Unveiling my secret YouTube channel – and a course!

When I announced I’m doing research about autism at Harvard, people said, Academia requires too much patience! You’ll lose your mind!

Undaunted I came up with a new paper every week for the first year. The papers were awful, but as a writer I didn’t mind writing to learn. So it turned out that my transition to academia was, indeed, an exercise in extreme patience: for my co-authors.

And maybe using past tense for that paragraph was too optimistic. But I’ve made progress. I downloaded five apps to figure out how to keep track of journal articles, and I spent the summer learning to use new software like Qualtrics — and even Excel felt like new software when I had to create a pivot table.

At some point I decided to stop learning new software and just focus on doing one thing really well. But then I decided I need to use Canva to make a presentation about what I’m learning in my research. I didn’t count Canva as new. I thought of it as gathering up all the things I’m doing into one tidy, project.

Of course the project got out of hand. I can’t just do something like make a presentation. I have to make 30.

Y said, “You’re literally making a YouTube channel on your laptop. This is not 1990. We have ways to share our videos now.” (This is what it’s like to have grown up kids: it’s like walking under the world’s largest microscope with a narrator following behind.)

I realized that I’m scared to show you the videos because I love them so much. I feel most comfortable making jokes about them, but the truth is I’ve worked really, really hard on them, and I want them to be fun and interesting and useful.  And I want you to love them. That’s hard to say.

I never did find an app to organize all the journal articles because I want them to feel like a story not a file cabinet. So these videos are my way of organizing everything I’m learning. And you know how academia is all about patience? These videos are my exploding exuberance.

Join my autism course You’ll get access to the collection of 30 videos I’ve created over the past year, and I’ll do a live presentation and discussion about key topics on Dec. 3, 4, 5, 6 at 8pm Eastern. 

The videos are not yet in the right order, but here’s a sneak-peek at the collection.