Some science and some journalism

It's been a busy week, both in the lab and out.

I mentioned briefly that I picked up an assignment from the student newspaper this week. Since there's no journalism program at the University of Alberta, the paper is written largely by volunteers like me, and no experience is required. This is lucky for me, a unique opportunity to start learning the journo ways despite my age (I imagine in a university with a journalism program you'd need to 'prove' yourself first). So they gave me an assignment, loaned me a voice recorder and sent me on my way.

The piece was to be about the research finding of a PhD student at the U of A, and there were a couple of articles already printed about it I found online. This was both a pro and a con for me: on the one hand I picked a different angle on the research findings, but it led to a fatal novice interviewer mistake! While I was interviewing the researcher I felt it was going well, she thanked me for asking good questions so I felt my angle was a good one. I listened intently and learned a lot. But later, when I came to write up the article I realised my flaw: I had been too busy getting into the details of my 'angle' that I forgot to ask the basics - the simple facts and figures. This meant that such pertinent details, like the number of research participants, I had to take from the article I read before. And really that was the only one I took, since I can see how you could get into a lot of trouble for reporting details you didn't get from the horse's mouth. Sure, a lot of that happens, which is why a lot of news gets so distorted, but I don't want to get into that!

Still, I wrote the article up until I thought it contained a lot of interesting titbits, and sent it off to the editors for the deadline. Then I sent it to my foreign boyfriend to test if it made sense. He admitted it was a bit hard to read, too 'sciencey'. Ahh, I'm too used to writing scientific documents! Well, now I have to wait and see what the editors say, but I have a sinking feeling it will be something along the lines of 'simplify!' Still, it's an extremely valuable learning experience, both in journalistic practices and what I learned about the subject from the researcher herself. That would be a wonderful thing about being a science journalist, all the frontiers of science I could learn about!

***

While I was in Alaska, I did get a chance to pick up some samples for my own research: one volcanic ash in several locations along with samples for carbon dating around the ash (my focus is on younger materials than Britta, hence I can use carbon dating to great effect). The first step in dating this ash is to make sure I actually picked up the same one in all the locations, so I had to test the chemistry of my samples, which should be similar within acceptable limits.

This involves a surprisingly lengthy process of sieving, dissolving organics, separating the mineral grains using some particularly toxic chemicals and finally mounting what's left in epoxy. All this means I have try to get as much ash as possible in my final sample that I analyse on the electron microprobe (a nice fancy machine that finds the chemistry for me). Sometimes this works better than others, for example this sample doesn't have a very high ash-to-junk ratio:

However, this was from a marine sample someone else sent to me, and you can actually see in it some life I didn't manage to eradicate! Hopefully you can see a couple of honeycomb structures in the above image (the largest is just above-right of the biggest grey grain), and these are tiny forms of marine life (it's a shame the scale wasn't preserved with the image; the structures are around 100 µm in diameter).

The electron microprobe is fitted with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which allows such images to be taken. What I do is sit and look through my samples with this to find good pieces of volcanic ash, that are coherent enough for chemistry to be obtained from. I 'pick' around 25 points per sample - recording the position so that the machine can analyse it later. The reason we do it this way is it takes several minutes for the machine to analyse each point, so if we pick them all out during the day we can leave it to run all the analyses overnight. Sometimes, the ash is more cooperative than others:

In this image all the frothy, ragged shapes you see are volcanic ash shards (around 20-50 µm in diameter). These are pretty difficult to analyse since you can't find a good spot to point the beam at!

Needless to say, this is another one of those gloriously scientific long and boring processes. Still, sometimes the shards can be pretty shapes, you can almost make objects out of them, like cloudspotting. This one, for example, I think looks like a smiling gun:

No? It's been a long week.

SkeptiCamp

Stumbling through the corridors of the university a week ago, I noticed a poster advertising 'SkeptiCamp'; a day-conference run by the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society and with an open format, where the talks were brought by the participants and organised in the morning.

Since picking up Skeptic magazine just a short while ago a new world has come to light. Skepticism seems to be more than a concept, it's a whole movement, one which I was to learn at the conference is much more active than I imagined.

