I suppose for one of my first blog posts here a good topic might be me answering the question “why have a blog?” There’s a few answers, so let’s unpack them.
- I enjoy science communication. This one is the most important. The past few years have been really phenomenal for the genre of science communication. Mention must be made, of course, of the excellent Facebook page I Fucking Love Science, but it’s only one among many. There’s never been a better time to be a science advocate, so luckily it’s always been an interest of mine, and I get to surf the wave. I love YouTube channels such as Numberphile, CGP Grey, SciShow, Veritasium, MinutePhysics and others, and they’ve all really inspired me to give this science communication thing a shot. I don’t want this blog to be exclusively about science, but as it’s my day job I expect it to take up a large chunk of the writing here.
- I gots opinions. There’s lots of interesting things happening within the scientific community, and within the world of higher education. As a physics graduate student, I’d like to think I have something to say about these things, but I’d also like to think that in a wide range of other subject areas, like politics and movies, I have interesting things to say.
- I like writing in general. I’ve written for the student newspaper before, and hope to do that more in the future. For those who don’t do it professionally, writing is a great pastime, and something I hope to do more of.
- Yes, it does look good on a CV. I’ll just be upfront about this. Obviously any personal blog these days is going to be, in part, an exercise in that most loathsome of modern concepts — personal branding. I think anyone who runs a blog who says they don’t have this somewhere in the back of their mind is kidding someone, either you or themselves. So yes, that is a part of why I’m doing this. Not a big part; not the main part, but a part.
So with that out of the way, let’s get blogging! My ambition is to have one blog post a week, with Thursday at noon as the upload time (I find it helps to have a regular upload time for these sorts of things). Thanks for stopping by!
-Tom