This year, I co-organized my very first symposium, Inspire Science Symposium 2020.
So, I wanted to write about it and jot down things that I learned, worked and could use work in future. It’ll take me a few posts to really log the nitty-gritties, so bear w/ me.
Part-1.
What is Inspire Science Symposium?
The Inspire series started years ago with a bunch of hopeful trainees that got together and created a space to celebrate (their) science, and the baggage it came with. In part, to find individual journeys after graduate/postdoc training as well as to find what tools lay in individual arsenals in order to find those journeys. What’s really unique about this symposium, is that it tackles the need for skills required beyond just science. Skills such as communicating the science, passing it on and most importantly, making it applicable to the society. And so, since its inception over a decade ago at UCSF/Berkeley, The InspireSci Symposium Series aims to nurture scientists and expand their skills by offering a variety of topics such as science outreach, communication, networking, etc.
Sponsored by the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU School of Medicine, 2019 edition of InspireSci broadly dealt with the topic of science outreach. But, this year, things were different. Unlike last year, we couldn’t have more than a few people in a seminar room… let alone a crowd of 100+. So, the symposium had to be virtual, and it had to set itself apart from any other online event. So, it required a brilliant idea, lot of organization, willing invited speakers and the right time.
First things first: how’d I get roped into this?
Two words, Ada Weinstock.
Ada is a K99 postdoc fellow at NYUSOM. She’s a friend, (an unofficial) mentor and someone I deeply admire for her science, her tenacity …among many other things. My first interaction w/ Ada was back in 2018, in a group meeting. I was so taken by her brain, that I actually went up to her after the meeting and asked, “Who are you?” She shot back, a little louder, the same and we’ve become friends since.
Ada sent me an email in early July about joining the InspireSci team w/ very little insight other than, “..I think you’ll be perfect at this!” July was a tricky time to take on more, considering we had just been back in labs for a few weeks and things were starting to look up for experiments. Albeit hesitantly, I said yes because I trust Ada. With the general theme of Staying inspired in uninspiring times, the InspireSci team assembled and began coordinating schedules to have a first (zoom) meeting.
Organizing a symposium
What does it take to organize a virtual (or any) symposium? It has to start with a really good idea. In our first organizational meeting, we focused on a theme. Under the broader theme of Staying inspired in uninspiring times, we started to dig in for something narrower but not “only” about the pandemic. Reason being, so much of being an academic is this pendulum of swinging between the highs and lows. Highs can be small and large successes that are few and far. On the other hand, lows are constant and come frequently and in all sizes. Luckily the half life of highs, outlast the many annoying lows. Or, so I’d like to tell myself. Therefore, staying inspired can’t only be about the pandemic and it’s fore-and-aftermath. It has to be about life of a scientist, in general. Because, that.. that is timeless. With that in mind, we came to this theme of an intersection. An intersection of where science, culture and politics meet. I’ll explore on that a lot more in the next post, but for now, the theme quickly became about a triangle w/ three corners …Science, Culture and Politics. And, so it began.
Divide, to conquer.
Our next task was to designate tasks to individuals and make smaller teams to remain organized and focused. I volunteered to take on Media because I find it easy to tweet about science (having done it for 12y) and have a substantial amount of science-network in the NYC area. But, ofcourse, I was also interested in using that network to help find speakers. I got two awesome partners to work alongside for the Media - Bianca and Mericien. Two fantastic humans with very specific skills and darn good taste. So, we started strategizing on when, what and how to get the word out in the subsequent weeks. We had to get the website up, twitter/Insta/LinkedIN set up and most importantly, a nice Logo revamp.
The Logo
For this, I reached out to a dear friend, Elisa Lau (aka Pinkimoon). Elisa is a brilliant illustrator and creative soul with many unbelievable projects stuffed in her portfolio. But, since we didn’t have any money, she agreed to help me out as a personal favor and listen to the theme and came up with some mock ups for the Inspire Symposium logos. I told her I wanted a human sitting at the precipice of thought and innovation pondering how to coerce the impacts of knowledge (Science) and policy (Politics) into the community at large (Society). And, boy, did she deliver! See the logo below!
Getting started
The meat of getting things organized requires the benefit of experience. We had a bunch of veterans from previous meeting, so that helped. Along with Ada, we had Sud (Sudarshan Pinglay). My first impression of Sud was that he was fun, mild mannered with a touch of refreshing team spirit, matured beyond his age. With some great hands on technical side (Nakisha, Deb and Meghan) and the fantastic graduate student duo (Johanna and Julie on the activity team), we were pretty set on what / when/ how to forge ahead. Ofcourse, all of this was meaningless, if we didn’t sort out Speakers.
Finding speakers who fit our theme creeped up at the top of our priority by the end of July. Since we had unanimously approved the theme of Science, Culture & Politics, we already had pretty good ideas on what kinds of people we needed to fill spots. We got pretty lucky and were excited about how warm, encouraging and informative these interactions were. In the next post, I will describe why and how we chose the speakers we did, and how it all turned out. Stay tuned.