The first talk I went to was about the dangers or otherwise of radiation from cell phones, power lines, etc. I was interested considering an article in Skeptic rather forcefully denied that cell phones could possibly cause any damage given the relatively minute radiation they produce. The speaker made less strong claims, but instead suggested we should be 'cautious, but not fearful'. Hm. Next up was 'amateur astronomers and UFOs'; a slightly odd prof from the uni telling us a tale of the time he and a student spotted UFOs (in the strictest sense, where UFO is Unidentified Flying Object) in the night sky on the observatory roof. He described seeing four white discs flying in a diamond formation crossing the sky in a little under 3 seconds. Bewildered, he and the student debated for a while, and watched in case they reappeared. Indeed they did, and as they flew overhead, they uttered the same word; "Pigeons!" The tale was to illustrate how easily our senses can be fooled, how our brains fill in the blanks, to the extent of blocking out most of a pigeon! It also illustrated the unwillingness of some to be told how foolish their brain is: the prof ended the tale by recounting another time a pigeon flew over while he was stood with a teenage boy. After explaining to the open-mouthed youth that his flying saucer was nothing more than the belly of a common pigeon, the boy took a step back, pointed a skinny finger at the prof and exclaimed "You're part of the conspiracy!!"

The next two talks were by the same chap, an Earth Science prof I hadn't come across in the department, who taught a couple of undergrad classes. He explained to us that he takes some time in his classes to explain the scientific method, the principle of falsifiability and why 'theory' does NOT mean some half-thought out vague idea. He makes the point that it's very easy to disprove something, as all it takes is one experiment, but to prove anything a great number of experiments must all point to the same conclusion. In the first talk he applied this simply to the creation vs evolution topic, using simple maths to prove that the dimensions of Noah's Ark (actually given in the Bible) could not, by any stretch of the imagination, carry all the animals and food required. Nor could the amount of rain needed to drown Mt Ararat fall in 40 days and nights without destroying the Ark itself (never mind where all that water came from). The point of this was to prove a literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible. Fine, but the point was raised by the audience that those hard-core creationists simply don't listen to reason (apparently a couple of them do take Earth Science classes). Our prof willingly agreed, but said that he hoped at least to reach those still on the fence, those that didn't have enough information previously to decide. A noble cause.

His second talk was about 'crystal powers'. This is one of those topics I know must be bunk, but that's never good enough for a scientist (how many Creationists say they know the Bible is true?), so I thought I'd get some good evidence from a Master. Unfortunately, he concentrated more on ridiculing the various claims and not on proving why crystals don't have 'healing energies'. Although he did give an amusing account of asking various exhibitors at a psychics fair what the crystal quartz does for you. The answers, needless to say, ranged wildly (some more wildly than others, including the assertion that quartz crystals were physical thought forms in Atlantis).

So far the conference had been entertaining, but not so thought-provoking. Maybe I'd picked the wrong talks, maybe I'd picked ones I already knew something about. So next I went for 'Why your perceptions are wrong', a fascinating round-up of the multitude of ways your brain fills in the blanks, such as with the pigeon 'UFO'. Passive thinking runs most of our lives, as we adhere to 'schemas', certain typesets we place every new 'thing' we encounter into, whether that thing be an object (it has four legs and a flat wide top, it must be a table), or a person (they have crazy white hair and a jacket with elbow patches, they must be a prof). Countless experiments reveal how our simple categorized perceptions, even those of ourselves, affect the way we behave and see the world.

The very last talk of the day was about 'Skeptical Activism'. Two speakers advocated the movement of skeptics 'out of the blogs and onto the streets', that the role of skeptics is not just to recognize the ills of pseudoscience and communicate them, but to actively campaign against their use. Examples given of successful campaigns (in one way or another) were the battle between Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association over libel, Boobquake and action over Power Balance (which I'd never heard of, but is apparently the 'power of holograms').

All of this was fascinating, and I was starting to feel quite comfortable in the Skeptic world, but I had one question in my mind. Would being a paid-up member of a Skeptic society, and taking part in the campaigning as the speakers suggested, make me an incredibly bias reporter? Does it create my 'schema', giving people a view of me that's hard to shift, automatically turning people off from what I write? The speakers admit you will always upset someone if you decide to take action, but perhaps it's a bit too risky for someone who's supposed to be 'impartial'. Still, it didn't do Simon Singh much harm, but he is rather more established than me! For now I'll remain interested in the Skeptical World, at a distance.

___

N.B. Apologies to those Englishmen who think that skeptic should be sceptic. Me too, but I am in North America now!

