Hi everyone! I want to welcome you to today's video where I will be talking about what it's
like to be an engineering communicator part-time online. For those of you who don't know me,
my name is Kat. I am an Electrical Engineer for the space industry and I also run a social media
account on instagram as well as here where I talk about my experience as an engineer, my experience
during college, I offer advice, offer motivation, offer reassurance. I also have a blog and I'll
link all of that in the description, but today I want to talk to you about what it's actually like
to be a engineering communicator. So what does my day look like when I do this work part-time.
So today is Saturday and I actually do most of my engineering communication stuff on the
weekend since I do work full-time. Um, sometimes I will work on it in the afternoons after work, but
usually I'm pretty tired so it'll just be minor stuff like editing a video um or
creating a caption things like that. As far as the actual content creation, I typically
do that on the weekends. So today I have a few things on my plate I'm going to be
creating an instagram post for next week so the photo, um the caption and then I'm also going to
be editing a video. I have a intro to circuits that's coming out pretty soon should already be
up by the time this video is up. I have to finish editing that and then I have two calls today one
of them is for a it's just an intro call for a podcast I'm going to be a guest on and then the
next call is a consultation with a friend of mine who was really interested in starting up her own
um science communication account. So that's what I have planned for today. Usually I end up doing
a bunch more things than what I planned on so I'll be showing you all of that today. First off is the
outfit of the day. I have this dress on which has Apollo mission patches some tights and my
doc martens. So I just got done with that call about the podcast I'm really excited about it,
the host is also a female engineer so we're going to be talking about our experience
and I'll link it in the description as soon as it's out. Now I have to edit a video
so the video should probably already be out by now it's my intro to electronics. I'm almost done
editing just need to add the last few touches so I'll be working on that for a few hours today. So
the very last thing that I needed to do was to add the voice over for that video and you can see
I'm using a little microphone. It is the same one that I am using for this voiceover for this video.
I'm doing a day in my life today so you're going to be in my video I'm like also filming over here.
If you follow me on instagram, then you know that one of the things that I really
love to do in my stories is open up old electronics and show you what's inside.
So I picked this recorder, voice recorder up at the thrift store it's super cool
it's in really really good condition. I looked it up and it's from the 70s I believe.
And so today I'm going to try to get this to work first of all, and if I cannot get it to work
then I'm going to be opening it up to see what's going on and I'll be sharing that and my stories
Okay so I went ahead and put batteries into this it's in amazing condition.
Sometimes when it comes to these old electronics you'll find a lot of residue from
old batteries or batteries sometimes will be left inside and they'll make a mess, but this is
perfect perfect condition and I do think that it actually works which I'm really excited about.
So we can see here we have the different buttons and the batteries are inside now this up here is
the little battery led and we can see that it turns on. I don't actually have a tape to put
in here which I'm so sad about because I want to actually try it out um but I'm going to be
trying to find one somewhere so that I can get this get the bad boy working.
Now, I want to do a little q&a. um I had asked you guys on my instagram what were some
questions that you had about what it's like to be a science or engineering communicator
particularly part-time which is the way that I do it and so I'll be answering some of those
questions that I received. The biggest question that I received was how do you get started?
And I really love this question because you know I feel like a lot of people are expecting me to say
something like you know I had this whole plan and I planned it out for months before I decided to
jump in and the answer is that I actually just went from one day to the next I just
kind of was like all right I'm gonna do it. Um I used my personal account that I had on instagram
and I just went through and cleaned out some of the old posts that I didn't really want to be
public, made my account public and then just kind of started posting as if I was already a science
or engineering communicator. So I'm sure the people that were following me were kind of like
what are you doing? But, that's just that's what I did and I kind of just kept going
you know. I didn't really stop, it was sort of a fake until you make it type of thing.
It really did work for me so my advice is to you know stop trying to think of all of these
reasons why you shouldn't or why you should wait um and just do it. Just post. Start with one post
or one story. Just do it. The next question that I also got was why did I start doing this work?
