Preparing for the future…

I have super high aspirations for myself and I’m pretty sure everyone around me has those same aspirations for me as well. A lot of people that I’ve met here at UNM call me a rebel. Mostly because it seems that everything I do is against the grain, but effectively so. Last week someone called me a renaissance man.

But I’m not here to brag. Nor do I particularly like doing so.

But I did want to say how high I want to set the bar for myself and I think by posting it in my notebook I’m holding myself pre-accountable (and by that I mean to expect results). So here is what I hope to accomplish in the next few months leading up to my graduation and what I intend to do to get there:

  1. Present at TED/TEDx ABQ: After my open notebook talk yesterday, I got a ton of great feedback. All of it was of the variety of people saying how great of a concept ONS and open science is. They all said I gave a great presentation too, but I know I can always improve in this area. My aim is to present this at TEDx and maybe eventually TED. I mean I definitely want to present at TED, but realistically they may not accept it because of how similar it is to Michael Nielsen’s talk. So in order to accomplish this I’m going to do B things:
    1. I’m going to check out the ABQ Toastmasters to work on my presentation skills!
    2. I’m going to give and organize lots of talks here at UNM and hopefully elsewhere as I expand my network. I’ll also be presenting at SACNAS in October, but that will be a poster presentation.
  2. Fund an ONS educational experience: I’m dead set on getting an IGERT/REU (or both really) for students here at UNM. Steve not getting tenure is really a huge missed opportunity for UNM to be well ahead of the curve in terms of the future of scientific publishing, outreach, and forward progress. But I realize that I can become the catalyst at the university level. So I’m meeting people and meeting with people who can help me get the funding I need to educate students and professors here at UNM. I don’t want this educational opportunity to be just for STEM students. I want open science to be ALL research, but education is key and right now there is none (that I know of) besides whatever gets posted online.
    1. I’ll need a tenured faculty member I suppose. Has anyone ever heard of an interuniversity IGERT?
    2. I was recently put in touch with people here who deal with NSF grant writing, so hopefully she is very helpful and can introduce me to the right people.
    3. Also I was given the contact information for the VP of Research here at UNM, and was told he would be really interested in my open notebook science stuff. Hopefully he can help out too.
    4. Finally I think maybe I could talk to Rob Olendorf about spearheading this, or getting me in touch with someone who would.
    5. Honestly I would love to do all of this myself and be considered the lead PI, but I don’t think NSF would logistically like that.
  3. Graduate: This seems to be the easiest task since I am currently doing research, but I just need to keep kicking ass and getting results. I’ll be working on the D2O/DDW experiments with E. coli and yeast, more tobacco seed stuff, introducing arabidopsis again, and I’ll also be redoing all the shotgun DNA mapping stuff which will hopefully work this time.

I realized a while ago that I can’t imagine doing design without science, and science without design. I do love research, but I love open science and open notebook science much more than standard experiments and results, and so it would make me very happy if I could spend the rest of my life spearheading a movement to change research forever. And I think the path that I’m on will help get me there. And trust me, the design will be forever part of this work.