How do people get started in science writing?
This is one of the most common questions that science writers get asked, and there are as many answers as there are science writers. Here we collect dozens of those answers from some of the best in the business, each of whom also offers one pithy nugget of advice for newcomers. This collection is inspired by a now-defunct comment thread on The Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong’s Discover Blogs post from 2010. Freelance journalist Carmen Drahl worked with The Open Notebook to collate writers’ stories with Yong’s support and involvement. We hope this guide offers help and inspiration to anyone making the leap into science writing.
How did you get your start writing about science?
It’s hard to pin down the “start” of my career. I always wanted to be a journalist, and I always wanted to study science. My earliest memories are from when I was a child, watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and thinking about what it would be like to learn about nature and tell stories about it. Through grade school and high school, my imagination filled in other details: seeing my byline in glossy print, writing fascinating science stories, chatting comfortably with editors at my favorite, famous outlets. But from my earliest schooling, I also was avidly obsessed with science itself and engaging in it. Because of some indecisiveness on my part, my career has traveled along parallel tracks that occasionally overlapped before they finally merged completely.
After earning my English degree, I worked in public affairs for a large state agency, which was the only job I could find at the time that was anywhere close to journalism—so maybe not much has changed in those, um, 30 years. I wrote for the agency newspaper, which had a circulation of a mid-sized town, and as part of that, I covered the environmental beat. That wasn’t enough for me, and after about 3 years, I decided to go to graduate school in biological sciences, not because I was dying to be part of academia, but because I wanted to be up to my earlobes in learning and doing science.
During my five years of graduate school, I also worked as a freelance writer, including as a regularly weekly contributor of a "wow, science" roundup for a magazine targeting young adults. My proudest moment was landing my first feature in 1999, a story about black bears, published in Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine. It was incredible to hold that in my hands.
I continued freelancing even as I bumped along in academia, through a postdoc and brief stretches on the tenure track before turning entirely to my writing career. As any journalist can tell you, that career has its bumps, too, but I have no regrets. The other day, I was sitting in my home, on the phone with my editor at a major print magazine, talking about coverage in two areas of deep interest to me before turning to wrap up another story for another major outlet, all journalism, all about science. Sitting there, I thought about young me, perched on the couch and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and dreaming of writing about it all, and wondered how she would feel if she could have known that at least one of her childhood dreams came true.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Network virtually & IRL, join groups, attend workshops, find calls for new writers, check outlet pitch reqs, apply for fellowships, don’t work for free.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was born in Jakarta’s slum area. But I had a privilege of growing up in a family which nurtured my passion in science writing. I have a father who was (and still is) fascinated with the natural world and brothers who loved books and brought them home so that I can read it. When I was in high school, debate and book discussions were something that we did almost regularly in our home. My father sparked my interests in studying natural science and my brothers—who studied Islamic study, anthropology, and philosophy of technology—enriched my knowledge and perspectives about the world.
As I got into college and studied biology, I enjoyed reading the translations of Richard Dawkins’ River Out of Eden as well as Matt Ridley’s Genome. Their writings inspired me to become a science writer. I wrote down my fascination on many topics taught in the class in my daily journal and nobody read. But during an academic consultation in final semester, I told my academic supervisor about this dream. He said it was a great goal because there were rarely science writers in Indonesia.
After college graduation, I forgot about this dream. I applied to dozens of job vacancies and scholarships abroad. None of them were successful. But interestingly, during that “unemployed” period, I kept on writing about science. My first publication was an opinion article about the underrepresentation of women in the parliament analyzed through the lens of neuroscience. That piece was actually written for my GRE practice but I sent it to The Jakarta Post editors. They liked it and wanted me to write more. After I produced several articles on the teaching of evolution and Indonesia’s biodiversity, they asked me: “What is your affiliation?” I did not know the answer because I was unemployed and not enrolled as a student in any university. Then one of my brothers said, “Freelance science journalist. That suits you,” he says.
Since then, I spent my time studying science journalism online and continued writing for The Jakarta Post. One day, someone at the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ) contacted me and asked me to join Science Journalism Cooperation (SjCOOP) Asia. There, I learned science journalism in real life and got connected with science journalists in the region. An important milestone that brought me to where I am now.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Be persistent! Don’t let failures distort your goal! For those who can’t find science writing courses in their country, please be resourceful to learn and practice. The internet is here for you!
How did you get your start writing about science?
I come from a family of doctors.
I remember as a boy hearing stories of complicated surgeries and medical advances. There was something there that attracted me to those stories. I was not so fascinated by medical details but by the desire to tell others those hidden stories, little-known scientific research that was not only carried out in the U.S., Germany, or the United Kingdom but in my country, Argentina.
I didn't want to be a surgeon; I wanted to tell the science behind it, as I did every day to my schoolmates.
I grew up in a world without internet and my only contact with science was through magazines like Muy Interesante (a well-known franchise in the Spanish-speaking world). Every now and then, I would get a copy of the Science Times (of the NYT) or magazines like Time, New Scientist, or Discover.
The problem was that at that time I did not know that science journalism existed. Nor that you could live on that. I just knew that I wanted to tell others those stories.
This is how I became the black sheep of my family. I went to the University of Buenos Aires but I did not study medicine. Rather, I studied journalism. One day I found a seminar with almost no students: a seminar on science journalism.
It was what I was looking for. What I wanted to be. One day the professor told me that an internship was opening in the science section of the newspaper where he worked. It was my entry into the profession. With patience, I learned the secrets of the profession in the newsroom; I met colleagues, people with the same passion for telling science stories.
Years later I ended up being the editor of that section called "Futuro" of the newspaper Página/12. Later I became the science editor of a newspaper called Crítica; I worked in the cultural magazine "Ñ" of the Clarín newspaper and ended up writing about science in Muy Interesante, the same magazine that I read when I was a child. In 2015 I was part of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT. I wrote four science books for children and general audiences ("Bathrooms Weren't Always Like This"; "Everything You Need to Know about Science"; "Dinosaurs of the End of the World" and "Odorama: Cultural History of Smell"). And I'm a member of the board of the World Federation of Science Journalists.
I would have liked to meet science journalists when I was growing up, someone who told me that science doesn't just belong to scientists: Science belongs to all of us. And it must be shared.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Visit laboratories. See, smell, listen, touch science: Learn how science is done behind closed doors. Learn from colleagues. Nobody is an island. Sharing is caring.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Toward the end of my first year in graduate school, I was pretty miserable. It was the summer of 2001, and I was in an ecology PhD program at a very fancy university. I didn’t feel like I had a home in the lab I’d originally been accepted into, and I’d tried out some other labs, but none of them felt right, either. I was complaining to a friend one day at lunchtime (complaining to friends was something I did a lot in this era) and said, “All I really want to do is be a science reporter at NPR.” And she said “Then do that!”
Whoa. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was an actual career path. I signed up for an intro journalism class and discovered that, like science, I was good at it, but, unlike science, I enjoyed it. Less than a year later, I was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow at NPR. From there I went to the UC Santa Cruz science writing program, which led to a summer internship at U.S. News & World Report, which eventually turned into a job.
