A New Hope

I went to a Women in Science Retreat this past weekend. We all gathered in a camp: the kind of camp you would spend a week in as a little kid, complete with bunks and fire pits and a dining hall and a little lake with a diving board. It was like a conference, in that there were panels and workshops and a poster session; but instead of wearing heels and button-downs, we were wearing hiking boots and outdoor clothing. Instead of going back to hotel rooms at the end of the day, we gathered in our cabins and slept together in big bunkrooms like we had in the sleepaway camps of our childhood. We sat cross-legged on each other's bunks and talked about weddings and jobs and car payments, bad PI's and good PI's and our latest family gossip.

It was hella fun.

My main takeaway from it was actually a long conversation I had with one of the panelists. Her name is Jessica Marshall, and she works as an editor for Chemical and Engineering News (a publication of the American Chemical Society). Before that, she was a freelance science writer for 10 years. And what was most significant to me was that she also had a PhD in chemical engineering.

I hadn't admitted it to anyone, or even really myself, but I had kind of written off science writing as a professional career. My experience with it as an undergraduate, both in classes and at my MechSE job, implicitly informed me that it was a field of journalists who liked science rather than a field of scientists who liked writing. I was a scientist first. I knew that. It's why I'm in grad school. I'm going to get a PhD, hell or high water. With that in mind, joining a group of journalists who liked science and making it my career seemed like a bit of a waste of my PhD. So I resigned myself to the age old question of "industry or academia" (each of which has always had an equivalently lukewarm appeal to me), and figured I'd wait to decide on a career until the absolute last second.

That changed this weekend. I approached Jessica at the evening social.
(I ask you to picture this--the basement of the camp dining hall, the door to the outside open and letting the smell of rain permeate the room, grad students in sweatshirts and raincoats with a few professionals scattered in between, everyone holding plastic cups of wine or beer, introducing entropy to the well-ordered chairs from the panel audience by forming them into randomized social groups. The booze was in plastic ice tubs, the red wine in large bottles scattered on the table between empty bags of chips and crackers. A large cardboard box sat off to the side with "Recycling!!" written on it in thick looping sharpie, its bottom filling rapidly with bottles and cups.) 
She was incredibly nice. She seemed to like my enthusiasm, and was eager to talk about her experiences. You're wrong, she said, about a science PhD being wasted on science writing. There were plenty of jobs, such as with Nature or scientific publications, where PhD science writers were wanted, were needed. Most of the people she worked with at C&EN--and almost ALL of her superiors--were PhD scientists. It was absolutely a valid career path for me.

Before I fell in love with physics, I wanted to go into writing. I wanted to be a journalist, an editor--but physics won out. When I found out that science writing was an actual field, I thought I had finally answered the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" That, I thought. I want to be that. Then it seemed like science writing would be a sacrifice of my science, that the PhD I wanted so badly wouldn't really be used to its potential. Physics won out again. What a roller coaster.

Now I'm back on the path to being a science writer, and it's actually terrifying. Science writing is the one career that really excites me when I think about it, that really inspires passion and a desire to pursue it. But it also seems like a much harder path. I'm looking up master's programs, national societies to join, places to submit publications...and it seems like it's just all so above my head. I've been surrounded by the "industry or academia" binary for so long, those two seem like the safest possible choices. Wading into the world of PhD-level science writing appears positively daredevil in comparison.

But I'm inspired, and determined. I'm willing to fight for it. And that scares me too, a little, but in a good way.