About GetScientific

We planned and designed this site with one goal in mind: help science students pass their classes. By creating a community of students worldwide, we hope to boil down all the great, free hard science resources on the web to content links that can be rated by registered users. How's that for an elevator pitch?

The Concept

By allowing students and professors to submit information, upload their notes, and share links to other pieces of information, we're creating a huge group of people with the same goal: conquer college-level science classes. We're doing this by creating a central place for science notes and links where members can add their two cents, filter out the good from the bad, and save their learning aids for someone who needs them.

As more and more information becomes available on the web, the standard "one search engine fits all" model is becoming obsolete. For a topic like "Honda dealers in San Diego" or "how to choose a plasma TV," the top ten (maybe only the top three) results will probably do a user well. For "spectroscopy" or "crystal symmetry," the important, useful links might be caught up in a sea of irrelevant or commercial results. This makes finding a last minute answer or clarifying a particular test topic incredibly frustrating and, oftentimes, completely impossible.

So we built a community-driven, rating site that circumvents the hunting that is needed when using Google for basic science topics. This is a place that any student who ends up in a chemistry, biology, or physics class can go and be confident they will find the information they need in several different formats with a rating and comments from other students who used the same resource. While a collection of important chemistry links might be useful, the real draw comes from the letter or number grade that will occur as students read, review, and score the document based on how useful it was to them.

Another important function of GetScientific is to create a place for student-created notes, study guides, and cheat sheets so hours of work is not lost as students move onto the next stage of their education. Many students (ourselves included) spent a lot of time putting together documents for their own purposes and in their own words that might be lost to the annuls of history without a site like ours to store them. In fact, if it were not for this site, my beautfully-typed Biochemistry notes would have no where to live. The horror!

Resting on top of all of this great information and valuable long-term data storage is the ability to use social networking functionality to connect with other chemistry students across the world. While we're wary of trying to take market share away from enormous sites like Facebook and Myspace, we also recognize the complete lack of a site specific to science students. The basis of any interaction on the site will be each user's list of bookmarked links and recent submissions (both of which are coming soon). We want to include features like user profile commenting, the ability to store some personal contact information, and, potentially, a "friending" feature. Our desire is not to promote the site as a specific social network but to allow interactions to happen (instead of eliminating that ability).

So, that's GetScientific in a nutshell! Now, let's meet the people behind it...

The People

This site was conceived and built by two beer-brewing, science loving former chemistry students.

Hi, I'm Josh Cunningham and I'm the guy in charge of design and development on this site. I finished my BS in Chemistry from SDSU in 2009 and went on to web development soon thereafter (actually, I kind of started before I graduated). People ask me all the time how I ended up here (making web) instead of there (making molecules) and my answer changes each time. I really enjoyed my time at SDSU and have no regrets about my degree (though I wonder if a computer science degree wouldn't have fit me a little better) but I felt a strong pull towards the amazing things that were happening online that I could not deny. If only there was a way to combine my love of science with my aptitude as a developer.... hrmmm....

Hi, My name is Christoff van Niekerk. I graduated with a degree in Chemistry at San Diego State University in 2009. As a future physician, my goal in life is to provide a service to others that will enhance their quality of life. This is why despite a busy time in medical school I still pour my love into this site. Mostly I work on the science side of the site but will also dabble in maintenance and administrative work. As much as I love working on the site in my bat-cave I also enjoy backpacking, climbing, surfing and anything else that will elevate my Vitamin D levels.

The Startup Myth

While I hesitate to call us a startup, our story is fun and it deserves a good title so here we are. It all started on a late-night inorganic study session on the 4th floor of the SDSU main library...

We were reviewing Group Theory and Molecular Orbital theory for an exam the next day and feeling that all-too-familiar distraction brought about by a lack of sleep and information overload. We started discussing how we use many different sources to study for a single topic and it helps us study and comprehend the material. With strong backgrounds in social media we realized a site that brings the hard sciences together with a social element will provide the ultimate study aid. We went back and forth for almost an hour, mentally building out parts of the site. At that moment the Getscientific idea was born and since then the core facets have not changed. Contrary to the idea Getscientific was not a help for that exam.

A week later found us at a coffeeshop (how cliche), frantically writing down must-haves and nice-to-haves. The site was originally meant to be a chemistry-specific site but, before too long, we realized that other science students must be having the same problems we were finding the right stuff on-line. A Photoshop broke out, a document was written, and we had a serious plan forward.

It took us a long time to actually build this site, mostly because life was occurring at a really rapid rate. We're also on our 3rd iteration of the site after a brief run-in with one awful platform and mistake choosing another. We finally settled on building the features we needed from scratch using Drupal and that turned out to be the right way to go.

So, that's how we came about!