＜概要／目的＞
Background:
Science communication focuses on the different practices that transmit scientific ideas, methods, knowledge, and research to both experts and non-experts in an accessible, understandable, and useful way. In recent times, social media has become a part of our daily lives including science communication. Many universities and organizations use different social media platforms to impart knowledge to the community about the latest news and events related to science. In line with this, the Department of Biology started a new initiative in the form of social media accounts on Instagram and Twitter platforms. The accounts were managed by graduate students of the Department of Biology and used to post information about events and activities organized by the department as well as new publications and interesting research findings of faculty members and students.

This project is a continuation from the previous semester. The Social media committee consisted of four graduate students under the guidance of Dr. Isaac and Dr. Ando. The committee oversees the design and publication of posts on social media platforms. Instead of weekly meetings, the group decided to meet once a month and have online meetings when necessary. Mastodon will no longer utilize due to its low popularity in the TMU community.

To gain the interest of the TMU and general community about this activity the students also helped in the organization of the Science Cafe project.

Purpose:
Committee Purpose
- To raise awareness to the students, staff, alumni, and faculty members of TMU about the current events and publications of the department.
- To impart scientific knowledge through the means of social media platforms.
- To encourage future applicants to join the Department of Biology in TMU.

Personal Purpose (Lola Alyssa Marie Albo):
Last semester, our general objective was to make official social media platforms for the department. For this new semester, our main goal is to strengthen our social media engagements since we only have a few followers. Specifically, I want to achieve the following purposes:
1.        To make more posts about the events, publications, and trivia related to the department using Canva as the application for editing.
2.        To encourage more people to follow our social media accounts by advertising on the campus and online.
3.        To persuade future applicants to join the department by posting interesting and timely scientific outputs by the department.
4.        To communicate more effectively among our social media group through monthly meetings and LINE group.
5.        To secure our social media platforms to avoid hacking incidents.

Personal Purpose
[Arisa Tamura]
-  Practice scientific communication for general audiences.
-  Improve creative thinking skills by coming up with interesting posts.

Personal Purpose
(Toshima Alexander)
Since I experienced how to start and run a fresh official instagram page in the last semester, my objective for this semester was to learn the responsibility of maintaining and an established instagram page and increasing the reach and viewer base of our Instagram page. I worked with the focus of making it easier for our successors to continue this project and create an online space for like minded individuals from the department of biology of TMU to interact with the each other during events held by the department and for the information of these events to reach them in an unobtrusive but efficient manner.

Target: Students, staff, alumni, and faculty members of TMU; General masses (potential students and the community in general)

Date of Implementation: October 3, 2023- February 29, 2024 (Project will still continue.)

＜方法／企画としての特徴＞
The students will post weekly/monthly (depending on the availability of current activities) on Instagram and Twitter.

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tmu.gradbiology/)
-Alyssa Marie Lola (Posting, editing, and designing)
-Toshima Alexander (Posting, editing and design)
Twitter/ X (https://twitter.com/tmu_gradbiology/status/1731860427242414327)
-Arisa Tamura
-Bounsanong Chouangthavy


＜活動内容／具体的成果＞
-Instagram (tmu.gradbiology) and Twitter (tmu_gradbiology) accounts for the department were made for the announcements and events.
(Instagram: 113 followers, Twitter: 33 followers (as of 01/23/24))
-Irregular in-person and online meetings to share progress and discuss about future plans of the project.

(Lola Alyssa Marie Albo)
-I made the infographics, edited some of the announcements that were posted in the social media accounts, documented some of the campus & department's events, helped in the distribution of our banners, shared the social media links, created the logos of the Science Cafe and organized the Science Cafe event.

Here are some samples of the infographics that I did:
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These are the logos I created for the Science Cafe:
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(Arisa Tamura)
1. I handled with creation of the posts, especially with the Japanese captions.
(Instagram: @tmu.gradbiology Twitter:@tmu_gradbiology)

2.  I made the banner of the Science Cafe and the flyer for the food menu.
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3. I was in charge of posting contents and captions on Twitter. Also arranging captions to pick out essential information due to its character limit.
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(Toshima Alexander)
1. I was in-charge of creating English captions and posting most of the infographics.

2. I also held responsibility for creating some of the infographics themselves for instagram posts following are some of the infographics created by me

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3. I also helped in the distribution of banners for the social media project.

＜感想／課題など（企画力／評価力／自主性等の向上を含む）＞
(Lola Alyssa Marie Albo)
Overall, I am very proud and happy of our huge progress on this project for this semester. We were able to impart scientific knowledge through our social media accounts and even made collaboration with others (such as Chocolate Cafe). These days majority of the people all around the globe are using social media platforms. With this said, we can use these as our tools to spread scientific awareness. Overall, we successfully gathered more followers and interactions on our Instagram and Twitter accounts. I helped here by sharing our page and works to my TMU and scientific community friends. We also posted several banners around the campus to let people know about us.

I learned a lot from this project. As I made most of the infographics, I was able to improve my artistic and creative thinking skills. I had fun making them. Additionally, since I am an international student, this project helped me in socializing with other Japanese and international students as well as staffs of the campus as we share our thoughts about the posts that we made and during the distributions of the banners. Moreover, I was able to meet different people from scientific and regular masses.

I firmly believe this project is a good venue for scientific communication. I hope the department can help us in encouraging more students and faculty members to follow our social media accounts since we plan to continue this project together with the guidance of Dr. Isaac and Dr. Ando. For the coming months, we plan to make more posts about the recent events, publications and trivia that are all related to our department.

(Arisa Tamura)
For the latter half of this project, I achieved my personal goals that I hold for the second semester. I learned how to advertise science topics while creating banners for science cafe available for expertises as well as non-expertises. It required considerable effort and time to create banners which fascinate people not involved in the scientific field. In the process of creating flyers, I used my strategic thinking and marketing skills to promote the event to the public, along with the recognition of the social media account. In regards with captions for the post, I give careful attention to use general terms and key terms that explain the content simply within the character limit in Twitter.

Overall, the project was a great opportunity for me to enhance my English communication as well as to practice how to inform scientific contents that attracts the general audience. I think this project should continue in a long span to acquire new followers and recognition. I believe this platform would become a good tool for people to spontaneously be involved in science-related events available in and off campus.

(Toshima Alexander)

As we reach the end of this stage of the project , I am proud of what we have achieved. We successfully reached our goals by the scheduled period and we can handover this project to the next generation without shame.
It is my hope that the small page that we created may grow one day into a portal for prospective students around the globe to learn more about our department and what kind of research and activities they would be able to be a part of.
It made me happy to see the number of followers increase rapidly in this semester and we were able to see the fruits of our efforts specially through the number of attendees for the science cafe.
The project was a great opportunity for me to learn about social media outreach and management which is a growing field of interest and I believe this experience will be of great value to me in my future endeavors.