Every now and then I run into that grad school friend at a conference and thank her again for pointing out the obvious.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Find someone who will let you write for them and give you feedback.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was a bartender, with one novel obscurely published, who deeply loved insects and trout and wanted to write nonfiction.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't try to be a professional writer unless you *have* to be a writer. Thinking it might be a nice way to combine science & humanities is not enough.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Just a few months before I was set to graduate in December 2014 with my bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics, one of my professors shared an announcement that the American Mathematical Society would be sponsoring a 2015 AAAS Mass Media Fellow.
I hadn’t heard of the fellowship program before and I was intrigued. The program sounded like the perfect fit for me, so I applied. I had always dreamt of writing for a living but felt unsure about how to make it work. During my whirlwind college experience, which included transferring schools twice and changing my major midway through, I realized that I had broad interests in math and science. However, I felt increasingly burned out and unsure about whether graduate school would be the right fit for me. Instead of feeling driven to narrow my interests down to a particular research area, I was hungry to continue exploring the wonders that different STEM fields offered.
My fellowship at The Oregonian changed my life. It didn’t take long for me to realize that science writing was the career that I had been searching for. However, when the fellowship ended, I still found it challenging to figure out what next steps to take. I applied for other internships and considered going to graduate school for science journalism. I worked part-time in a library while freelancing for nearly any publication that was willing to give me the opportunity until I had enough work to write full-time. I wrote math and science stories when I could, but also wrote about other subjects as needed.
I owe much of my start to people in my network who mentored me, offered me opportunities to write for them or connected me with other journalists and editors. I also think that my openness has been critical to my success. When I was starting out, I tried to never turn down an opportunity to write for a client unless there was a compelling reason to do so (and sometimes even then, I would still pursue the opportunity). I started trying to find opportunities in rejection. For instance, if I applied for an internship and wasn’t chosen for it, I asked the editor who sent the rejection if I could pitch them instead. If an editor said they weren’t taking on new freelancers at one point, I asked if I could check again in a month or two. I have also always strived to remain open throughout the editing process, in order to learn and grow, as well as to develop strong working relationships with editors.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Identify and capitalize on your strengths. Embrace editors’ feedback. Be open to new subjects and opportunities. Don’t let criticism get you down.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started my career writing witty opinion columns for a local newspaper while I was still a chemistry undergrad. My columns eventually became exclusively about science and I was employed as a general news reporter. After a few other unrelated jobs I was spotted making science jokes on Twitter by my current employer, and after some freelance gigs with them they took me on as a science communicator. I continue to work as a freelance science writer and a columnist for various publications in South Africa and other parts of the world and I am an ardent advocate for the decolonization of science and science writing.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Show your best self on social media. Chances are you'll meet your next big client, employer, or make a great friend!
How did you get your start writing about science?
Since I was 8 years old, I showed a passion for wildlife and nature. I would spend hours reading entire animal encyclopedias, watching documentaries at the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and walking through streams and woods on my family’s property in the countryside. My mom used to bug me about climbing trees to watch birds.
I thought of becoming a veterinarian, but then, I chose law school instead; I had the idea of becoming wildlife’s lawyer.
So, I originally started off as a lawyer, specializing in environmental law, working with conservation organizations to help communities protect their biodiversity. I acquired a master's in climate change and did postgraduate studies in conservation and management of natural areas, and environmental law.
Soon after I started in the conservation sector, I was invited to write for a magazine about ecology in my country. And that was my origin story in science writing.
Even as I would continue working in conservation for 5 years, I was also sharing my free time writing for media outlets. So, the change from being an environmental lawyer to becoming a full-time journalist was a short jump in my career.
Something that helped me connect the dots was a postgraduate study I did in creative writing and literature, which made me take advantage of my former career in conservation in order to sharpen my skills in science writing.
And, in 2016, I launched Red Ambiental de Información (RAI) Bolivia, a nonprofit news platform that focuses on environmental conservation and science throughout Bolivia and Latin America. Our project is committed to giving voice to biodiversity and indigenous populations. The initiative is sponsored by the Blue Foresta Foundation, a Bolivian non-profit organization I also founded that same year.
Besides our project, I have also contributed as a freelance to different outlets, such as National Geographic, Mongabay, Mongabay Latam, and O Eco, among various magazines from Bolivia.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Invest time in acquiring knowledge in the specific field of science you have interest in. This will improve your comprehension and find different angles for stories and topics.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I tried everything I could think of to break in. I studied physics in college, and wrote and edited for the student newspaper. My junior year, I took a winter/spring semester off to intern for Discover magazine in New York. Taking the semester off was impulsive, partially bankrolled by my parents, and the most magical thing.
Right after school, I was extremely unable to get another internship at a news outlet. Summer is a very competitive time to intern especially if you don't have j-school connections. I moved to Idaho for the summer and interned at a nuclear energy lab doing PR work. Often I would go to a Starbucks after work and do freelance fact checking and write pitches and work on a cherished magazine assignment or two. I lived with a family friend for free, built up my savings account, and went camping every weekend. Between that and other savings from a job at school, I had enough runway to live for a few months, even if I didn't make any money, so I started freelancing.
In the fall I stayed on my parents health insurance, and moved into an apartment in Philly. Philly is where I'm from, but it's also a place where you can get an affordable apartment, and still make it into New York for the day for a meeting if you really need to. That's probably not important anymore, but it turned out to be then, because I started fact checking part time for Popular Science and they wanted me to be in the office sometimes. (It was 2013, I think I was their first semi-remote fact-checker, which is wild).
I did a lot of fact checking, and a lot of pitching editors I fact checked for, and a lot of telling everyone who seemed relevant to the situation that I fact checked, and had a physics degree, and wanted to write more. I got most of my big clients at conferences, going up to people and introducing myself and giving them my business card. My income goal, which if I remember correctly I approximately hit, was $36,000 that year. A family member asked me when I was going to figure out what I was doing for work, and I was like: This. I am doing it.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Network!!!!!!
How did you get your start writing about science?
Around 2004, an editor at my local Montreal paper was looking for someone to review bird books. She worried that ornithologists were a tight-knit bunch and would just lavish each other with praise—but a bird-and-poetry-obsessed 13-year-old seemed like a safe bet. I wrote my first piece for her on spec, and then kept taking assignments throughout high school. But as I got older, what I really wanted to write was fiction. When I was in college, I took a science journalism course, mostly because I couldn't get into any of the seminars taught by novelists, and writing science news seemed better than not writing anything at all. I was surprised at how much I loved it. Campus life felt claustrophobic, and reporting was my escape. I neglected my romantic poetry readings to bike around town, knocking on the doors of lobstermen and shadowing doctors around a TB clinic. It was addictive, to be able to slip out of your world and into someone else's, and so I just kept doing it. When I got a newspaper internship, the editor saw that I wasn't afraid of science and put me on the health desk, despite my protests, and I ended up loving that, too.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Leave room for the unexpected and follow it, even if it leads away from your original subject. What surprises you is bound to surprise readers, too.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a scientist. I got the idea from a television show called 3-2-1 Contact. In it, there was an African American girl solving problems, and when I saw her, I saw my reflection. Years later, however, my dream of becoming a scientist was nearly derailed by weed-out undergraduate science courses. After I graduated, I pledged to make others’ journeys in science smoother than my own. My career in science communication springs from that old wish.
