Nathan Hernandez's Reflections | Student Reflections | Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show | Biological Engineering

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Day 1 Thoughts

As a person who's still pretty confused about a lot of things including my major and what I'd like to do with the rest of my life, I've had to figure my (vague) goals—a major one being making a positive impact on the world…somehow. I think teaching is a pretty good fit for that. I've always thought that science education is a really important thing not just for the sake of getting people to be interested in working in science or engineering, but also in order to form a scientifically literate population. I've also always wanted to try my hand at making videos, but never quite got up and did it. So when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do this IAP, I admit the clickbaitey title did catch my eye and after reading the course description, was pretty excited about the class.

The first day was pretty interesting and made me think quite a lot. I watch a decent amount of youtube, but yet I've somehow never really thought before on what makes a youtuber be enjoyable for me instead of one I close the window on. I've never really thought from the perspective of the creator, only from that of a consumer, so it's odd to try to think of the whats and whys and hows. That said, I'm really excited to figure it all out since I want to contribute to the sea of content that's already on youtube. Growing up, I never really did see any science shows, so a lot of my exposure to science videos has come from different youtubers or Ted or Edx, which really makes me want to make my own video (I suppose this is partly an exercise in narcissism).

The two materials we watched were pretty engaging. I've left some comments in the annotations, so I'll avoid what I've already said there. While reading the Hank Green piece, his comment that a small team of people (<5) could work on a show that received from 30k to 150k views per video and make a living out of it. I ended up looking up a lot about how the Youtube Partner program functions, as well as the model where creators utilize crow-based funding sources like Subbable, Kickstarter, or Patreon and how they work.

All in all. Good first day.

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