You’ve got to love the first blog post, right? Untamed optimism, wild predictions, unbelievable potential… it’s fantastic. The first blog post sums up all the good feelings that surround a new project which, if you’re doing it right, should be myriad. At the risk of falling head-long into this cliche, I’d like to tell you a bit about what we’re doing and how we’re going about it.

What we’re doing

The whole GetScientific idea (GetSci for short) came about late one night in 2008 on the 3rd floor of the San Diego State University library. I was studying physical chemistry with Christoff and mentioned to him a crazy idea that came to me a couple days earlier: a social site surrounding life science learning resources. He was immediately intrigued but I have to attribute part of that to acute Distraction Syndrome (this is a common state of being while studying chemistry that allows you to get distracted by almost anything non-chemical that crosses your path). Regardless, the conversation lead to a manic planning meeting at a Mission Valley coffee shop and the rest is history (after a multiple month hiatus spent actually achieving our degrees).

Our goal is to create a place where life science students can find the learning resources they need to really understand the material being thrown at them. You would think that being a life sciences student in the Age of Google would be easier but, in fact, it’s not. There are too many resources, too much conflicting information, and a plethora of commercial sites that make finding the answer you need harder than actually going to class. The gems out there, the university pages and learning guides buried under millions of pages of useless information, are tough to find and only last as long as a particular graduating class. What happens to these great sites once that group is out of school? They move towards almost complete anonymity until they are found once again by another group of soon-to-be alums. This system sucks.

The other part of our idea is to make a place where students can submit their own notes. Personally, I have pages and pages of notes and study guides that are just sitting on my hard drive. I sent them out to me study group and I hope that others are finding use out of them but who knows? I know several other students in the same position who would be happy just knowing that someone else out there might, just might, get some kind of usage out of their very hard work.

Combine these two main functions with the ability to comment on and rate the information and you have the basic idea of GetSci. This is a site made by life science students for life science students and professors as a way of giving back to a large, mostly disconnected community of people who had a hand in getting us through those exams, labs, and papers.

Where we are now

We started out our idea thinking we would either need to learn programming (which I have) or find an investor and pay to have it built. In the meantime, we found an open-source platform that seems to fit our needs and purposes almost perfectly. This platform, however, needs a lot of work form a bugs and performance standpoint as well as a “let’s make it do what we want it to” one. It’s been tough but, I have to say, nothing seems to have helped my knowledge and ability of PHP more than reading code I didn’t write and trying to make it do my bidding. I highly suggest it.

So far, we’ve fixed some major issues, come up with the first iteration of how it should look, and implemented a few tricks to make the system conform to our needs. There’s a fairly long list of vital to-dos but, all-in-all, we’re making great progress despite having very busy lives outside of this project. I’m proud to say, we’re getting ready to (very) soft launch our little project in February to a select group of testers and advisors. We’re looking to make the site easy to use, find all the bugs, and get it ready for a second stage launch in the summer.

We’re also getting ready to approach a few partners and sponsors to see what kind of support we can get out there. I think we have a pretty solid business model and I can’t seem to stop thinking of ways to make this a successful endeavor. That’s a good sign right?

Watch this space

If you’re reading this and you like what we’ve got going on, contact me and let me know if you’d be interested in helping out with either testing, building, or otherwise. Our structure is loose right now and, really, we’re just looking to learn and have fun at this point.