My introduction to science writing began in graduate school, after my research program temporarily stalled. On a lark, I applied for the AAAS Mass Media fellowship and was assigned to work at Time magazine in Washington, DC. On my first day, I wrote about how Olympic swimwear used sharkskin technology. I was smitten. I not only gained an appreciation for making science understandable, but also felt appreciated. This pivotal experience shaped my remaining days in graduate school and thereafter.
After I received my doctorate in materials science, I worked at Bell Labs and later as an associate professor at Yale, keeping my passion for science communication aglow with numerous science outreach activities. At Yale, I created a science lecture series for kids called "Science Saturdays." This program was special to me because I had a vehicle to bring science to the public that could fit into my grueling academic schedule. I looked forward to a long career of doing both. But that all came to a halt when my position at Yale ended. It was this moment that forced me to make an important decision: Find another faculty job or try something new. I decided to leap into science communication.
I began a new life as a science evangelist, finding my way as opportunities presented themselves. First, I created science videos. Then, I gave a TED Talk. Next, I wrote books (Save Our Science and Newton’s Football). My life began to include giving talks, making TV appearances, and writing articles. My most recent book, The Alchemy of Us (from The MIT Press), combines storytelling with science—a merger of my two worlds. It is my best work yet, and admittedly, it took some time to get to this point. But I can honestly say that all my experiences have made me a better—and more empathetic—science writer. My hope is that I will continue to find more ways to make science accessible to the general public, and provide reflections for others in science, just like 3-2-1 Contact did for me.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Want to do #scicomm? Sign up for the @AAASMassMedia fellowship. Ten weeks takes you from zero to hero. It was one of my best career moves. #diversity
How did you get your start writing about science?
I see myself as a journalist first and a science writer second because I began my career after studying engineering at university as a general newshound, covering crime, politics, and local news. I was recruited by ITN as a trainee broadcast journalist, working as a producer and reporter. I had to doorstep politicians early in the mornings to ask them about the big scandals that they were caught up in, with the hope of getting a comment on camera. I had to write scripts for presenters, produce segments for the national news, and did stints as an overnight reporter. I would encourage all young science reporters to try their hands at other beats if they can, because this sharpens your journalistic skills, gets you familiar with media law, and helps you recognise the elements of a solid story. Science is as much ridden with ego, corruption, abuse, scandal, and funding pressure as any other human endeavour. The key to good science reporting is to be able to spot these often hidden human aspects, as well as communicating the research itself.
I went on to work at the BBC, where the biggest report I worked on was a six-month investigation into bogus universities. We helped an overseas student who had been conned into paying for a fake degree course in Britain get his money back. That experience taught me to see every potentially big story as a detective might, because you have to slowly piece together each aspect, follow every lead, get every perspective, until you have an airtight case. You need to back up each word with irrefutable evidence. Hearsay, rumours, and guilt by association are not enough.
After that, I left broadcasting to focus on science writing full-time. My first book was a travelogue through Indian science, looking at how the nation was pushing to become a technological superpower. My work since then has also tended to investigate the underbelly of science: how nations, institutions, and individual researchers are affected by the pressures of politics and bias, even as they try to maintain the illusion of being objective. In my two most recent books, looking at sexism and racism in science, I’ve tried to bring my investigative experience to bear. I research far more than I end up writing, and that means I always have some stories left in my pocket. There’s always something on the back burner.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Remember who you work for. It’s not scientists, it’s the public.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I spent four years and three summers in a lab as a biochemistry major, aiming straight for PhD school. Our key task was to build proteins, which is a remarkable, delicate, intricate thing to be able to do outside a living cell. But I had a restless curiosity. In my senior year I veered left, took one journalism class, and went to MIT's science writing graduate program to give reporting a shot. The course was terribly hard, like growing an extra limb. But I asked for help at the writing center, turned up annoyingly often to office hours, and things worked out.
One of my first internships was at the science/tech desk at MSNBC.com (now NBCNews.com), blogging for a massive national audience. Publishing was terrifying, but also addictive, like oxygen. I was hooked.
I graduated in 2010, a little after the last downturn, and the market was rough. My first editors ran technology or business desks, so I had to be creative about pitching science stories when I could. I went to any meeting I could get to—NASW’s annual conference, AAAS, the local meetups where I lived. Like so many of us in those years, I made friends and mentors on Twitter. Parts of this landscape eventually began to feel familiar.
I was fortunate early on to be able to move every few months, chasing internships or other gigs—Boston, Seattle, New York City, and now Washington, DC, have all been home. But a lot of doors were closed to me because as a foreign journalist any potential employer needed to sponsor a visa so I could work for them. Many editors didn’t know how this worked; many companies in media just didn’t do it at all.
My favorite past jobs have defined who I am as a reporter, but I feel like I crash-landed into them. I lucked into a job at a local newspaper when it was trialling a technology blog—that stint at the Boston Globe still guides the way I think about my responsibility to readers. My job at the BuzzFeed News science desk didn’t even exist when I started out in 2010, but it taught me so much about journalism and the Internet.
It seems change is the one constant in this business. That and how much you can learn every day, from your sources, from the editors and reporters you work with. I feel truly lucky to get to do this every day.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Keep pitching. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
How did you get your start writing about science?
On some level, I was always a journalist but I took the real dive during my undergraduate college years when, halfway, I switched majors from physics to journalism. Although I’d made a decision to leave a science career behind, science never left me. My mom was a biochemist and I always credit her for my insatiable curiosity for science and technology.
During the first 10 years of my journalism career, my beat centered on current affairs, conflict, and politics. But that’s the thing about journalism; being trained as a generalist gives you a unique perspective and an ability to see the big picture. I wouldn’t be where I am today as a science writer if it hadn’t been for those grueling field-reporting years where I breathlessly chased stories in Egypt and the Middle East, and landed in situations that were often challenging or outright scary. And as fascinated as I am with science, having a background in newsroom reporting and investigative journalism enabled me to switch gears with relative ease when I was head-hunted by Nature Middle East, the regional copy of Nature magazine, in 2013. It certainly made me a more critical storyteller, able to dig deep, and juggle perspectives.
Navigating a new genre was initially a little jarring—deep diving into academic papers and researching concepts that I’d never come across before—but it was worth it. From meeting renowned scientists doing impressive, cutting edge work to touring labs and rubbing shoulders with fellow science communicators at international conferences, it’s been a wild and awesome ride. The visuals and the imaginative expanse of the different science fields—from astrophysics to biology and genetics—constantly inspired me to take the story beyond text and across disciplines. I’ve been producing stories in writing, in podcast form, and even in virtual reality and gaming. Switching to science journalism also helped me forge a path to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, as a Knight Science Journalism fellow, I experimented with immersive science storytelling using different tech tools. I still collaborate on ambitious narrative projects as a research affiliate at MIT.
