Tour de MSCL

  My first day at the lab started with an impromptu tour of MSCL borne from my apparent inability to check lab schedules. Though my official first meeting with the lab was on Tuesday, July 2nd, Dr. Goodwin was kind enough to let me tag along for a lab tour he was giving another colleague, after I had emailed a day earlier and very resolutely stated I was excited to be starting “tomorrow,” on the 1st, as if I knew exactly what I was talking about.

    After recovering from my initial embarrassment, I decided that in true German fashion, I would bike. This did not happen. Did I bike? Yes, but it was done feeling very much like a New Yorker. The thing with bike lanes here is that…they exist. And for the most part, they are coordinated. This is something my order-starved, fear-for-my-life-every-time-I-bike-on-Broadway brain cannot comprehend. I kept on missing that the bike lane very subtly, gracefully, hugs the sidewalk on most streets, separated from the main road. That is to say, I was a crazy New Yorker biking in the middle of very polite but undoubtedly judging German traffic. The first time I went to take a left turn, I crossed onto the road into the left-turn lane for cars only to realize a couple seconds later that there was a bike lane route for turning, too. Incomprehensible! Who would design such a thing!

    After a long and perilous ride (perilous in the sense that I did the peril-instilling), I arrived at the Munich Science Communication Lab on Akademiestraße. It is in a quaint, quiet part of town1, across from a large, grand LMU arts building. Trees line this other side of the street and border the Romanesque style structure, with an array of arches, heavy columns, and rows and rows of stairs that let onlookers know just how small they are.

    But MSCL is not so. Munich seems to have an assortment of pastel-colored, blocky conglomerations. Although not limited to LMU by any means, these buildings line the university’s surrounding area abundantly. It feels like something you’d find on The Truman Show, but worn in enough to know that it’s not a show but a reality. MSCL is found in one of these buildings. Though it is not a bright pastel color but a grayish structure, it is open, inviting and curious from the start.

    A building like this is truly fit for its inhabitant, program director and my supervisor Dr. Goodwin. From the beginning, on our previous Zoom meetings and all throughout the tour, he has been nothing but inviting, the image of an academic and scientist. He is open and honest, yet polite. He has immaculate manners, yet will share bits and pieces of quirky information as readily as they come to his mind.

    As we made our rounds across all of the lab’s various offices, I realized the breadth of the research conducted at the lab, everything from AI in local journalism to climate change communication through memes. I was also introduced to their version of an office door lock, called a transponder, a gadget which looks and sounds straight out of a sci-fi film. Honestly, I still do not know how it operate it. Lastly, my favorite thing of all: MSCL is located on the 6th floor of the Akademiestraße building, and to encourage people to take the stairs, the lab set up a Lego block counter system which keeps track of the number of flights of stairs that everyone in the building has taken. Each time someone takes the stairs up to the 6th floor, they get to add 6 blocks to the tracker. Once enough blocks accumulate, they can be represented more efficiently by swapping them out with a block in a higher place value, such as the tens section. The tracker goes all the way up to the ten thousand’s place!

    “It’s a psychological incentive to take the stairs,” explained Dr. Goodwin. But apart from this fun Lego reward, he shares with me, “The best way to build good habits is to eliminate the choice. I always take the stairs. In my mind, the elevator doesn’t exist.”

- Footnotes -

1. Generally, quaint and quiet seems to describe most of town.