Meteor: The honest podcast about scicomm with impact

Last year, I launched Meteor, a podcast, with friend, collaborator, and fellow dreamer-schemer Virginia Schutte. We just wrapped Season 2 a few weeks ago, and I am so pleased to have so much to share with you!

We started Meteor because we crave advanced-user conversations with other mid-career scicomm professionals (like us!). We intended to use Meteor to learn and grow together, and check each other when we need it. Our plan was to dig into things as wide-ranging as branding, projects that matter, privilege, and inclusive science communication, with actionable, tangible steps to level up.

"I have been working in scicomm for over 20 years, and it’s like you are inside my head." ~Meteor listener

In the first ten episodes, we covered all sorts of topics. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. What we think scicomm needs

2. Branding is not a dirty word

3. The privilege of volunteering

4. Balance, schmalance (about work-life balance)

And then, in Season 2, we focused on an important theme: finding hope through action and saying yes. So we talked about things like:

1. The h*ll yes! of finding your people

2. Is it time to make a stink??

3. The visibility monster

4. Scicomm jargon that matters

5. Guru – who, you?

6. Do we even need mentors anymore?

And people have said some amazing and positive things about the podcast.

"I highly recommend you go listen to Meteor right now. I’m addicted already…this is the scicomm podcast we didn’t know we needed." ~Meteor listener

"It’s really refreshing to hear scicomm practice talked about from the mid-career perspective; so many scicomm conversations are about the basics." ~Meteor listener

I’m telling you about Meteor for two reasons. First, I’m really proud of this project. It’s a side-project (aka passion project), and it has been no small feat to plan and produce it in the corners of our free time. Second, it addresses a lot of really big issues in the professional scicomm world that we really think need to be talked about, grappled with, and addressed. We’re hoping that Meteor is a mechanism for getting some daylight on these issues and helping the whole profession build some collective will and game plans to deal with things that can feel really impossible when they are experienced by individuals.

We’re thinking ahead to Season 3 in 2023, but don’t know for sure yet what the theme will be. If you have feedback, ideas, etc., we’d welcome them here.

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