This switch made me realize how the science story is part of every single aspect of our lives. It also made me a more global journalist. Although I have intimate knowledge of the high-stakes stories that shape my region, the universal aspect of science has given me the opportunity to follow stories across borders, something that I’m incredibly grateful for.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don’t get intimidated by science. Ask that "stupid" question. Remember, you’re a stand-in for a broad audience. Your job isn’t to know everything, but to find where the story is and which facts hold the most weight—then tell that to your audience in a simple way.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I decided around 2009 that I wanted to be a science journalist. I had just graduated college and was working full-time as a teaching assistant in a fruit fly lab at UCLA. As a staff member, I got discounts on UCLA Extension classes, so I took an introduction to journalism course. I also used UCLA’s Career Center to find an internship—a remote, unpaid position, writing one story a week, for a blog covering the latest research on a rare cancer. I was fortunate I had a 9-to-5 job that paid well and came with good benefits, and privileged in having neither family obligations nor student loans (my parents paid for my undergraduate degree). All that made it possible for me to do my class and internship work in the evenings and weekends.
After the class and internship, I was pretty sure this was the career route I wanted. I decided to apply for a master’s program. I can’t say my reasons were the best; I was too scared to go out there and get a journalism job. But NYU’s SHERP program turned out to be great for me. It taught me skills that would have been a lot more painful to learn on the job and gave me connections I couldn’t have dreamed of in 2009. Plus, without undergrad loans and with the savings I had from three years working post-college, the NYU loans were manageable.
I landed a full-time staff writer position at LiveScience after graduating. I’ve also spent some time freelancing. I never endured a layoff until 2019, and was fortunate to find a place at The Chronicle of Higher Education quickly. It meant not covering science directly anymore, but I love the new work and anyway, academia as a whole is not so different from the science enterprise specifically. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and I found my experience covering health to be incredibly, and sadly, essential.
You never know where science journalism will take you, but it will always help you to help readers navigate the modern world.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Trying break in after the Great Recession, many told me: Don’t bother. I say try but be kind to yourself if it doesn’t work out as imagined.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started in the fall of 1986 covering town government, cops, and the fishing industry on Cape Cod. Health and science were the last two fields I would have expected to cover. Science confused and intimidated me. Health—especially surgeries—made me queasy. I thought scientists were boring, then I read James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Boy was I wrong. They were fascinating.
A second pivotal moment was writing about a blue whale that was dragged ashore in Rhode Island by a tanker. I got sent to write a story about scientists stripping the flesh from it (Melville got it right: "It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment."). I got to the landfill in New Bedford and discovered that scientists from up and down the East Coast had driven hundreds of miles to collect pieces of the whale (a researcher at Tufts got the eardrum, one at Cedars-Sinai in New York got the larynx, etc.) I thought that was damned interesting so I set out to write about the scientific legacy of a single blue whale. Along the way, I learned even the most complex science can be explained. Every scientist has a line they save for Thanksgiving when Cousin Freddie asks what they do.
The third key moment for me occurred when chronic wasting disease, the deer equivalent of mad cow, came to Wisconsin, where deer hunting is virtually a religion. I got assigned to work with a far more experienced science writer, John Fauber. He taught me how to read scientific and medical papers. Early on it felt like half the words in each sentence were foreign to me. So I started collecting science dictionaries, and reading the best science writers (Fauber, Gleick, Natalie Angier, John Noble Wilford, Robert Lee Hotz, Paul Salopek, Amy Harmon, Amy Dockser Marcus, David Quammen, etc.).
One of the best and most important experiences of my career was following first-year medical students through gross anatomy, dissection of a human cadaver. Seeing what nerves look like, holding a human heart, dissecting the brain—it was amazing. The conversations I had with the medical students ranged far and wide—life, death, why we're put here, where we go afterwards. They were some of the best conversations I've ever had.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't be intimidated, be curious. Fact check with scientists; gain their trust. Read everything: newspapers, magazines, fiction, plays, poetry. Read Hersey's "Hiroshima." Write about everything: math, physics, DNA, stem cells, plague. Talk to trailblazers. Learn every day.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I wish I could say I had something noble in mind when I started writing, but tapping away at my keyboard was an act of desperation. I was an undergrad in the ecology & evolution program at Rutgers University, but I just wasn't clicking with my major. Worse, I was such a poor student that I was stuck on that academic track until I brought my GPA up. I understood the importance of forestry and wetland management, but those topics didn't speak to me like evolution and paleontology did. So, I used my university library access to start reading technical papers on the topics I loved most.
Diving into the fossil record didn't help my studies. I'd regularly skip class to download reams of papers and read them. And at the time, blogging was still a relatively new thing. What better way to remember what I was learning than to write about it? Better still, I found a blogging scholarship contest. I definitely needed the money, working sales jobs at places like Target to fund my education, so I jumped in.
I couldn't get enough. I loved writing, even though I had no refined skills to speak of. All the same, I started to build a small following and I thought "Okay, maybe I can do this." I started thinking of a book I wanted to write, and I was so confident that I could do it that I ended up writing three full chapters before my first proposal ever went off to an agent. Against that background, I went from the scholarship contest to a WordPress blog to ScienceBlogs—at the time, the place to be. That led to some of my first journalistic articles, a gig blogging about dinosaurs for Smithsonian, and my book Written in Stone. It was a unique time in science writing, where I went from a nobody to a published author within about four years.
By that time, I was still struggling to finish my degree and I was working a full-time database gig I didn't much care for. If I went the academic path, I knew I would struggle for years to come. So I moved to Utah and started work as a freelance science writer. The cost of living in the Beehive State was much lower than New Jersey's back then, and I wanted to put myself right in the middle of fossil country. Trying to make it as a freelancer hasn't always been easy, and there's been more than one moment when I thought I would quit, but I'm proud that I plowed my own career path.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
There is no single definition of Science Writer, nor one path to it. Alternate routes may be the very ones that suit you best.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I got into science writing when I was about to graduate MIT with a geology degree and realized I didn’t want to work in the oil and gas industry or stay in school for a PhD. I had worked as a writing tutor in college and taken several classes in science and nature writing. The summer before my senior year I had even had my first job in science writing, when the resume I sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to work in environmental sciences got diverted to their in-house research magazine. So, facing graduation, I panicked about how I was going to make a living and started applying to editorial jobs at trade publications in the geosciences.
Fortunately, one of my professors told me about a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz that was all about science writing. I applied, got in, and moved cross-country to start at UCSC that fall. After finishing that program I took a summer internship at the Dallas Morning News, then freelanced for about a year, and finally landed my first full-time job with Earth magazine. I was so young that when I flew in for the job interview, Hertz wouldn’t rent me a car at the Milwaukee airport.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
File clean copy, accurately reported, to length and on deadline. And you'll be doing better than a lot of professionals who have been doing it for years.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was in graduate school, working toward a PhD in genetics, and had realized early on that an academic career was not a good fit. I started thinking about science writing—what a fun career! You get to write about cool science without having to actually do science?—and I got in touch with Robert Irion, who was the director of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program at the time. Rob offered some very practical advice: Try writing about science before you decide this is the career for you. Because you could hate it. So, I did a semester-long internship with one of the news offices on campus, wrote a few not-extremely-good stories, and decided to apply to the UCSC program—because even though I was quite inexperienced and rough around the edges, that internship had showed me the way forward.
