We’ve got over sixty personal science career stories on MySciCareer, but we know there are many more stories out there: There are jobs we haven’t featured yet, fields we’ve left uncovered and countries that are underrepresented. This is your chance to fix this!
We’re opening a new call for submissions. Send us your own personal science career story, or a link to an existing published story that we can excerpt, before June 17, 2016. [Summer submissions are now closed, but anything new that comes in will be included in the next batch.]
Here’s what you need to know:
- You can submit either an original piece, that you wrote specifically for MySciCareer, or you can link us to an existing article on the internet. See the guidelines for both of these below.
- Have a look at the existing content on the site. (You can navigate using the menu to the right). All stories are welcome, but we get a little bit extra excited about content from the following groups that are currently underrepresented on the site: People based outside of Europe and North America. People with jobs in industry, the arts, or secondary education. People with a background in physics, engineering, geology or mathematics. People who have struggled with moving long distances, language issues, or other challenges that affected their career.
- Submissions are due by the end of the day on June 17, in your local timezone.
- You can send all submissions to MySciCareer@gmail.com
Guidelines and examples:
Original Stories
- Original submissions should be written in first person
- There is no maximum word length, but we recommend not going over 1000 words. (Try to aim for 500-800)
- When writing, think about what you would like to tell a current student or your younger self about your career.
- If you no longer work in science, mention how your science background helps in your current job.
- Include your name.
- We are paying to run this site and it doesn’t generate any income (you can help us out here if you like) so unfortunately we don’t have a budget to pay contributors. If this is an issue, the best way around it is to already have your career story somewhere online, so that we can simply link to it directly. See the next section for info.
- Some examples of original content on MySciCareer
Excerpted/linked stories
If your career story has previously been featured elsewhere, and that article or interview is freely accessible online, you can submit that as follows:
- Send us the link to the article. It must be available to read online without a subscription to the site where it’s published. It must be in first person, so either written by you, or an interview with you.
- Tell us if you still hold that same job that was featured
- Tell us if you have permission to let us excerpt a paragraph from the piece.
- Some examples of excerpted content on MySciCareer:
A note for editors of other online career stories
If you are the editor of an existing series of science career stories, we’d be happy to feature a few of them on MySciCareer! Send us a link to your online resource, and choose one or two favourites. We always link back to your site! See above for some examples.
We look forward to your submissions! Since this is a side project for us, it may take a while before you see your story on the site, but you can always get in touch with us via email or on Twitter.