A professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a video series, similar to "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." It documents his life as a physicist and as a husband and father. César Hidalgo is an associate professor at MIT. He is also the director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab.
His video series is entitled "In My Shoes," which documents both his professional and personal life. The series has eight episodes and followed Hidalgo's life between March and June of last year. Various endorsements from professors of different universities were featured in the series' official website. One example was from a professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Steven Pinker, who described Hidalgo's series as "a fascinating and thoroughly original portrayal" of what it's like to be a scientist.
The goal of the series, according to Hidalgo's statement to Phys.org, is to help demonstrate to younger people who are planning to have an academic career about what life is like as a scholar. He added that this would have been useful for him 20 years ago when he was still considering having an academic career since he had no role models to look up to in Chile.
Hidalgo self-recorded his life and gave viewers a glimpse of what it's like to be a researcher, a la "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." The series featured the three months when he traveled a lot from Boston to Washington, D.C., Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Portland, Monterrey and Paris.
Episode 1 of "In My Shoes" began in Washington, D.C. Hidalgo participated in an academic event at the Library of Congress. The second episode showed his travel to Riyadh where he met with a group of scholars to work on research.
The third episode was about the MIT professor getting ready to launch DataUSA, which is a project he created along with his research group at MIT, Deloitte and Datawheel. DataUSA is a website that presents different types of data in an easy-to-understand visual way. It was created to provide information for policymakers, business owners, students and job-seekers.
Trailer "IN MY SHOES" 8 Episodes Series - Created by César Hidalgo. from Lupa Productora on Vimeo.
