SAn Diego Science Storytelling, Ya’ll (SASSY) is a first-person storytelling event featuring local San Diego scientists and science enthusiasts.
I was intrigued by the storytelling format of the event and thought the name sounded familiar. As it turns out, I had listened to past recording during my first year of grad school!
SASSY isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. The closest concept I could think of were TED Talks, but the stories from SASSY hit differently - they are deeply personal, funny, transformative, and have just the right sprinkle of melodrama that I love.
It is not your usual science communication program.
When I saw that the theme for this SASSY was “Adaptation,” I knew I had to pitch my story. Grad school has been a process of adaptation, but none of that gets captured in a paper, a talk, and definitely not in my dissertation or defense, and I wanted the opportunity to talk about the behind-the-scenes of my own grad school journey.
I got to talk about aging clocks, the science behind them, human-computer interaction; and through writing my story, I had the opportunity to reflect on what it means to do science, explore the meaning of biometric data from sleep trackers and aging clocks on a personal level, and think about societal perceptions of aging and the cultural associations with age. More than anything it was also fun to workshop the scripts of other storytellers - it was a lovely experience.
SASSY was founded by Margot Wohl, Ashley Juavinett, Alie Caldwell, and Ari Remmel.
