ViNES

When I first started The Scientist NZ, one of my first posts was about a group of us who were keen to advance both our careers in science in NZ, and in a wider sense the knowledge-based economy in NZ.

Well, things are progressing nicely, and we now have a name, ViNES.

We decided on the very first day that we are a group of young and emerging scientists that are interested in making opportunities for ourselves and contributing to a knowledge-based economy in NZ. This may take the form of entrepreneurship, employment in industry, doing a post-doc, or even switching outside of science altogether.

To get where we wanted to go we decided that we need to:

• raise our profile
  
• build our networks
• upskill
  
• build a track record
  

Five of us met today and really made some progress toward making the ViNES concept work for us. It is now more clear than ever that what we want in the near term is exposure. This alone will help guide us towards our ambitions. Unfortunately, the ViNES blog was taken (but not used) by someone else. We are ViNES-NZ in the blog world, which is probably a good thing since NZ is who we are representing. Feel free to comment if you have other suggetions.

So there you have it. If you have anyone knows of any interesting events coming up we should be at, or any business that would like to brainstorm with us, please get in touch.