The Gerardo and de Roode labs recently completed the S8 challenge–Sandra’s Seriously Spectacular Series of Scholarly Scientific Studies in September–where each person reads a paper a day everyday in the month of September. We challenged the Corbett lab to compete with us, but some might say the intra-lab competition was more intense. Our average was 24 papers read per person over the month. Fittingly, as the namesake of the challenge, Sandra was the first in the lab to finish the reading challenge (we could read up to 3 papers a day). Above, she poses with the winner’s trophy next to our poster that tracks each person’s progress with stickers! The trophy is made from an ancient lab relic and filled with paper flowers. All in all, we all had a great experience participating in the challenge–it got us to read papers we would normally put off reading, we learned about cool science, and we got stickers for each day we read, which is to say, the best motivator of all.