And the answer to that is that when I was in college I was desperately looking for
role models or for somebody to answer some of the questions that I had or even just for somebody
who would help me feel understood or less alone. And I didn't really find anybody. It was really
difficult for me to have to go through that and feel alone so when I graduated college and I got
my dream job and I started doing all of that I kind of still felt like I wanted to do more
to help. You know, I was doing outreach events and um talks and presentations and stuff, but I just
felt a need to do more of it to help more people and that's why I decided to start my account. I
think that it has been really helpful to a lot of people. I think that it's really helped me
not only meet an amazing group of women who are in college and early career and even beyond that. So,
not only am I helping others but this platform has also helped me so much. Next question. How do you
keep up with it all? And so I really want to talk about that because I feel like sometimes people
have this idea of me where I'm doing it all. I'm doing everything. I have my full-time job.
I have my social media work and like I'm just keeping up with everything perfectly and and the
truth is that that's not the case at all. I have, just like everybody else, times where I get tired.
Times where I get burned out. I think that I have been able to find something that works for me
and I've been able to keep myself in a pretty consistent schedule by doing that, but that
is something that comes with a lot of work on myself. On understanding myself, on understanding
when I'm starting to get burned out, when I'm starting to get tired and giving myself that time
to decompress and to relax. That's been really important for me with the work that I've been
doing, but no I am not a perfect person. I don't keep up with it perfectly. That's not the case.
Sometimes there will be you know two weeks where I'm not really posting anything and I'm
just trying to just trying to get myself rested get myself back into it. Sometimes, I also have
some days where I just had so many things planned, but I just maybe had a difficult
week or maybe had a lot of deadlines at work and I just simply don't feel like doing more work.
So, I give myself that time to rest and do something else,. read, watch a movie,
um so no I do not have it all together. But, I have found something that works for me and that is
not giving myself deadlines when deadlines do not exist. So remember that one, that one helps a lot.
Here's another question that I was surprised that I actually got a lot and it was
how did you get over that barrier of having co-workers or friends or family
see what you're doing um and their criticism? So yeah um I'm the kind of person where when I'm
doing something new I don't really like to tell anybody until it's already successful and this
was something that I couldn't really do that with because it's social media or youtube
you know you when you start out it's really important to market yourself and advertise what
you're doing whether it be by getting featured on different pages um or whatever it may be.
So I couldn't really hide what I was doing and that definitely was something that was
embarrassing but it was more of like I don't know I just felt really weird about putting myself
out there and having all my friends family and coworkers see. So I get that if that's a concern
that you have I totally understand but I think that kind of goes back to what I had said where
you just have to do it what I did is I talked to a few of my friends, I talked to a few co-workers. I
told them what it was that I wanted to do I kind of showed them examples of what it was
that I wanted my accounts to be and they were honestly really really supportive so when I
first started out I think that their support was just so important to me. Um they were commenting,
they were sharing my stuff, when one of my first tik toks um with my first tiktok account
started going viral my friends were like the first ones to be sharing everything and resharing and
making accounts just to go in there and like it. So that was I don't know it was just such a sweet
thing that I experienced to see their support in that way. So I think that sometimes our own fear
and our own embarrassment can get in the way and we tend to maybe underestimate
some people that are in our life. Now if you are actually getting negative
comments or their co-workers or people that you thought were your friends
who are criticizing you or making fun of you, this is your space, this is your account. This is
kind of your own little virtual world you can absolutely restrict them
block them whatever it is that you need to do in order to feel comfortable in your own space.
So think about your social media pages kind of like your you know whatever your favorite room at
home is and you're allowing people to come you're allowing people to come and share that space with
you you wouldn't keep inviting people back that are being really negative and making you feel bad
so you definitely have that freedom. Um hiding people from your stories
restricting them from commenting or even just flat out blocking if that's what you need to do
by all means do it, but it's really important to not let people who are being negative about
what you want to do stop you from doing it because I mean I definitely faced criticism and
people who didn't understand what it was that I was doing who kind of made fun of it
but I didn't really care. I didn't really let that bother me. Um I restricted them when I needed to,
I hid my story from the people that I needed to and I just did my thing. So I'm really glad that
I didn't listen to that at the time. All right so it's the end of my day I'm gonna go back and do a
little bit more work on my youtube video that I was editing and I'm also gonna do some research
on this tape recorder that I found, just to try to figure out the way that it works and all of that.
Thank you so much for watching this video. Let me know if you have any
questions about what it is that I do as an engineering communicator
or being an engineer or anything like that. Thank you for watching, bye!