Become a volunteer
why join?
how to join
1 👇🏽
Check the open positions below and decide which project you could be interested in joining to hone your scicomm skills.
2 📧
Contact us through this form, specifying the project and position you might be interested in. Not sure you’ve got all the skills and experience to apply? Most of us didn’t 😉
3 🎉
Within a week, we will contact you and walk you through the next steps to join The Science Basement. Welcome to the team!
open positions
Below is a list tasks and positions that divided below by each project. Remember that if you are a PhD student in University of Helsinki, you can get credits per volunteered hours. See anything interesting? Reach out specifying the project and make sure to mention the position in the message.
Afternoon in the Science Basement (Public speaking)
Teaching material organizer/updater: We would like to provide materials for the speakers with instructions on presenting/Q&A/etc. We have discussed the ideas many times, but need someone motivated to put the ideas into an attractive guide/powerpoint. In addition, we are looking for someone to keep our training material up-to-date.
Blogging Science + SciCrisp (written science communication)
If you are curious but hesitant, reach out and we can talk about possibilities and specific opportunities 
Regular contributors: We will be launching a new line of shorter articles outside the themes and are now opening positions for regular contributors for them. We are happy to hear any ideas about topics you might have. Of course, you can always pitch for the current theme as well!
Reviewers: a person with experience in the same-ish field as the blog topic who can notice if the approachable way of writing misrepresented some scientific terms or ideas. We will contact you on a per-need basis depending on the fields of the contributions received.
Others: We are happy to put to work whatever expertise you bring to the table! The idea of TSB is to be open to people with no experience in science communication to try their hand at and learn about whatever medium they are interested in communicating their research and supporting others to do so. Ex. Graphic design or art? We can pitch to our authors collaborations to illustrate their articles/figures.
FIRN – Finnish Reproducibility Network
Coordinator: TSB has joined the Finnish Reproducibility Network as a local node. If you’re interested in organising activities related to research replicability and good scientific practice. Read more about FIRN at www.finnish-rn.org!
TSB Podcast
Video editing: no previous experience required, we will learn together.
Social media
Interested in any of the below social media projects? Or have any particular skills that you’d like to learn? You’re always welcome to our meetings to come and brainstorm, and we’ll find something interesting for you! 😀
Humans in Science: Humanising researchers to the public via posts on social media (helping break stereotypes). We’d like to introduce our wonderful TSB members & community through this project as well, before hopefully expanding to a general global internet project
Coordinator for In Simple Words: Video project idea similar to this one, explaining your research to different audiences
Content creation for TSB Tiktok & Reels: brainstorming TSB’s tiktok image, defining target audience and what type of things we want to communicate, filming the tiktoks, giving each other feedback, researching trends (also see scope for plenty of sub-projects beneath this one, sky is the limit with this)
Video editors: We’d like to upload some of our old Afternoon talks and videos from other events to Youtube; would need a few more people to join the video editing team to help with editing, transcribing, uploading, sharing these.
Virtual School Visits
Researcher/Speaker: The Young Academy Finland offers a service called “Meet a Researcher” where researchers are virtually visiting schools to give students an impression what it is like to work as a researcher. To sign up as an available researcher for the virtual school visits follow this link.
Writing Workshops
Workshop Presenting Presenter: This person would be in charge of preparing for the Workshops, generating the material, and presenting the writing workshops.
Youth Science Club
We are a pilot project bringing a youth science club to children of immigrant backgrounds in Finland. If you are interested to support us by hosting a science-related field trip at your workplace or otherwise contribute to this exciting new project, please get in contact.