Last note: I picked up my first assignment for the student newspaper this week, will soon be a published journalist, BOOYA! All gotta start somewhere :-)

Fantastic Science Facilities I'd like to visit

I was watching an old episode of BBC Horizon the other day about the search for extraterrestrial life and was reminded of the Keck Observatory. This is the closest you can get to space; perched on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii's tallest volcano, is an array of some of the best sky-probing equipment on Earth. As if that isn't awe-inspiring enough, when I looked into visiting the centre, I came across this advice:"The summit of Mauna Kea at nearly 14,000-feet altitude, presents unique challenges to visitors. Visits to the summit require a 30 minute acclimatization stop at the 9,200-foot Onizuka Visitor’s Center, warm clothing for the summit, sunscreen for protection from excessive UV radiation, and water. A four-wheel-drive vehicle is required beyond the 9,200 foot level as the air is too thin to adequately cool a vehicle’s brakes upon descent."

So, for those that work there, even reaching the office is an adventure. Then there's the work itself. In it's own words, the vision of the Observatory is: "A world in which all humankind is inspired and united by the pursuit of knowledge of the infinite variety and richness of the Universe." Sometimes scientists can be real poets. Actually, in their core, most scientists are poets, driven on by the very innocent emotion of wonder, and the desire to question.

As you can tell, the childish wonder also fills me sometimes! (This is probably also due to my reading of The Lost World right now, the old sci-fi is always the best in my view, only they can be so romantic about geology and astrophysics). So, I'm slowly compiling a list of Fantastic Science Facilities I'd like to visit - hopefully if I get to be a half-decent science journalist I can summon up the charm to convince someone to send me to them.

The Keck Observatory is at the forefront of research, making ever newer and bigger discoveries about the universe we live in. But not all big science buildings are for research. One place that has fascinated me for many years is the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. This colossal undertaking was pioneered by the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and built by the Norwegian Government, and consists of a giant vault in an old abandoned mine in the remote Arctic capable of holding 2.25 billion seeds. It's mission is simple; "Preserving seed from food plants is an absolutely essential part of the work of preserving the world’s biodiversity, adapting to climate change and global warming and thereby ensuring food for the world’s population for the foreseeable future." Gene banks of the sort exist around the world, but many are vulnerable to natural disaster, war or lack of finance, and all are smaller than this latest project. The Global Seed Vault aims to be the most permanent resource for crop seeds in the world, it's location and building design picked so carefully as to be cold without electricity (thanks to the permafrost) and even to avoid any possible sea level rise due to climate change.

Finally (for now) there's one Fantastic Science Facility I've already visited. Our school ran a trip to CERN in Switzerland when I was 17, and we toured the place, led by a classically eccentric Germanic professor. The problem was that it was a combined Geo/Physics trip that included the day before a wonderful time in the Chamonix Valley; and I was in it for the 'geo'. I had no idea what CERN was, and after all the travel and excitement, no particular enthusiasm to find out either (although I did learn one thing, that protons, neutrons and electrons are made up of even smaller bits, but I'm sure I'd have known that already if I actually took A-level physics). Now the whole world knows what CERN is about, and I'm left cursing my 17-year-old self for not paying attention (even though everyone, including the teachers, fell asleep when they turned down the lights and showed us a physics film).

Ah well, it's on this list, it will be visited!

Entrenched in Alaska Part 3: Escape to Dawson City

So long, Fairbanks!

After 2.5 weeks of toil and soil, it's off to Dawson City, in The Yukon, where the rest of the research team are. Actually, I have no business being there. In fact, originally the only reason I was going there was to help Britta with the drive from Fairbanks via the 'Top of the World Highway' (which is apparently as grand as it sounds). However, upon hiring a car in Fairbanks, we were informed of a bizarre Canada customs law where Canadian residents are not allowed to hire a car in the States and drive it into Canada. It seems like quite an important law it would have been useful to know beforehand... but since I already had flights booked from Dawson to Edmonton, and the way the flight schedules are, it now meant I got to spend a couple of days in Dawson.

Dawson City is an instant charmer; a gold-rush town that had rich enough country to never go bust, and much of that era is preserved in the original buildings and board-walks, the winding Yukon River, and plenty of dancin' and gamblin'! We were met at the airport by one of the 'Bonediggers' team; a group that works in association with our lab in the Yukon Beringia by collecting bones that melt out of the ice.

Mining is often seen as 'evil', but for our lab placer gold mining in Beringia is the best way to get research done. Nothing exposes new sediments quicker. And while the mining process melts thousands of years old ice, we can collect and catalogue what comes out, advancing our understanding of the past.

