People say the first step is the hardest; so imagine writing the post to kick of the blog I intend on using for a scientific outreach project for at least the rest of my college graduation; yeah it is pretty hard, so I'll be going with a safe bet in:
Hello readers,
Before I introduce you to this blog and the project I intend on developing here, I need to introduce introduce myself; my name is André de Oliveira and in summary I'm a 19 year old Biology college student in Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil.
Since I was a kid I always was fascinated with dinosaurs and other extinct fauna, and as expected, the interest faded during most of my teenagehood. Only coming back in late 2014 because of the recent discoveries of the time about Spinosaurus and Deinocheirus that made me go and look stuff on the internet and that made my passion for those creatures to bloom once more.
During 2015 and 16 I mostly followed the subject from far away with quite a passive approach, checking into new species I looked up at some blogs or Wikipedia, but nothing very deep. But while looking for pictures of various species I entered frequently in contact with the DeviantArt paleontology community till one day (September 29 2016) I decided to create my own page there. This was the "start of my paleontology internet career". For most of 2016 and 17 I was just there enjoying the art till I decided to start posting some of my drawings, positive reception of members of the community made me keep posting those consistently.
During the second semester of 2017, I was doing a subject/course in college named "Topics on Geology and Paleontology" and in the end of the semester I decided to show some of my work to my professor. She was quite supersized and invited me to help her at her lab and work in a project with her (where I'm still working).
In February, I needed to make a trip to São Paulo and driven by such success in my institution I decided to visit the paleontology lab of São Paulo University. There I talked with Dr. Max Langer and show what I was doing, he was not impressed, and said to me something around the line of “You are still very fresh and barely finished your first graduation year; when you reach the penultimate year of college come back here and if you are still interested I can help you”.
To be honest this was not the answer I expected to hear; for the rest of that day I was quite miserable, on the ground and even questioned if that was the career I intended on following for my life. But as some say "successful people are those who rise up after they fell", so I needed to rise up once more.
The next day I reevaluated my work and saw I was drawing too much but producing very few technical paleontology contempt. Realizing so I changed what I was doing; I stooped drawing constantly and transformed my DA into a mini blog where I made reviews and commented recent papers and sometimes congresses abstracts and resumes.
I liked that work and felt it was much more in line with a graduation student than my old gallery with mostly drawings. However, I always felt Deviant Art was not the right place to do such; I had a blog in a platform supposed to be an art gallery. Because of such I am here today inaugurating this blog and transfusing that work into a more appropriate platform.
This is just a brief story of myself so everyone can understand how I got here and the origins of this project. The rest of the introduction: proposal, objectives, motivation and my inspirations for this project are in the other posts of this Introduction series.
Since I was a kid I always was fascinated with dinosaurs and other extinct fauna, and as expected, the interest faded during most of my teenagehood. Only coming back in late 2014 because of the recent discoveries of the time about Spinosaurus and Deinocheirus that made me go and look stuff on the internet and that made my passion for those creatures to bloom once more.
During 2015 and 16 I mostly followed the subject from far away with quite a passive approach, checking into new species I looked up at some blogs or Wikipedia, but nothing very deep. But while looking for pictures of various species I entered frequently in contact with the DeviantArt paleontology community till one day (September 29 2016) I decided to create my own page there. This was the "start of my paleontology internet career". For most of 2016 and 17 I was just there enjoying the art till I decided to start posting some of my drawings, positive reception of members of the community made me keep posting those consistently.
During the second semester of 2017, I was doing a subject/course in college named "Topics on Geology and Paleontology" and in the end of the semester I decided to show some of my work to my professor. She was quite supersized and invited me to help her at her lab and work in a project with her (where I'm still working).
In February, I needed to make a trip to São Paulo and driven by such success in my institution I decided to visit the paleontology lab of São Paulo University. There I talked with Dr. Max Langer and show what I was doing, he was not impressed, and said to me something around the line of “You are still very fresh and barely finished your first graduation year; when you reach the penultimate year of college come back here and if you are still interested I can help you”.
To be honest this was not the answer I expected to hear; for the rest of that day I was quite miserable, on the ground and even questioned if that was the career I intended on following for my life. But as some say "successful people are those who rise up after they fell", so I needed to rise up once more.
The next day I reevaluated my work and saw I was drawing too much but producing very few technical paleontology contempt. Realizing so I changed what I was doing; I stooped drawing constantly and transformed my DA into a mini blog where I made reviews and commented recent papers and sometimes congresses abstracts and resumes.
I liked that work and felt it was much more in line with a graduation student than my old gallery with mostly drawings. However, I always felt Deviant Art was not the right place to do such; I had a blog in a platform supposed to be an art gallery. Because of such I am here today inaugurating this blog and transfusing that work into a more appropriate platform.
This is just a brief story of myself so everyone can understand how I got here and the origins of this project. The rest of the introduction: proposal, objectives, motivation and my inspirations for this project are in the other posts of this Introduction series.
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