Dear listeners,
Our Recovering Academic Podcast is two years old! Special thanks to all our listeners. We could never have done it without you. When we decided to start the podcast, we never thought that we would have such a warm welcome and audience. We just passed the 40,000 downloads mark in July, as we start recording Season 3 of the podcast. In this next season, we plan to continue with a mix of topic discussions between the ‘Recovering Trio’, and interviews with other Recovering Academics to tell you their transition stories. Let us know if you have any suggestions of discussion topics or interviewees. We have an ongoing list of possible topics, but we are always open to suggestions. Let us know what YOU want us to talk about. Now is the time!
We also started to get a lot of followers in our Twitter account (1,751 as of this writing). We tried for a while to alternate between us and each one of us would take care of the account for some days/week, but that became somewhat difficult. Life happens, and we ended up taking a summer ‘break’ on our Twitter account as well. However, one of the main goals of the podcast is to make you know that you are not alone, that there’s sunshine outside the ivory tower, and that there’s a lot of people out there to reach out to. We also started interviews in Season 2 as a way to bring more exposure of PhDs that successfully transitioned away from academia. We wanted you to hear their history, their uncertainties, and how they succeeded. But we want to bring more people in touch with you, and in a more interactive manner.
That’s why we are going to transform our @RecoveringAcad twitter account into a Rotating Curator (ROCUR) account until the end of the year as an experiment. Like other ROCUR accounts, someone will be given full access to the @RecoveringAcad twitter account and will tweet about their experience within academia and beyond the ivory tower. We are seeking curators who are PhDs or soon-to-be PhDs that left or/are planning to leave academia. Let us know through this Google Form if you would like to be a curator! Don’t feel pressured to tweet 24/7 during that week. Do it at least a few times that week and share whatever you are comfortable sharing. Your three Recovering Academic hosts will curate the first three weeks to show the diverse ways of curating and plan to have our first guest curator in the early fall.
We don’t want to impose many rules, but we hope that we can trust the curator common-sense and avoid problems. The three of us will try to keep a close eye into the account, but and we will generally trust the curator. But if you see something that doesn’t seem quite right, or if you feel offended in any way, please tweet to either one of us (@ladyscientist, @Doctor_PMS, @IHStreet) and let us know.