Immediately, I noticed how good it felt to be around people. There were 5 people in the ground floor of a guesthouse, 2 from back in Edmonton, and 3 Bonediggers. We had dinner together, and went to a local pub to see 'Dawson Idol' and shoot some pool, all things I felt like I hadn't done in forever. Funny how quickly you can be completely consumed by a new kind of life; I had gotten so used to sleeping in the tent and having Britta fiddling with the camp stove be my alarm clock; to tramping up the silt cliffs and eating lunch out of the car; and to showering all the dirt off in the evening, remembering to actually clean behind my ears and between my toes carefully.

Anyway, the next morning the Bonediggers were kind enough to let me help them catalogue one of around 15 of their bags of bones already collected. My role was modest - painting clear nail varnish over the labels on the bones to keep them in place - but it was fun for me to learn about them and how to identify certain body parts and what animal they came from. Most of them are bison, mammoth, or an extinct horse, with some special finds of fox and one scimitar cat leg bone! There was even a large, intact mammoth tusk which I unfortunately forgot to photograph, but it was beautiful, and said to be worth up to $50,000 on the black market. But all bones in The Yukon thankfully belong to the government. They were also making a time-lapse video of the process which I sneaked into (view it here, I'm the dark-haired girl that comes in about half way through). Mathias and Jana were more than happy to tell me everything, and especially interesting was what they were going to do with the bones after cataloguing. Mathias' project is to crush a part of every well-preserved bone and extract the DNA. The idea is to track the change in DNA over time, so we can say more than simply 'mammoths lived here for 50,000 years', but rather say something about how that mammoth population changed. And how do they date the bones so that they can make these DNA timelines? Why, with tephra of course! And that's why our groups are working so closely together. (You can even see a video of Britta explaining all this here. I highly recommend checking out this Bonedigger's videos every so often for updates of the project).

Another fun evening followed in Dawson at Diamond Tooth Gerties, the most famous gambling and dancing hall, and left me with a small fantasy of running away for a summer and being a 'Gold Rush Girl'. Still, I think a summer of research would be just as good, and I have a wish one day to return as a journalist and meet all those people and the great projects again.

The next day I crossed the Yukon River for a walk, and found a sternwheeler graveyard and plenty of peace and sunshine. Then, it was time to leave the North, back to the lab, and to start analysing some samples! No wonder Britta lives for the summer fieldwork...

What are scientific conferences for?

Scientific conferences, as far as I can tell, are for two main reasons. The first is what all the organisation goes into; the presentation of research done. Plenaries, talks, poster sessions, all sorted into sections, all worked at for weeks in advance by the presenters. But, despite all this work, the most important reason for a scientific conference is just bringing scientists together, allowing ideas to flow, debates to form, and ultimately for new research directions to be found. Technology may be fabulous in allowing us to communicate, but it doesn't compare with the energy that a hive of (usually well-lubricated) minds can produce.

I went to my first conference fresh-faced at 22, having just finished my undergrad MSci, with a poster under my arm. It was a reasonably large conference of volcanologists worldwide and held in my favourite country and second home of Iceland. I was nervous but excited, as I was heading there essentially on my own. But I was soon welcomed by one and all, and thrilled at the chance to attend talks by people who's papers I'd read, and not just that, but talk to them too. The conference had a great atmosphere, friendly and open, but I quickly leanred that not all conferences are like that. Many participants had just come from a smaller kimberlite conference (special volcanic pipes that bear diamonds), and told be the air was a little more frosty there. The exact mechanism of diamond formation is quite contentious, and the business is lucrative enough that the various sides are bitterly fought over. I felt glad that the kind of science I was there for was for the joy of knowledge. Although, to get funded for any science these days there needs to be a 'so what', that usually you have to relate to people's everyday lives. But I think that's a subject for another post...

It was at my most recent conference, however, that gave me the final push to go for journalism. I sat with chin in hands, staring up admiringly at all the speakers, marvelling at all the work they'd done and what it could mean. But that's where it ended. The second part of the conference, the part that I identified as the most important reason to hold one, was the part that I didn't want to participate in. I didn't want to plan new research with my peers, I only wanted to tell the world what amazing things they'd done. Part of realising what you want to do is also realising what you don't want to do. I'm trying not to feel guilty about this, since I know that really I'm not escaping academia, I'm embracing media, which I truly feel is the right choice for me.

Entrenched in Alaska Part 2: Sampling

So, the trenches are dug, what's next? Time to get down to sampling.

