If you’re following me or Lou or the general MySciCareer account on various social media, you’ll have seen that we’ve steadily been updating the site over the past year and a half with more career stories. We now have more than 60 science career stories, and continue to look for more.
I also just got the bill to pay for the next two years of the “MySciCareer.com” domain name, which I paid, but it reminded me about something else we had been planning to put on the site. A donation button.
We have been paying for MySciCareer out of our own pockets this entire time. It doesn’t cost very much to grab a domain name, we got free hosting via a friend of Lou’s for one year, and the site is currently taking up space on the same hosting plan I have for easternblot. That’s fine for now, but if either MySciCareer or easternblot.net suddenly gets more popular, I will have to pay extra for bandwidth.
Then there are our other plans: We’ve had a lot of praise from people who work within universities to provide their graduate students with realistic career advice. We’d like to be able to produce some print material that they can hand out (postcards with some of the quotes, perhaps?). That costs money as well.
We might also want to advertise in other ways, or be able to afford to travel locally on behalf of MySciCareer for talks or meetings. Again, that also costs money (and we’ve been paying the latter out of pocket as well.)
So if you love MySciCareer as much as we do, you can now show your support in a monetary way. There’s a donation button on the site, where you can enter your own amount. Nothing is too small for us, and we’d be over the moon if you could help us at least cover the small costs we’ve already incurred this year.
We won’t make any profit off this – all money raised goes directly into the maintenance and promotion of MySciCareer, and ultimately benefits science students (and potential students, and grad students, and postdocs…) who are unsure about their futures. We don’t have registered non-profit status so we can’t give you a tax break on your donation, but PayPal has restrictions in place for the donation button (which can only be used for charitable causes), so you can be assured that we will comply with their guidelines.
Any suggestions or questions – leave a comment below.
Any spare change – leave that on the MySciCareer donation page.
On behalf of the MySciCareer team, and all the readers of the site, thank you!!
