All of the REU students just finished presenting their final work at a poster session at OIMB. It was interesting for me to see the projects everyone has been working on, especially now that I have a better understanding of what the process of a science project is like. During the session I was able to have some interesting conversations about science communication with people who are more on the science side of things.The line on my poster that attracted the most attention was: “Scientists are just people who practice science.” It seems like such a simple take away, but with all of the misconceptions and stereotypes plaguing science and scientists, it can be a difficult lesson to learn. It was mentioned to me that I may have had so much success engaging with the marine biologists on the cruise because of the embedded expectation of outreach in that field. Other fields of science may place a greater value on using high-level language and not reaching out to the general public for various reasons. If I had attempted to engage with rocket scientists, maybe I wouldn’t have had such a positive experience. While communication practices in each field and individual people may vary, the same goes for every other field that journalists engage with. From my perspective, some people want to talk and some don’t and that’s just the way it is.
All that being said, I don’t think that the lack of journalists involved in science communication is caused by a lack of scientists wanting to talk about their life’s work, but rather the label of “science communication.” It’s likely that many journalists get scared off by the word “science” and automatically assume that science communication requires a special skill set. A science communicator is just a more specific title for a journalist. Whether you’re covering a public event or writing about the research done in a lab, you’re going to be asking the same types of questions: why is this happening? What is the goal? Why should people care about this goal? Those basic questions can be applied to any story, including ones about, you guessed it, science. As the world around us changes, it becomes harder to avoid science. While some people still put in the effort to act like proven studies are full of false information or that the world’s problems don’t affect them, I believe that science has to become a more integrated part of our society for our own good. So, whether I call it science communication or journalism, I’m grateful that I was able to have this experience and recognize the importance, and fun, of telling these kinds of stories.
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I finished my first draft of my final story and I kind of hated it. There was no core element holding it together, so it read like timeline of what happened during the cruise. If I was general reader, I wouldn’t get past the first paragraph.
Fortunately, Kelly and I were able to talk it through and figure out what was missing. As I was writing the first draft, the focus of the story shifted and I realized that my original plan of writing two separate stories was complicating the process rather than simplifying it. Instead of struggling against the rules I had set for myself, we decided that it makes much more sense to change them. It’s quite easy to get tunnel vision with your own work and become too attached to the plan you made. When you’ve been staring at a word document for days, trying to make a story fit into the outline you’ve prepared, you need that secondary person to bring in a different perspective. The new plan is to write a single story from my perspective about the cruise, focusing on what makes these people excited to spend 10 days sleep deprived and seasick on a research vessel. In other news, I made my first poster! Next Wednesday is the REU poster session at OIMB where all of the REU interns will present what they’ve been working on this summer. When I was planning my poster, I had a hard time fitting it into the scientific format. Again, it took an outside perspective (Kelly) to help me escape my tunnel vision and realize that I should create a poster that fits my project, not fit my project to the poster. After designing the content and flow of my presentation, I realized that my journalism poster had many parallels to the scientific poster, just with different headings. The poster is basically showing the outcome of an experiment on myself (joining a research cruise for the first time), highlighting the methods and process (what I did throughout the cruise) and sharing the results (how my perspective of scientists and the scientific process changed). The lesson this week is that getting too preoccupied with the rules can stifle the creative content that people will enjoy. As I start the next draft of the new story, I plan on doing whatever feels right and adding in the rules later. It never occurred to me that the most difficult part of this internship would be actually writing the story. Creating a story is the only part of this experience that I have a lot of practice in, everything else—going on a ship, learning about jellyfish, documenting a process through photos—is completely new. I had assumed that once I went on the cruise and collected all of my information that the story would flow right out. Realistically, there is so much content that it’s incredibly difficult to strip it down into what’s important and engaging for a general audience. In most of my previous work, I’ve dealt with a much smaller topic or had constraints on an assignment that made the process much simpler. The amount of options I had for this story was overwhelming because there were so many different avenues to explore. I don’t think this is a science communication specific challenge, but a challenge created by my experience level. It takes a significant amount of skill to take a large topic and break it down into the most salient, interesting parts. Going into this internship, I had no concept of what to expect, so I didn’t have a plan on how to break down the topic. It was only after I experienced the cruise and collected a massive amount of information that I started breaking it down, but at that point it’s very easy to lose your perspective of what’s important to an average reader because you’re so entrenched in it that everything feels important.
I just finished the first draft of the primary story and there are significant edits to be made. Though it’s unbelievably rough and needs some work, having the draft complete means that the most difficult part is over. Once the structure of the story is laid out, the crafting can begin. |
AuthorI am a third year journalism student at the University of Oregon with a focus in traditional written journalism and interview techniques. Science communication is an underrepresented field of journalism that I’m excited to explore and produce content for through this internship. Archives
August 2018
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