Lately, I got more and more inquiries how my work as a fact checker at kurzgesagt looks like. Therefore, I decided to put a small kurzgesagt corner on my webpage, which might provide a few insights into my work.
Let's start with a short FAQ. If you want to know more about it, feel free to drop a short message via LinkedIn or Twitter.
The kurzgesagt team is closely working together with fact checkers who are experts in their respective fields. They come into play, whenever scientific facts, references, principles, calculations, expressions, or translations have to be checked for validity and correctness.
In practical terms, this means that kurzgesagt sends me the video script with specific instructions (e.g., check translations on page 4 and 5; Is the principle that is described on page 8 scientifically correct?; Can you have a look on the calculations?; Is there a paper/study to the statement?). Usually, the script comes with a (not so urgent) deadline and I can work on the script whenever it fits best to my schedule. From time to time, we clarify some details on the phone or via mail.
Once I am done with my scientific check, I send back the revised script, and still are on standby in case of further questions to the script or my edits.
I am an experimental physicist (main focus on polymers) with a masters degree in (physical/inorganic) chemistry. So I would say, I am an expert in these fields. However, in my opinion you don't have to be a top expert in a specific field, to help kurzgsagt with their scripts. Of course, an expertise helps, but often, a general scientific understanding is required to sense that something is communicated incorrectly in the scripts.
So far, I have worked on scripts and videos that focused on (bio)chemistry, classical physics, and astrophysics. I also contributed to the kurzgesagt scale app that was released in 2021.
It is so awesome! Exciting science, great colleagues, flexible working time. Can it get even better?
It is an international team (in-house + freelancer). The people I am working with are German and therefore, we communicate in German with each other, but English would be fine as well.
Most jobs at kurzgesagt require good English and German skills since there are English and German versions of the kurzgesagt videos.
I love how kurzgesagt succeeds in explaining complicated stuff in a very easy way. It is really impressive and I am learning a lot about scientific story telling.
There are time periods with very little videos that fall into my fields of expertise, which means barely no work for me. That's not so cool, but is also means more time to work on other projects.🙌🏼
Have a look at the open job positions. Alternatively, you can use the contact page or send them an email(info@kurzgesagt.org