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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about my new adventures in podcasts. Since then, “University of Venus” has launched its podcast -- “The View From Venus.” We launched last Thursday with a teaser/trailer episode, and our first full episode will be released this Thursday, Oct. 24.
When Meg Palladino and I started the “University of Venus” blog in January 2010, one of our main goals was to build community, because both of us were feeling a bit isolated at work and we felt that we couldn’t be the only ones feeling this way. So, we decided to create community by creating a blog and writing about our experiences. Nearly 10 years and hundreds of posts later, we’ve decided that it is time to do more, and we believe that a podcast is an ideal format for continuing to build community, highlight voices and come together around topics that are meaningful to us as women in the academy.
While the topics may be serious -- impostor syndrome, mental health, gender and race discrimination, mentoring, productivity, etc. -- the format is meant to be informal and fun. Each episode will have three co-hosts, and we will invite one or two guest experts to join us to talk about the topic of the week. Our main goal with “View From Venus” is to build community with readers, listeners, writers, contributors and guests. If you want to join us as a guest expert, let us know; if you have constructive feedback on the podcast, let us know.
The guest expert on our first episode is Janni Aragon from Victoria University in Canada. The topic is #AcademicStyle, and we talk about everything from Fluevog obsession to owning the room, racism in the academy to sexism in the classroom, professional wear and having fun, being yourself and being taken seriously. We had a lot of fun taping the episode. This one is co-hosted by Meg Palladio, Lee Skallerup Bessette and me.
One of the best parts was getting four “University of Venus” writers together on screen and having the opportunity to “see” one another for the first time in 10 years. While some of us have met in person over the years -- at conferences or when one of us happened to be in another’s city -- some have never met in real life. After reading so many blog posts that were often very personal in nature, finally getting to see one another and be together online was really fun and incredibly rewarding. It took our sense of community to a whole new level.
We hope you will join us -- as a guest or as a listener -- as we continue to build this amazing community of women and allies in higher ed. I am grateful to all of you, and I feel fortunate to have this community that has my back, that supports me, that amplifies me, and our main goal has been to do the same for all of you. We have always wanted “University of Venus” to be a third space for all of us -- a space where we can reflect, renew and regroup, where we can share our challenges and we can brainstorm solutions together. The podcast feels like a natural progression of community building, and now that we are doing it, I just wish we had done it earlier!
This first episode is full of tips on feeling comfortable, finding your funky style and rocking it. We have an assignment in the end, and we even created a new Instagram account to move us into this next phase of UVenus as we near our 10-year anniversary.
We have a podcast! We have an IG account, but most importantly, we have you and you have us.
Check our explainer trailer here:
https://the-view-from-venus.simplecast.com/episodes/welcome-to-the-view-from-venus
And stay tuned for our first episode -- “Creating Your #AcademicStyle with Janni Aragon” -- coming Thursday, Oct. 24 at 4 p.m. EDT.
