About Me

You're probably (not) wondering how I got here

Growing up I always loved to read and write, but as I got older those interests found themselves on a back burner as I began focusing academically on more STEM subjects. This probably had something to do with the fact that my high school only offered advanced courses in those fields and I’ve always been a bit of an overachiever. So when I got to college, naturally, I continued taking those classes, chemistry, biology, physics, math, etc. and I decided to major in Biochemistry after taking organic chemistry and actually enjoying it (maybe I just like suffering). While I loved, and love, learning about these topics, the idea of working in a lab day in and day out and trying to figure out the answer to a single problem for an entire career wasn’t something that I was excited about (I also wasn’t interested in medical school). It wasn’t until taking Fundamentals of Biochemistry my second year of college that I started to learn there could be more to getting a STEM degree than just working in a lab or going to medical school.

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The only real assignment we were given that semester was to watch a research presentation being given somewhere on campus and then write an article outlining the research in a way that would be easily accessible to those who had little to no fundamental knowledge of the concepts at hand. Presumably, this was to both evaluate our understanding of fundamental concepts and to give us some insight into the challenges faced by people translating scientific research for the general public. It was with this assignment that I realized there was more to the STEM field than lab research and where I realized my interest in writing could play a role in my future career/academic path. This is also the assignment I decided to use as my origin piece for my Introduction to the Minor in Writing. 

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It’s from this origin piece that I started asking the question: how do scientific journalists communicate with the public? When considering an evolved piece, I wanted to do more than just another article summarizing the research, but it did lead me to question the techniques and difficulty of scientific journalism. It isn’t easy to translate such complex ideas into something (almost) everyone can understand. Evaluating this question is at the core of my experimental proposals and a large part of the analysis I did for them.

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There is a lot of distrust towards the media, with scientific journalism being no exception to this. I want people to walk away from my piece with a more critical eye and to be able to ask themselves important questions as they read pieces of scientific journalism: what information are they leaving out? What gets lost in translation? Can we as readers fill these gaps? How can we do this? This goes for scientists in the field just as much as people on the outside looking in. 

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My first experimental proposal left something to be desired, at least from my perspective: an editorial covering the rhetorical analysis of scientific writing/journalism. It isn’t bad, but it lacks accessibility and caters to a very small readership. The fact that I didn’t fully realize that at the time also indicates how my perspective changed over the term. I enjoyed the model pieces I read and researching this genre helped me gain a better understanding of scientific writing, and I think it primed me for analyzing the following proposals.

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For my next two experimental proposals, I wanted to explore genres that were more than just written. I’m someone who consumes a lot of media daily, I listen to podcasts, music, youtube videos, read articles, scroll through social media, but I had never really stopped to consider what these forms of media were doing and how they did them. I also hadn’t thought of them as valid forms of work when considering my first proposal but the more we talked about media and the intention behind the creation of a piece, the more I became curious about them. After all, I had only ever written academic papers. What set these pieces apart from most written pieces was the need to develop a personality and sort of character to reach an audience. While a written piece does that through its style and syntax, I’ve always found that to be much easier than in person or on video/audio. These experiments helped me to realize the importance of understanding the audience of a piece and developing a style for them.

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When it came time to decided my final piece, I was drawn to my initial experiment, but the initial proposal fell short. I needed to make something that was more accessible and that wasn’t so limited or niche. The other two experiments, while they were interesting to research and analyze, I wasn’t excited to complete them. After some brainstorming, not without help, I settled on a movie critic. This altered experiment would allow me to stay at the core of my initial experiment, an analysis of scientific writing and how it communicates with its audience, but in a form that is much more common. I landed on the documentary Chasing Coral on Netflix. It reminded me of the nature documentaries I used to watch as a kid but I could tell that there was more to it than pretty pictures of marine wildlife. 

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Starting this piece I much clearer understanding of the effect I needed to have on the reader and how to manipulate the medium. I needed to have a clear intention and purpose for writing this piece because otherwise, what’s the point?