Stephanie Castillo on Building a Stronger Business Foundation for a Better Phuture in Science
SHOW NOTES
How are you building a better future?
For today’s episode of Ellas, I spoke with the extraordinary Stephanie Castillo about how she’s building a better future for high school and college students through educational and entertaining interviews with talented and diverse STEM graduate students of Vanderbilt University.
Stephanie is a Ph.D candidate in Science Communications at Vanderbilt University and founder of Phuture Doctors, a YouTube channel that began as both a creative outlet for her to share her passion for outreach and teaching, but to also bring diversity to the STEM workforce and academia through representation in media.
In this conversation, Stephanie opens up about being in an unsupportive environment and struggling to achieve her Ph.D candidacy for Chemistry and ultimately creating Phuture Doctors, which led her to her current Ph.D candidacy at Vanderbilt University.
We talk about the consequences of imposter syndrome Stephanie is experiencing due to her underinvestment and how she’s now focusing her time to grow Phuture Doctors into a successful business once she graduates. This of course entails stepping back from producing content, but Stephanie reminds us of the bigger picture: to build a strong business foundation, so once she graduates she can hit the ground running and powerfully inspire underrepresented minorities to pursue an education in STEM while bringing in revenue to continue demonstrating how scientists work on breakthrough scientific research.
To create a meaningful, purposeful and impactful business that also is financially successful takes time and I encourage you to listen to today’s conversation to discover how Stephanie’s journey of entrepreneurship, science communication and community have helped her achieve that important mission.
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+ In this INSPIRING conversation we talk about...(Read More Here)
2:57 - Stephanie Castillo shares how she’s learning not to get defeated when she doesn’t succeed the first time around
5:48 - Listen to Stephanie talk about her journey in studying chemistry and how media has shaped her journey in STEM
11:49 - Discover the ups and downs of Stephanie’s Ph.D journey and not being supported or invested by her advisor
16:49 - The underinvested journey that Stephanie experienced led her to discover Science YouTubers and create Phuture Doctors to fill in the gap of minority voices
20:40 - Stephanie shares how devastated she was to rejected to be a Ph.D candidate
25:28 - Amplifying underinvested representation in science communication is a new space and Stephanie shares how she’s been developing a strong business model and production model
36:52 - Stephanie shares how her entrepreneurial journey is unique and not comparing her growth with her friends
43:56 - An unsupportive and underinvested environment can really tear us apart and create imposter syndrome, Stephanie shares how she had to find support, help, and guidance
51:51 - Stephanie talks about messing up in her first workshop, but connecting with her audience due to that experience
57:21 - Listen to Stephanie’s journey of her growing to be the best Science Communicator she can be
1:00:12 - Phuture Doctors has evolved since its conception and Stephanie shares how she’s cultivating it so it can be a strong business once she graduates
1:03:19 - “Trust my gut.”