After I defended my PhD, I said goodbye to lab work and headed for the redwoods, where I spent a year unlearning how to write like a scientist and learning all sorts of practical skills instead. For me, UCSC was essential—I knew basically nothing about news writing, interviewing, constructing features, or pitching. The program dropped me into a newspaper internship before classes even began, and I loved news reporting from the very first terrifying day on the job, when I had to write stories about the upcoming weekend weather and an unfortunate accident north of town. Later, the program helped me get through the door of several prestigious publications, and I was really fortunate to land a staff job at Science News almost right after graduation. Since then, I’ve worked with many publications and am now a contributing writer at National Geographic.
Not everyone needs a PhD or graduate program to be a science journalist. There are other ways in—many, many of them!—but I definitely needed that level of instruction and guidance. I often wish I could do the SciComm program over again but they said they won’t let me. Boo.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Be brave! Breaking into a new field is, by definition, stepping outside your comfort zone and it won't always be easy or fun. (But it's often worth it.)
How did you get your start writing about science?
I didn't set out to become a science writer, and I’m still not sure the title fits snugly—I think of myself more as a writer interested in the intersection of science, culture, and politics. But I have always been a person who writes. I wrote (mediocre) fiction in college, and after graduating I worked at a digital film production studio, where my paycheck subsidized an internship at the feminist publication Bitch Magazine. I got that internship by sliding a paper resume under their office door, and when a kind editor called to tell me there were no jobs, I suggested an internship, and when she said they didn’t have any, I suggested they could make one. That internship taught me how magazines work and helped me publish my first piece, a bit of feminist cultural criticism about tech and language. Around the same time, I was doing piecemeal freelance work for a city website that no longer exists. I applied online and I’m pretty sure the bar was low. That gig taught me how to do cold call reporting, write within a word count, and file pieces on time. Then I moved to Ecuador and taught English for two years while writing things I never tried to publish and that taught me about writing. Two years later, I moved back to New York to attend Columbia University’s nonfiction MFA program.
I went to grad school in part because I wanted to write about a family member who had sustained a brain injury. I didn't know anything about the brain or brain injuries, so I decided I would real quick learn neuroscience while getting my MFA. I began with an undergrad neuro course, sitting in the back row of a room full of bright-eyed college freshman. I read voraciously. I interviewed scientists and went to conferences. I joined one group of scientists for “lab drinks” every Thursday so I could hear about what they didn’t know, the sorts of questions and speculations that got them excited over a beer. I had a friend sneak me into a medical dissection lab in the middle of the night so I could hold a human brain. In retrospect, things escalated quickly. I started working as the book review editor at The Believer, and through industry contacts I was able to publish a few pieces about neuroscience, then editors started asking me to write on other science-related subjects. So I did. And I was hooked.
Soon after graduate school, I turned toward writing about the climate crisis. This is a science you can’t unsee, and writing about the most complex threat to human civilization on this planet still feels compelling, enraging, and urgent.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Write about the questions/discoveries/histories you find most compelling. Your fascination will enliven the writing and can help spark an editor's interest.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started looking in earnest for a career outside of research my third year of grad school.
My first thought was that I might like something in scientific editing. It took a couple copy editing gigs to realize that I wasn't well suited to editing and that I actually wanted to write.
The turning point for me was meeting a science journalist who happened to be covering my research for a story. She gave me three excellent pieces of advice that I ran with: 1) Start a blog. It’s less relevant now but still great training. 2) Get on Twitter. I’ve come across many job opportunities, writing gigs, and people in the field who become acquaintances that have actually led to paying assignments on that otherwise hellish site. 3) Take a journalism class. The class taught me the structure of a story, the basic ethics of journalism, and gave me the opportunity to have my writing edited.
I knew that once I graduated, I would need three good clips to apply for writing jobs so I started building up clips wherever I could. I wrote for my university research magazine by attending an open editorial meeting. I cold emailed someone in my university press office and after an informational coffee meeting, I asked if I could write a practice press release for them. I also walked up to a publisher’s expo booth at a scientific conference and asked if they needed student writers. Six months later I was writing regular blog posts for one of their journals for free. All of this writing was for free. I don’t recommend anyone write for free unless you, like past me, have literally no writing clips to your name and want the practice.
Around this same time, I entered two video scicomm contests geared at graduate students and would highly recommend contests in general because it gives you a deadline to create and introduces your work to judges who are likely scicomm professionals.
After about two years of side hustles, upon graduating I landed a job as a science writer for a university (my only interview) and also an early-career fellowship with The Open Notebook, which was an incredible experience that paired me with someone who I consider a lifelong mentor.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Read everything on The Open Notebook, connect with science writers on Twitter, start building clips where you are (personal blog, ask to write for your alma mater, current dept website)
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started writing science for the public in late 2013 in the most inadvisable manner and I only made it with the most unbelievable streak of good luck.
At the time, I had been teaching and researching insect ecology for almost 7 years, first in California and then as a lecturer in Malaysia. I loved to teach and research (still do) but many factors drove me to question if I would enjoy that life in Malaysia. I began to look out of academia. At the time, Malaysia was (mass-)producing science graduates, but I saw little effort by scientists to engage the public and talk science. I could fill that gap.
I didn’t know where or how to start. But I had a good salary and many free evenings. I could afford to pick a new study I liked, speak to the authors, and write about it. The product—my first-ever popular science writing—was a 1,100-word article about Indian farmers deterring elephants with playbacks of tiger growls. But I had pitched too late and by then many outlets had reported the study. The story ended up on my blog.
I committed a worse mistake with my next article. I pitched a news editor and attached my completed story. Yes, I submitted the story with my pitch! Nobody told me that it should be "pitch first, write later." Yet within 24 hours, Tracy Vence, then with The Scientist, accepted my story; she only asked that I add comments from external sources (I didn’t even know that was compulsory). The next week, she accepted my second pitch. I thought: “Wow, science writing is easy. I could do this for a living.”
Three months later, I left academia. I was 31 years old: adventurous, daring, but also pragmatic. I must upskill fast and build my network. So, I interned at a radio station. The pay was poor but the training was priceless: I researched topics, wrote interviews, produced shows, and practiced narrative writing. Writing for radio forced me to omit needless words.
In my first year, aside from my radio internship, I published only 22 stories in eight outlets. My income dropped 75 percent. My luck ran out. My parents were worried. I was worried. But I slogged on. I read what I could on writing and storytelling methods. I experimented with stories and I pitched without shame. I gave myself three years to try and make it as a science writer. It’s 2021, and I have been a science journalist for seven years. I still make less money than I would have in academia. But life is so fun now!
