2018 Reflections, Resolutions, and Round-Up

Wheee 2019.  2018 has been a good year for this blog!  Over the summer, Meridith took the initiative and got us posting again.  And we are so glad we did!  This year, we shared a lot of ourselves with you all.  Thank you for visiting with us and this space, and allowing us to share our experiences with you. 

We are kicking off 2019 like we do each year, with our college besties!  This year, we are celebrating in Savannah, GA listening to Rachel nerd out about all the marshes near our AirBnB.  Starting off the year with one another always serves to recharge our batteries for work and our other creative projects, like Sweet Tea, Science.  We have big plans for 2019!  We can’t wait to take you all along with us on this ride! 

The top five seven STS blog posts from our 4th and BEST year ever are as follows:

1. Guide to Graduate School Grief
2. Managing Your Motivation
3. Catching Up with STS – Meridith Edition
4. Part 1: How do I get in? Applying to STEM Graduate Programs
5. Graduated AF: Science Twitter
6. My #StatStud Starter Satchel Set-Up (this one just barely lost its fifth place standing so I had to give it a shout-out still!)
7. Public Speaking Hacks for Scientists (and this post is still going strong even though it’s a few years old so it definitely earned a spot in our top posts!)

2018 Blog Statistics

• 22 posts went up nearly weekly starting in July. The most ever since 2014!
• We appreciated the 35 comments left on these posts and the kind words we received on other platforms and IRL.
• We wrote 27,774 words for this website in 2018!
• Over 2,700 of y’all visited our site and viewed posts over 4,000 times! How many of these views are our moms?
• Twitter provides most of our referrers to the site, but to be fair I think WordPress stopped pushing our posts to the Facebook page, so there may be unbalanced opportunity there.
• We also had some lovely mentions in Small Pond Science and on Dynamic Ecology so be sure to go check out those amazing blogs as well!

What’s in store for 2019

• Dr. Rachel Wigginton!!!
• The deets on Rachel’s new job (more soon!)
• Meridith submitting at LEAST two manuscripts for publication.
• AND Meridith starting her third (and final) research project. End is in sight!

Our goals for this blog

• Continue to post 3-4 times each month
• Up our posting and interaction on all our social media platforms
• Collaborations/guest posts with other #SciComm folks!
• OMG! The continuation and conclusion of our Amazing Besties National Park Road Trip Series! (We also said this in 2015!! I love us.)

Our goals for ourselves

• Rachel will become a PhD!  Other than that, her goals are to publish 4 papers and run a marathon!
• Meridith will pet more dogs in 2019. And also try to publish 2+ papers, visit another new-to-her National Park, and finally wake up and get out of bed at 7 AM for an ENTIRE WEEK! 

We hope you all are entering this new year with full hearts and curious minds.  Cheers to another year!