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I did a few things as I was finishing up my thesis. I just started writing science articles
for the student newspaper just to get a little bit of experience and some clips and then
I ended up going to a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz in science writing from there
I (it was a one year program) went to London and did an internship at New Scientist Magazine
and then from there I was fortunate and landed a job at Science.
...every day is a little different but the kinds of things that I do typically include
going to conferences. I go to maybe a dozen conferences a year; the biggest one by far
is the Society for Neuroscience meeting. I go to a lot of smaller meetings that are focused
more narrowly on a subtopic in neuroscience. I spend some time going out to visit scientists
at their labs, spend a day with someone to learn more about their research and meet the
people who are actually doing it. I spend a lot of time on the phone talking to people
on the phone just because it's not practical to visit everybody. I spend a lot of time
reading, reading papers trying to stay fairly current and of course, writing.
...what I find most gratifying about being a science journalist is just the opportunity
to stay engaged and keep learning about cutting-edge science. I spend a lot of time talking
to really smart people who are doing fascinating things and asking them a lot of dumb questions
but it's a constant learning experience for me and I feel like it's fulfilling an important
role to be able to translate to a broader audience some of the exciting things that
are happening in science and the importance of research in general.
I've gotten to do some really fascinating things over the years. I think probably the project that stands out for me most is a series I did a few years ago on mental health in
developing countries in a fellowship that enabled me to go to Sri Lanka and visit some
of the people who are doing work with the tsunami survivors and I've actually just returned
from Indonesia. I was there about a month ago in Aceh Province to see some of the follow
up that people are doing to try to build an effective community mental health system in
that area that was really devastated by the tsunami.
I also spent some time this summer talking with people who are studying traumatic brain
injury and PTSD in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and had the privilege of talking
with some of the soldiers themselves who are grappling with, you know, the fall out of
their experience there. Scientists are trying to better understand how just exposure to
blasts and the head injuries that are sustained by our troops are impacting them and what
the long term consequences might be. I think that's a really important issue going forward.
My advice to someone who thinks they might be interested is to just start writing and
it doesn't really matter so much where you start but it's important that you start. And
I think that if you are thinking about journalism as a career you need to have experience working
with an editor because it's easy, well not easy but you know, well a lot of scientist
will start a blog to start writing about their research and that's a great way to hone your
writing skills but in order to get paid and try to make a living as a science writer you
generally have to work with an editor and that's something that you need to learn.