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Get real: The hike starts up a cliff; you pitch and pitch into the abyss; income sinks and panic strikes. Prepare 6 months’ cash before the hike. There will be light.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was an English major in life until, in my 30s, driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I realized I didn't know why sometimes on roadcuts the lines went up when you're going uphill and down when going down, and other times the roadcut lines were dead flat no matter whether you were going up or down. And then I understood I knew nothing about the world. And science writing seemed the easiest way to find out. So I enrolled in the Johns Hopkins University science writing masters program and after I graduated, gave myself a year to make as much money freelancing as I had teaching gifted junior high school students. I almost made it, so I've never looked back.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
It's amazing what you can do when you don't know you can't do it. (My son)
Never give up, never give up, never give up. (Nell Greenfieldboyce)
How did you get your start writing about science?
Serendipity 🙂 I didn't know science writing was a thing until I started volunteering with Ciencia Puerto Rico (CienciaPR; one of the nonprofits I work for now). The first project I took on involved writing popular science articles for the newspaper of record in Puerto Rico. I started writing for the newspaper, then helping other scientists do the same. This writing opportunity allowed me to realize that I loved telling stories about science and that science writing was a potential career, and it really opened doors for me to do other different types of science communication. I think most importantly, science writing helped me realize that it was possible to combine my cultural identities (as a Puerto Rican who grew up in a rural working class community) with my identity as a scientist, and that connecting science to people's identities, culture, and experiences was a powerful way to make it relevant to their lives.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Find good editors—people who can give you constructive criticism to bring the best out of your stories, to help you think about your audience critically to write clearly, concisely and compellingly *for them*.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I got my start by chance. After interning at Bloomberg, I was hired on full time and needed to find a permanent home. There was an opening on the health team, and they told me I could join if I'd cover biotech. I said, "Sure, I'll do that. What's biotech?" It turned out that covering startup drug companies an ideal beat for me. I got to write about the cutting edge of science, including new developments in gene therapy, gene editing, personalized cancer vaccines, and immunotherapies, many powered by recent breakthroughs in sequencing technology. I learned it all on the fly, which was overwhelming at times, but I loved it and had some kind colleagues who helped me learn the field. In 2014 I got my first experience covering infectious diseases when the Ebola outbreak spread in West Africa. I wrote about the race to develop therapeutics and flew to Dallas to cover the treatment of the first American patient.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Keep asking questions. If you don't get study jargon, ask the author to explain until you get it. The best stories come from your genuine curiosity.
How did you get your start writing about science?
From a very young age I began to hear about science, specifically about agronomy. My mother, a biologist, and my father, an economist, were both professors at the University of Chapingo, considered the largest university in Latin America specialized in agronomy. It was Chapingo that also allowed me to get to know journalism. As part of their courses open to the public, they offered a journalism workshop for students and I took it when I was 16. There I learned not only to write journalism and to talk to people, to ask questions and get to know their problems, but also to strive to understand the complexities of the problems of the field and of the university community who studies them. In a country where more than half of the population lives in poverty, and where many of these people depend on the countryside, I found it fascinating and necessary to talk about how science can be used to improve crops, soils, irrigation, or pest control techniques; how economics can improve the livelihoods of those who depend on the countryside; and how social science can contribute in understanding the way people’s culture and customs impact on and depend on their relationship with the land. Later, I joined the official newspaper of the same university as a volunteer, where I wrote, for example, on the impact of certain types of fertilizer on the tomato harvesting or the experiences of young people in rural communities when they entered university. I think that first experience inserted in me the interest to write stories of how the land feeds the human being and how the human being, with his knowledge, can enrich the land. When I entered the university, I had no doubts: I would study journalism to become a science journalist. Before finishing college, I found one of the few places in Mexico to train in science coverage: the Science Journalism Unit at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). And there I acquired basic tools: understanding how science works, reading and understanding scientific papers, structuring journalistic stories, avoiding the principle of authority, doing interviews with scientists without losing the control, verifying data, and, in general, including scientific information in science journalism. I learned what would become my permanent attempt as a science writer: to tell journalistic stories with the scientific information necessary for people to decide.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
To find your first stories, look for the university or research center nearest you to see how their presence does or does not affect the community and write about it.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Ever since I can remember, I've always been interested in both science and writing, but it took me a long time to realize I could find a career that combined both. As I was finishing up my undergraduate biology degree, I actually applied to both PhD programs in microbiology and MFA programs in creative writing because I thought I had to choose one or the other. I ended up choosing a PhD because I wasn't quite done with science yet, but the more time I spent doing research the more I missed writing.
I started writing on the side as much as I could, from writing for a student science magazine to contributing to the "Ask a Geneticist" column of a local science museum and taking a course in environmental journalism. Shortly before defending my thesis, I happened to attend a talk about science writing, and realized that's what I wanted to pursue as a career. I started reaching out to other science writers to find out how they got their start in the field, and found that the vast majority of them were extremely generous with their time and advice. These contacts also enabled me to find some freelance gigs after my PhD, and I simultaneously applied to every science writing internship I could find.
I ended up getting an internship with Popular Science and Science Illustrated magazines, which provided a great introduction to science and technology writing for magazines. After the internship, I decided I wanted more training in other aspects of the field, and attended the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication program. That provided a great crash course in different facets of science journalism, as well as the opportunity to get articles published in various national outlets.
After graduating, I moved to Washington, DC, and started an internship at Science News magazine. Right after the internship, I got a job as a science writer at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with the added benefit of it sponsoring my work visa. After I got my green card a few years later, I started freelancing, and I continue to enjoy constantly learning about new scientific discoveries and getting to write about them.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Draw from your unique experiences, perspectives and interests to come up with lots of original story ideas, which in turn will make your pitches stand out.
How did you get your start writing about science?
My journey into science writing was about curiosity and connections. While getting my PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, I read a column in my hometown newspaper back in Nebraska saying that the writer would boycott Oprah for suggesting that beef cattle in the U.S. could carry "mad cow disease." The writer was the wife of a farmer who raised cattle. She said it couldn't happen in the U.S. I wanted to know if that was true, so I began researching everything I could about prions. Turns out there was a real possibility it could happen here. I wrote a story for the newspaper about what I had found. I so enjoyed that process that I began writing for the student-run campus newspaper about research other graduate and undergraduate students were doing. I decided I wanted to move away from the bench and become a science journalist.
I didn't know how journalism works really, so I decided to go to a science writing program at Boston University. I did internships at the Dallas Morning News and at Science News. I think I got the Science News internship based partly on my clips and partly on the letter written on my behalf by Laura Beil, the medical writer at the DMN. My editor from the Dallas Morning News, Tom Siegfried, helped me get a job as the biotechnology reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. More than seven years later he became the editor at Science News and hired me to cover molecular biology. I've been here more than 13 years now and became senior writer in 2017. Now, my duties also include mentoring interns and helping them get their start.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Make opportunities for yourself: Cover science (or even non-science) for the campus newspaper. Journalistic skills transfer to any topic.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Oh, man. I so desperately wanted to be E.O. Wilson—I wanted to do the science, write about it, and convince everyone why we needed to save the rainforests and decrease carbon emissions and halt climate change. (This was more than 20 years ago, now. I guess you could say I got an early start in climate proselytizing.)
