As the current Graduate Student Representative to the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), I am committed to developing a variety of initiatives to provide more valuable services to student members. As part of my duties, I actively participate in planning and assisting with outreach efforts. For instance, planning scientific events aimed primarily at students that further the core goals of the Society is one of my main responsibilities.
Accordingly, I am excited to announce that I have been working on a small but interesting project that will help any scientist have freedom in their computing. The project consists of a series of YouTube Shorts called “Beyond Microsoft”. This series contains a number of 60s videos that showcase a wide range of programming tools available to perform tasks that scientists carry out on a daily basis, such as writing papers, making professional presentations, building academic websites, among others.
The idea is to provide a new way for the ASN Graduate Council to connect with all scientists using just a smartphone, tablet, or laptop through the YouTube app. YouTube Shorts offers us the ability to interact with viewers by responding to comments with additional videos, or with stickers through formats such as Q&As. Thus, I am expecting a moderate level of engagement with the public.
An important point of this project is that viewers do not require any programming skill, following the content of the videos should be enough for them to reproduce the observations. In addition, I am providing a number of resources that viewers can use as a guide, such as templates, tutorials, scripts, and scientific literature supporting all the material. The resources will be available in both the description of the videos and the comment box.
We are going to release two videos weekly, one on Tuesdays and the other one on Thursdays, starting in August 2024. Subscribe to the American Society of Naturalists YouTube Channel to receive a notification every time a video is dropped. Also, follow us on X (or Twitter) to get an interactive description of each video. I hope you enjoy it!