The tephras Britta finds are all beyond the range of radiocarbon dating (up to ~60,000 years ago), and too young for the next isotopic dating range. That's why there's so much work to be done in this time period - different methods of dating have to be found. A popular one is fission-track dating, but for most volcanic ash this old the individual shards are too degraded for it to work too well. So Britta's been trying out something different - paleomagnestism. Many materials, on being laid down or cooled in the case of volcanic rocks, retain a memory of the direction of North. North is not a constant, the poles wander, sometimes all the way to the tropics, and sometimes they switch altogether. Humans have never lived through a switch, and we don't really know what happens to the inhabitants of planet Earth, but so far there's no evidence of mass extinctions associated with them.

Anyway, some materials fare better with fission-track dating than do volcanic ash shards, like lava. Lava can be dated well, and preserves paleomagnetism, so that the wanderings of the poles can be tracked over time when lava is out-poured continuously (e.g. as on Hawaii). If we can match those precise wanderings in our loess bluffs, we can date every tephra within them, simple!

Except of course it's not that simple. Loess is a tricky substance, meaning that in order to pick up these polar movements we have to take a sample every 5 cm. A sample that has to be the right way up. A sample that has to have it's declination from North recorded. A sample that is essentially compacted dust, and where all the particles have to stay in the same relative position until analysed back in the lab. So over the next week we took over 15 metres of these samples, until Britta got tendinitis from hammering and I couldn't distinguish between counting in 5 cm intervals and simple numbering of samples.

And that's not even the worst of it. That 15 m, with some overlaps, totalled over 400 samples. The machine in our university processes 8 samples a day. Per day! At that rate, those samples will never get processed (unless of course Britta really does intend on working on this for the rest of her life).

What's the solution? Well, did you know that as a scientist you have to be a charmer? A manipulator? Whether it's writing a grant proposal or requesting information from a surly scientist, you have to know how to get want you want. Britta is an excellent mentor when learning this fine art; charismatic and skilled in seeking out the right people to provide her with what she needs. For this particular problem, Britta has already scoped out two potential victims whose better-prepared labs she can commandeer to analyse these samples in a fraction of the time. I sure hope one of them works out, or else all those hours are wasted!

After one long day we stopped off, dusty and dirty, in a local pub that wouldn't mind the state of us; Skinny Dicks. Exactly as rude as it sounds, Skinny Dicks was a fun pub, and after the landlady had showed us a few of her more special treasures (including a couple of walking sticks you wouldn't want to lean on) she asked us what we do. Britta confidently said 'I'm a geologist'. I never really considered myself to be a geologist, but I suppose I am. In fact, I started my undergrad degree in geology, then changed to 'environmental geoscience', and had a year abroad in which I studied 'Earth science', and finally here I am in Alberta doing a Masters in 'Earth and atmospheric science'. And whenever anyone asks me, I somehow always feel the need to explain all that, when really, what they would understand the most is 'geologist'. And hey, I study volcanic ash, and what's more geological than volcanoes?

Later that evening, I got chatting to a couple of women in the laundry room at the campsite. They asked me if we were holidaying there. 'No,' I said self-assuredly, 'we're geologists, doing some research up here.'

Sure, I may be changing discipline, but I may as well enjoy it while I can!

Hayley discovers Skeptic magazine

Journalism isn't a totally new idea for me. It was suggested to me by career advisors in high school, since I'm naturally curious and love writing. But I was put off by a single notion: that if I wrote for a newspaper or magazine, I would be writing for an agenda. I thought I would rather be an author, where I could write what I liked, but came to the reasonable conclusion it would be difficult to make a career out of that right away, so I'd better do something sensible in the mean time. A short lesson later on in school reinforced the idea of biased media, where we were given several national newspapers to look over and decide where their allegiance lay. I looked at every newspaper from then on as trying to sway me, and generally stayed away from them.

This unfortunately means I've so far had a poor exposure to the types and styles of printed science media (while I'd certainly love to have my own volcano science show, for now I'm limiting my dreams to my comfort zone of writing). Walking around a bookstore today however, a magazine caught my eye, with it's cover story 'Climate Skeptics', a pet subject of mine. I picked it up and searched for the article inside. I read the first few sentences: there's talk about defining the difference between climate skeptics and deniers, a very important division I hadn't known was necessary before I befriended a true climate skeptic. Alright, I was interested, what else did the magazine have to offer? I scanned a few other headlines: 'The stigma of being atheist' 'Do cell phones cause cancer?' 'Daniel Loxton's top 10 busted myths'.

OK, so now I was checking the price and my small change collection, but before I took the final plunge, what was I buying into here? I checked the inside of the front cover, which showed a slightly cheesy advert for a conference in Las Vegas. I raised an eyebrow. Then I read the keynote speaker: Richard Dawkins! More speakers: Simon Singh, Penn & Teller, that guy from Mythbusters... and the magazine is SOLD!

