuff and we're presenting at conferences and I'm doing these sessions at conferences. I feel like if I could just get everyone that's doing Saikami stuff on campus together, at least I would know what's happening. At the very most, we could talk more about this whole institute. I want to know more about your end goal. What's your end goal with your vlog? I liked blogging. Yeah. Your vlogs were awesome. Yeah. They were fun. There was a fun thing to do. My end goal with this vlog is much less well-defined. This vlog is in its really early days. Right. I think I've got like 66 subscribers. It's slow. It's small. I'm getting like one or two a week. It's in that small phase. I don't have a really well-defined goal. I don't either. One of the things that I'm going to say in your class is I think these kinds of projects work the best when you have a niche that you want to play today. Yeah. To be honest, I don't like usually communicating about astronomy. Yeah, I don't either. I'm not very... Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm not actually passionate about talking about astronomy. Yeah. So some people have been asking me, like, why don't you do like mini astronomy lessons or talk about your research? Right. Cause... I don't want to. I like talking to somebody about their work. Especially science that I don't know anything about. Right. Like when Lena Dahlberg came on our show and she does CELINs. I think that's what they're called, The Little Worms. And oh my gosh, she showed those worms to myself and my nine-year-old and we're like looking at them. And I never took biology. And I'm looking at these things, swarm around and she like... And looking at their brains. I was going insane. I was like, I feel like a scientist. This is awesome. The goal now, and the theme, is not to show my life. It's to show what the job is like. It's a day in the life of a astronomer. Exactly. And it's trying to demystify some of that. It's trying to humanize it. I want to glorify the cool things. There are some truly cool things about this game. Having access to these brilliant students. And I get to travel some. This job allowed me to go to Congressional Visit Day. I got to meet a couple senators. That was so fun. That's such a cool experience. That actually changed my life too. Doing that experience, doing the Congressional Visits, put me on the path to actually be an advocate. It is an amazing feeling when you realize that you have power. I do so much inclusion work. And I do so many things where it's like, people of color, this is what happens to them. These are the slides we hear. And this is the stereotypes we face. And a lot of my white colleagues are like, I'm a terrible person. I was like, no, look at what kind of power you have. And when I have my colleagues and my friends that be like, I'm going to use this power. I'm going to sit in a room. When they have that mindset change all of a sudden, we as people of color or women of color and everybody who feels underrepresented, when we start to realize where we aren't underrepresented or where we are privileged, for me, when I realize I'm privileged as a scientist, as soon as I finished a PhD in physics, confidence just was like, I felt like I could do anything. I have all these privileges and I need to actually use them for good. Like the Superman, with great power comes great responsibility. You're basically like Superman. Well, that's Spider-Man. I was a Spider-Man. Not a very good comic book fan. Writing emails for three hours straight, which I do all the time, is not fun. But when you actually have an end result or you have a student being like, this program really helped me or like, you know, I got into this grad school because of you. So everything I do, the way I teach, why I teach, why I host this podcast and created it, why I do STEM inclusion and outreach and like my job doing that, it's all for one thing. And that one goal is to dismantle the scientist stereotype. Like that's my one goal. And so whenever somebody asks me to do something, is it going to help dismantle the scientist stereotype? Yes, then I will do it. Is it not? No. And it's taken me five years to crystallize that thought so that it can help motivate me into picking what I'm going to do next, how I'm going to do this project. This is my goal, to get rid of the scientist stereotype. So yeah, like that's my goal. Yeah. That's good TV right there.