Featured, News

Welcome back to 2017

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Here’s to another new year with The Scapegoat!

Thank you to our readers and subscribers who have stuck with us throughout thick and thin in 2016, and the Scapegoat team here hope that we can put up more interesting and relevant content for your enjoyment.

With the new academic year starting in late February, we’ll be saying hello to our new Monash University Science students soon 🙂 With it comes an influx of excitement, amazing events and oftentimes free food on campus! Until then, though, the team will be recovering from the summer holiday honeymoon phases and we’ll slowly kick back into gear closer to Orientation 2017.

Keep a look out!

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Entertainment, Featured, News, Student Submissions

The Power Couple: Juno and Jupiter

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Written by Jenny

Space News

Juno, sister and also wife of chief god Jupiter, has reached her husband/brother. Well, not really the goddess but NASA’s spacecraft, Juno, has reached the gas giant after a five year journey through our solar system and is currently in orbit. NASA has a series of short clips with Bill Nye explaining the journey of Juno, why Jupiter is such a fascinating planet and the challenges Juno had to face.

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Careers, Featured, News

Jenny’s experience: Access Monash Mentoring Program

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Do you enjoy aspiring high school students to achieve their dreams?

Written by Jenny Truong.

Hi! I am Jenny. I’m a 3rd year science and commerce student and I have been an Access Monash Mentor for the past 2 years.

I became an Access Monash Mentor (AMM) because I wanted to share my knowledge about high school and Monash with students from under-represented communities to help them find their passion. With Access Monash, we get the opportunity to work one-on-one with Year 11 and 12 students at schools in the Dandenong, Frankston, Berwick, Mornington and Gippsland areas, where not many students end up going to university. Many of these students are the first students in their family to even consider going to university, so it feels quite rewarding to aspire them to go on to higher education after finishing high school.

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Featured, News

Why doing a Science degree is not ‘risky’.

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By Dr. Mahbub Sarkar, Dr. Chris Thompson & Prof. Tina Overton

The recent Australian Graduate Survey (AGS) reported that 51 per cent of the science graduates found full-time work within four months after completing their course, 17 percentage points below the national average. Based on this single data point, Andrew Norton of the Grattan Institute claimed that enrolling in science degrees is “risky”. He commented,

“If people think doing a Bachelor in Science will give them skills that are highly valued in the labour market then they should probably look at something else.”

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Entertainment, Featured

‘The Martian (2015)’ #MotivationMonday

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Check out this awesome concept art from The Martian – originally shared via http://bit.ly/TheRaceToSpace.

Written by Jenny

Started off as just journal entries on Andy Weir’s personal blog (super old school), ‘The Martian’ turned into a mega-hit novel. Andy’s passion for science shines through the story with the realism of science and technologies in ‘The Martian’.  The movie adaption by Ridley Scott to be become one of the science fiction movies where the movie did the book justice.  

The story follows a witty, clever astronaut, Mark Watney, in his quest to survive the inhospitable Martian life and return to Earth. The movie is much more than just an adventure as his humour and charm keeps you feel invested in the story, even through the most serious and deadly of times. This is true for both the book and the movie.

The science and technologies in the movie and film may not be perfect but it’s as close to real technologies as movies get. Check out 9 real NASA Technologies in ‘The Martian’ here.  

***Be warned! There may be some spoilers in this post, continue reading at your own discretion.***

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Careers, Featured

Bioinformatics with Professor Ross Coppel

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By Carl Wang, Science student

As a student interested in the medical sciences I am always torn between medicine and research. Some days I gather the resolve to push the boundaries of human knowledge, whilst other days I endeavour to ease the burden of suffering one patient at a time.

In my conflict, I decided to talk to someone who has been through both. Enter Professor Ross Coppel, a man who, starting with an MBBS, has branched out into fields such as microbiology, bioinformatics, and molecular biology. He is currently the Deputy Dean and Director of Research in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences.

Ross’s qualifications and accolades are as varied and plentiful as the man’s interests in the fields that make up biomedical research, and an expanded biography may be found at http://www.med.monash.edu.au/microbiology/staff/coppel.html

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Careers, Featured, News

Research?

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By Jesse Givens-Lamb

RESEARCH?

Not a word that I would ever anticipated myself ever really getting involved with.

Well, to be honest I used to be interested in medical research but then realised I wasn’t as passionate about the medical field as I thought I was … and after only a brief period of time I understood (to some degree) what “actual” research meant.

Research was not for me.

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Featured, News

Science cannot solve all our problems.

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Author: Michelle (Yi-Xuan) Fu

Science cannot solve all our problems.

 

By studying science and by allocating billions of dollars into research, we hope to expand and organise our understanding of the universe, providing us testable explanations of past and current events and assisting in predicting and preparing for our future. But there is a huge difference between knowing something and acting on it.

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