A New Chapter. 

May 24, 2020

Hey guys, this newsletter edition is a little different than usual.

It’s more of an update and introduction to some of the more ‘entrepreneurial’ emails I’ve promised but yet to deliver.

But not to worry, even if you’re non-medical, the takeaway advice and tips will be very transferrable.

For those who don’t know, I built a platform during medical school called YoungAcademics. It’s a collaborative platform for medical students and clinical researchers, currently in a prototype stage.

Researchers can advertise research projects on the platform; medical students can then apply for them.

That’s the essence of it right now, but I aim for it to transform the way we source, collaborate and complete research projects, hopefully making researching a lot less boring in the process. Additionally, we’re creating an educational hub (think GeekyMedics for research).

We’ve had amazing success at King’s College London’s School of Medicine, my former medical school and our pilot testing site.

In our first year alone, we sourced 60+ research projects that attracted over 300+ medical students willing to pay for the service, with each project attracting 6+ student applications on average.

The feedback was amazing and we knew we’d created something that provided genuine value to our users.

The problem? Our progress hit a ceiling.

It bugged me that we couldn’t facilitate non-medical students and those outside of KCL due to technical limitations.

In order to scale this project, I realised that I would have to re-build the platform from scratch.

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Here’s the vision-board for YoungAcademics:

  1. Students to be in full control of their research experiences: Choose your own project/specialty/supervisor according to your preferences, skills and availability.

  2. Students to be able to apply for research projects across UK institutions, even if you’re not a medical student (will include biomedical students etc.).

  3. Students to be given full transparency on what the timescale, requirements and outcomes will be for the projects (i.e. potential for publications and presentations etc.)

  4. An educational hub of articles, tutorials and courses to make researching and academia more accessible and enjoyable.

  5. Supervisors (junior doctors, research-savvy students or senior academics) to be able to advertise their projects and personally select successful applicants, leveraging other students to increase volume and speed of research output.

  6. All users to be given a personal dashboard to view the status of all active/completed projects, possibly even an in-platform chat amongst users (getting carried away now, but I can dream).

I’ll be announcing a waitlist for the new Beta platform very soon.

📌To be first in line to try the Beta platform once ready, register your interest here to the YoungAcademics newsletter (unsubscribe anytime): https://mailchi.mp/c3467dd6fbb1/4lvsg2v1c5

In the meantime, have a browse of the website to see what we’re about: YoungAcademics website

For everyone else (non-medics), I’ll be touching on various learning points, takeaways and reflections from the journey in this newsletter.

Things like marketing, SEO, growth tactics and finding product-market fit are all topics you might expect from me to write about in the coming weeks.

A big THANK YOU all 300+ of you who read this newsletter weekly.

Let’s hope this new chapter is a fruitful one!

See you next week.

Faisal

P.S. I just dropped a new video on Youtube - check it out!

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You can read all my previous articles here on Substack or on Medium.

✏️ About the Author:

👨🏽‍⚕️Faisal is a Junior Doctor working in the NHS, new Youtuber and Founder of YoungAcademics.

🎙You can find him on: 📸 Instagram, 📺Youtube, 🐦Twitter and 🤓LinkedIn.

☕️If you’re feeling generous today and would like to support his content, you can buy him a coffee.