I read the first two articles - on how 'boosting your immune system' is an empty phrase and a piece about a therapeutic pseudoscience - over a bad Chinese dinner, and barely noticed the earthquake in my intestines. But while this magazine appeals to me for it's no-nonsense approach to bad science information, I know there is a lot of it out there, and I'm going to have to read the bad to know what's good.

It seems there's a whole world of science media out there, and the research is just beginning!

Entrenched in Alaska Part 1: Digging the trenches

Since my Masters thesis has very little field research of its own, I've spent most of the past 2.5 weeks being 'Britta's Bitch'; a field assistant to our lab's biggest personality.

In the lab Britta is an irritating figure, impossibly self-righteous and demanding of attention. But in the field she's a brighter, freer being, reveling in the confession that this is what she's in the business for. While my body is sluggish, stumbling across the dirt bluffs, Britta skips and slides up the hills, digging trenches and discovering tephra as she goes.

Tephra is what we're here for. Tephra, for our purposes is volcanic ash, and we're searching for it in the loess (wind-blown sediment) bluffs of 'Beringia'; the area of North America and Russia that wasn't covered by ice during the last Ice Age. The area was too dry for ice to form, but grasslands thrived, supporting a population of megafauna such as the wooly mammoth, steppe bison and sabre-tooth tiger, to name a few. What's volcanic ash got to do with all this? Well, fortunately, ashes tend to have unique chemistries, so that you can match up a tephra found in one location with another found elsewhere. If you can find a way to put a date on that tephra in one place, then you also know how old it is in every other location, in turn helping to date any sediment the tephra lies within. This is an invaluable resource when trying to piece together the environmental history of an area: any proxies of climate are useless if you cannot put them in context.

'Beringia' was a phrase I'd never even heard of before I came to Canada. That's the thing about science, there are so many areas, so many disciplines, techniques, specialities, and they're always expanding. Britta exemplifies a scientist by having the patience and constant interest to keep up with all these advancements and to be excited by them, trying out anything that might help her reach her goal.

In fact, her only flaw seems to be keeping that goal in mind! Most postgraduate projects change and evolve, but Britta seems to be in danger of not answering any of her original questions, or else working on the same problem for her entire academic life (she's already been working on the issue for 7 years, through a Masters and now a PhD). However, she seems happy with this, and that's when I realised another fundamental reason I want to be in journalism and not research: Britta's in it for the race, and I'm in it for the finish line. I revel in conclusions and a job completed. Deadlines suit me. Still, I know that the science itself is never finished when I close a piece, and that half the joy would be revisiting subjects in the future to see what marvellous advances have been made in the mean time.

Those changes may seem marvellous from that perspective, but science is really a long and arduous process, and for now digging trenches is my task. But at least they get dug, and mighty proud I am of them too!

Trench sculpted by Britta, dirt-shovelled by me

Escaping Academia

I decided to start a blog about my big career change.

I was a PhD student in Earth Science, but one year in I've decided to downgrade to a Masters and pursue a career in science journalism instead. I wanted to write a blog about my transition from academia to media.

Why? Well, to put it simply, I'm still very interested in all that science has to offer the world, but I don't want to do the research myself.

Now, it's difficult, when putting it that way, not to come across like I think science is too hard and I think journalism is the easy way out. While that's certainly not the case, I decided to call this blog 'Escaping Academia' as a tongue-in-cheek summary of my transition.

So, to go a little further in depth, why I want to be a science journalist specifically stems from a hate and a love. The 'hate' is for the way science is sometimes horribly misrepresented in the media, especially in the way science is conducted. In a world where an email between colleagues that mentions a 'trick' is taken to be an admittance of misconduct and akin to espionage in the minds of some, there is requirement for the general public to be better educated in how science works. Scientists are no longer revered as the intellectual elite, and while I believe they shouldn't be put on a pedestal, and that everybody should be inquisitive enough to question everything, my dream is perhaps if people understood the intricacies of research life better they could make more informed decisions on the outcomes.

The 'love' is the fact that I am that rare breed that loves writing essays. Nothing gives me more joy than having a bunch of complex, disseminated information and distilling it into something not only readable and informative, but enjoyable to my audience.

So that's my motivation. I hope this blog will provide some insights into the minds and practices of the scientists around me while I'm still in the academic field, before 'escaping' to the media world. I hope I never forget my roots.