I was having dinner with my friend Dan the other day, who mentioned what a big success cuSTEMized has been, as if we were some group of high-tech Silicon-valley CEOs working in those modern open space floor-plans. But I had to break it to him: we’re still just operating out of my apartment (at least it’s not my parent’s garage!). For our hardcover and softcover books, we partner with a professional manufacturer, but to keep spiral-bound books affordable, we still make them in-house…here:
Each spiral-bound book is made by hand (by yours truly) with donated time and labor. Kamil took a picture of me after I came back from a weekend off to do a TEDxJHU talk and made a dozen books in one sitting (eesh I look tired!).
It’s so important to offer affordable products. But until we reach the scale and volume where we can get the prices of each book down to where parents, particularly low-income graduate students such as myself, can afford to buy this non-essential item for their kids, we will just have to donate our time and labor to meet them half way.
That goes for our whole team of amazing volunteers! We’ll just have to do what we can until we can do better.
Best,
Jean
My Scientific Name