I majored in English and biology, but was convinced I didn't want to be a journalist and "just" write about other people's research. But after working in a marine ecotoxicology lab for a couple of years, I realized that I had no patience for centrifuges full of test tubes and no taste for delayed gratification. I started working part-time at a local environmental science institute and, in addition to my job doing data analysis and sorting marine samples, convinced them to let me write for them, too. The result was a terribly dry executive summary, but it was a start.
From there, I took a pretty prescribed route: I applied to graduate school in science journalism and got my master's at Boston University, with the goal of learning everything from news writing to features to radio reporting. One of the graduation requirements was that each student do an internship, so I spent a summer at the Christian Science Monitor, and then a winter at the Economist (their Casement internship is aimed specifically at newbie science writers). After that, I freelanced—struggling to sell enough freelance assignments—before finally landing a "reporter-researcher" position (a.k.a. glorified fact-checker) at Discover magazine, in New York City, in August, 2001. I had been working there for all of two weeks when the Twin Towers fell.
I can't recommend a fact-checking job highly enough. It might sound like a bit of a slog—and it can be a bit tedious—but I got to see how some of the best (and worst) journalists reported their stories. I saw how the best-researched stories came together, and how the plagiarized ones fell apart. It has informed all the work I’ve done since (editing, reporting, writing, teaching).
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Be your best self: Bring stories no one else has, or at least fresh angles on those stories. Be reliable. Be open. And come willing to do the work.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I’ll always say that science writing chose me and not the other way around. Even when I majored in communications, I never considered becoming a journalist, nor did I think I had the skills to navigate my way through science. Still, I always felt curious about it, and life works in mysterious ways.
After graduating in 2015, I landed a fellowship at my university’s science museum, Universum, where science hooked me for good. I came to regret not pursuing a scientific career, mostly because, outside of the fellowship, there weren’t a lot of science-related jobs without the proper degree. Then, the fates intervened. While figuring out what to do next, I got a fortunate voicemail in my cell phone from Javier Flores, a science journalist from the national newspaper La Jornada. I met Javier when he came as a guest speaker to my science writing class at university and we kept in touch over the years. That day, he proceeded to offer me my first science writing job in the digital monthly science newsletter Aquí entre nos (Here Among Us), edited by him.
Little by little, my passion for this profession grew as I started getting more involved in it. In 2017, I joined the Mexican Network of Science Journalists, which ultimately opened up a whole new perspective for me of what was out there in terms of job opportunities, workshops, fellowships, and collaborations. My colleagues at the Network gave me the encouragement to step out of my comfort zone and start freelancing on the side for outlets like the magazine ¿Cómo ves?, The New York Times, Science, Medscape, and The Open Notebook, among others. Also, they encouraged me to apply for fellowships to attend international meetings, such as ScienceWriters, of the National Association of Science Writers.
My beginnings in science writing were a mix between being in the right place at the right time and me making the most of it. Although it’s not the ultimate path to riches, it is possible to make a decent living out of it.
I love science writing because, as opposed other careers, the path to it is quite original and diverse, as diverse as there are ways to do it. It’s an incredibly versatile job made for curious people who want to learn more and more about the world. Some of us choose the freelance path, and others may become staff reporters or combine them both, as I did a while back. It can also be joint with academics, research, the development of a blog, you name it—the possibilities are infinite.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Just do it. Find a story that you’re interested in telling and pitch it. Become a member of a science writing association and keep an eye open for fellowships. Have fun!
How did you get your start writing about science?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a science degree must be in want of a PhD. And I tried, but I was the world’s worst graduate student, and quit after two years when I realized I was much better at writing about science than actually doing it. I joined a cancer charity as a public information officer; on the side, in 2006, I started my own blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science. I wanted to practice writing, to convince myself it was something I actually enjoyed, and to build up a portfolio of clips to show to editors. It worked, but slowly. The blog was independent at first and few people read it, but it was eventually picked up by a series of increasingly high-profile networks—ScienceBlogs, Discover, and National Geographic. Its audience slowly grew, and I won some awards for it.
Concurrently, I started pitching freelance pieces and over time, rejections went from constant to merely frequent. The pieces got longer, from 120-word news stubs to 3,500-word features. In 2011, I quit my job and went freelance fulltime, writing a mix of news and features for a variety of publications including The New Yorker, New Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, the BBC, The Scientist, Wired, and more. In 2014, I sold my first book, I Contain Multitudes, which was published a few years later. And in 2015, I was headhunted by The Atlantic to be their first staff science writer.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Protect your work and your work will protect you. Writing problems are usually structuring or reporting problems. Be kind, to others and yourself.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I fell in love with biology in high school and decided to become a doctor. But then I got to shadow several doctors for a semester, and realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life under fluorescent lights, surrounded by sick people.
I figured I’d become a biologist instead. The only problem was, I couldn’t narrow my interest to a single topic for a PhD. After college, I bounced around various research jobs trying to figure out whether I wanted to study ecology, evolution, molecular biology, or pharmacology for my doctorate. During a stint at a biotech company, I’d often sneak away to the company library and devour its copies of New Scientist magazine. I started writing a column for the company newsletter and the editor, a former freelance science writer, asked me if I’d ever considered science writing. It had never occurred to me that I could escape the drudgery of data collection without leaving science. I enrolled in the UC Santa Cruz science communication in 1997 and have been a science journalist ever since, with most of my career spent freelancing.
The best piece of advice I ever received was from my first mentor, Joe Alper. He told me to figure out what I wanted to do and then go do it. That’s pretty much exactly what I did. I ignored all the advice that said I had to put in some time as a staffer before going freelance. Instead, I started writing query letters. I sold my first piece to New Scientist magazine and decided that this was the life I wanted. I landed some steady work from ScienceNOW and Health magazine, and that was the beginning of my freelance career. I’ve made a very nice living from this path ever since.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Figure out what you want to do and then have the courage to do it.
How did you get your start writing about science?
My path to science journalism is unusual only in that it began relatively early in my life. As part of an immigrant family, I received a lot of pressure to pursue a more practical and lucrative career (as in, not journalism) so that I could "make it" in the U.S. and achieve some stability. So I entered university as an engineering student, focused on computer science. While I was waiting in line to check out some books for study at a campus library, I noticed a bright yellow book called Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower on a cart of texts for reshelving. I picked it up and started leafing through it: One of the first chapters detailed careers in science writing.
At the time I was 18 years old, and as soon as I read that chapter while standing in the library queue, I knew I’d found exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Luckily for me, the University of Virginia, where I was, had a health and science section in its newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. I remember my first assignment: My editor asked me to cover ergonomics research ongoing at the university. Writing that left a lasting impression on me about the necessity of good chair and keyboard positioning—pretty handy given how much time we journalists spend at our desks. When I transferred to Dartmouth College the next year, I joined the college’s newly launched undergraduate journal of science, where I helped edit articles about fellow students’ research. I majored in biology, but always with the purpose of becoming a science writer. My organic chemistry professor was very confused by this.
After university, I got on an airplane and headed to Berlin to see if I could make it as a science writer there: I pitched furiously and landed a few articles on WIRED.com. After a brief year-long stint as a newspaper editor in Latvia following that, I took an internship in London with a new science and innovation magazine through the Economist Group called Intelligent Life. From there I went on to work at Nature and Nature Medicine for a cumulative amount of almost 14 years (with a brief 2-year hiatus at New Scientist magazine).
