Science Sisters: Interviews with diverse role models on career paths and academic life

Science Sisters is a YouTube interview series and podcast hosted by Dr. Iris van Zelst. Lighthearted in tone, it explores different career paths, academic life, and science communication in the planetary and geosciences. The majority of the guests on the episodes are female and/or non-white to show a diverse range of role models in STEM and celebrate women in science. Together with the guest, Iris goes into the highs and lows of being a researcher and discusses issues in academia, such as the lack of permanent jobs in science and sexism. So far, two seasons of Science Sisters have been produced with topics including ethical fieldwork, switching careers, science communication, postdoc life, leadership, women in science, job applications, postdoc hopping, outreach, publishing, feeling incompetent, astronaut training, toxic academia, and how to build a research group.

Here, we present the project and some of the choicest nuggets of wisdom from the guests about academic life and careers. We also discuss the production phase of the series, highlighting for instance the considerations that go into selecting topics and guests, and the postproduction phase of editing and uploading the videos.

In addition, we present how we use Science Sisters as a way to start conversations in our own institutes. We organise a parallel seminar series where we watch the premieres of the episodes live on YouTube and afterwards have a discussion on the episode topic with the episode guest attending online. This has resulted in a greater understanding of each other and more cohesion within the institute. Early career scientists in particular say that Science Sisters is extremely useful to learn about life as a researcher and they enjoy the chatty, entertaining quality of the interviews.