As you may recall, in December 2018 the East Bay chapter partnered with Silicon Valley, Berkeley, and San Francisco to float an idea to all of you: merging the four chapters into STC NorCal. We asked for your input, and you responded brilliantly – thanks to all who contributed.

Although the response was overwhelmingly positive: 88% of all respondents supported the plan as written (of these, 62% indicated strong support), and offered a variety of reasons and suggestions for their approval. Some folks had very reasonable concerns regarding responsible budgeting and content archiving, to name a few. The chapter leadership will work to address these points going forward.

Unfortunately, our grand experiment didn’t work out. It’s a lot harder getting the machine to change than expected. However, we’re taking what we learned to try again. We picked the event from the last six months that had the best response from our members.

What does this mean?

A lot less push email and a lot more fun.

The six STC chapters in Northern CA (the four active chapters and the two closed chapters), are trying something new.

Our members have told us that:

• they want to connect with their professional peers
• they don’t want to sit in traffic
• they want opportunities to grow their expertise, but
• they want to break away from the same-old STC events of the past.

We came up with the Viewing Party. The idea is to support more regional, distributed events to more people in more places. Continue reading →

SEED, a program designed to help promising disadvantaged youth launch science careers, is seeking mentoring help from technical communicators.

The California Section of the American Chemical Society’s Summer Experience for the Economically Disadvantaged (SEED) program is:

• A nation-wide program run by the American Chemical Society
• A chemistry-oriented, hands-on research internship program
• Focused on low-income high school students who are paid for participating over 1-2 summers
• Full-time work for 9 weeks under the supervision of scientist mentors in industry, academia, and government labs

Continue reading →