Even though it’s been a while since I started out in science writing, the early lessons have stuck with me: Don’t be afraid to pitch, and write down the advice of your editors. I still take notes whenever I talk to an editor because I’m still learning how to be the science writer I want to be.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't be too afraid to pitch and don't be too strong-headed to listen to your editors. A bit of hubris and humility go a long way in science journalism.
How did you get your start writing about science?
A year after obtaining a master's in journalism, I started working as a full-time reporter and then section editor at El Nuevo Herald newspaper (The Miami Herald Spanish sister) in Miami, back when papers were a good business. I loved my job at first. For eight years I was the reigning food editor, and even though I cannot cook an egg, I got to review restaurants and write about artichokes. At the same time, I managed to write a biweekly op-ed column on environment, and injected all the science I could think of into my 18 weekly food pages; occasionally, I pitched bilingual Sunday features on ocean exploration and the complex science of the Everglades. That kept me somewhat happy, until the Spanish language paper’s quality declined in favor of cutting corners. They couldn’t care less about a science beat, so I decided to jump ship, leave the security of the check and embrace the freelancer’s life with all its pleasures and perils. I then realized I had even forgotten how a cell divided. So, I bought college textbooks and read through them—everything from geology to astrophysics to molecular biology. I talked to scientists at the forefront of ocean research at the University of Miami. I also started driving up to the Kennedy Space Center to witness shuttle launches and look for novel ways to cover space for little-known outlets. Thanks to a friend, I began freelancing for Discovery Channel Latin America, as translator, content researcher, and clueless field producer in Discovery Channel Ecochallenge Patagonia. In 2000 I became the first Hispanic to obtain a Knight Fellowship in Science Journalism at MIT, and that opened my doors to science and also to the big leagues of journalism. I became a senior correspondent for a hugely popular science magazine edited in Spain and Latin America called Muy Interesante, a lovely adventure that lasted 15 years, until it didn’t. In the end, surviving the past 25 years as a freelancer has taught me to continually find new audiences in industry, academia, government and education.
Besides pitching science research features, I write news and books for young adults, give conferences on science diplomacy at embassies, and try to present science in novel ways, in all platforms, to all people.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Think beyond reporting and training your peers, and put your journalistic skills to serve other, more specialized and potentially powerful audiences.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was near the end of my undergrad career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was a psychology major, when I got the idea that I wanted to be a writer. I vaguely thought that maybe there was a way I could write about science, and think about science, but not actually do the science. However, I couldn’t find anyone who had ever heard of a job like that. For lack of a concrete plan or any understanding of how people find jobs, I instead stuck to the academic track, enrolling in a PhD program in social psychology at Yale University. After a couple of years there, I was restless. I sensed that a progressively more narrow academic existence wasn’t for me, but I didn’t know what was for me. Then one Tuesday, while reading The New York Times science section, I suddenly realized that the people whose writing I was reading … doing this was their job. Science writing (it seemed) was a job, and that meant it could be my job. I instantly knew that I wanted that job.
The problem was that I had no idea how to become a science writer, and neither did my friends or advisors. I tried entering “science writing” into a search engine, and lo and behold, there was a National Association of Science Writers. Phew! Not only was “science writing” a job, but it looked like there was a whole national association of these people. And on the NASW website was a list of science writers who had email. I emailed all of them, I think—maybe 20 people or so.
One person, Charles Seife (now a journalism professor at NYU), replied at length and explained some basics about the field. He also told me about the AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship program, which placed science grad students who are interested in science writing into summer internships at media outlets. I managed to land a spot in the AAAS program and was placed at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia, where I was mentored by the science reporter A.J. Hostetler. That summer, I started learning core principles of newspaper journalism: how to gather accurate information, interview scientists, and write clearly for a lay audience.
The next summer, I interned at Science News, trying to further hone my skills, including my ability to suss out newsworthy stories and to craft feature stories. After that internship, and while finishing up my dissertation, I did some sporadic freelancing, including writing a short feature for the APA Monitor on Psychology. That assignment put me on the magazine’s radar. Just as I was about to graduate, a science writer position opened up there, and I was offered the position—my first professional job in science writing.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't believe the voice in your head that says you may not be cut out for science writing. If you're curious, committed to factual accuracy, and can tolerate not always being the most knowledgeable person on the subject at hand, you can do it.
How did you get your start writing about science?
It all started when I ran away to sea.
I was fresh out of college with a degree in technical theater and, instead of pursuing the lighting design career I had laid out for myself, I snagged a deckhand job on a tall ship. I tell people this was because I graduated into the Great Recession and job hunting was depressing. But if I’m being honest, becoming a professional sailor sounded cooler.
There were a million things to learn—carpentry, rigging, history, science, songs, and stories—and a constant rotation of new people to share it all with. It took three years of hauling lines, tarring rigs, and pronouncing words like “forecastle” with as many apostrophes as possible for the learning curve to flatten out, and for me to feel like I was ready for something new.
I fumbled through a series of jobs, trying to figure out what had been so satisfying about those first few years of sailing. I picked up carpentry and electrician work at local theaters (maybe I love using tools and pulling on ropes?); I taught after-school science classes (maybe I love working with kids?); I managed a sailing and windsurfing program (maybe I just love boats?).
Then I got a job as an educator at the New England Aquarium. Once again, I had that invigorating feeling of being delightfully out of my depth. I was surrounded by brilliant people excited to share their knowledge with me. That’s what I had been looking for.
In addition to filling my brain with weird fish knowledge, the aquarium taught me how to build facts into stories that people would actually listen to and, hopefully, remember. But it never occurred to me to try to transfer these skills to writing until one of the women I was hired alongside, Erin Ross (check out her work at Oregon Public Broadcasting), mentioned that she was applying to science journalism graduate programs.
Honestly, I wasn’t sold at first. I’d never been a writer, and I’d never been a scientist. But I did like telling stories, and I loved diving headfirst into learning new things. This career promised an endless supply of both.
True to form, though, I gave boats one last shot. I quit the aquarium and took a job captaining a tour boat for two seasons while I read every science-oriented article, essay, and book I could find. The year I got into MIT’s graduate program in science writing was also the year I put a hole in the boat I was captaining. It was a relatively small hole, but switching to science writing was definitely the right call.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Get comfortable asking questions, even if they seem simple. No one expects you to know everything!
How did you get your start writing about science?
I've always been a writer, and I've always loved nature, especially the stranger parts. In 2011 I was looking into grad school for nonfiction writing. One school's website mentioned a science writing degree. I thought, "That's a real job you can do?!?" I immediately applied to the program, got in, and started freelancing as soon as I could. My first published story was a goofy explainer called "A Guide to Pooping in the Galapagos Islands." At first I wrote a lot about nature, especially marine biology, but over time my confidence grew and I branched out into other disciplines. Around that same time, my chronic illness worsened. I began writing about my experience and medical science as a way to understand it, to explain it, and to cope.
These days I cover biomedical research at my day job and publish essays, poems, and occasionally articles as a freelancer. I write a lot about illness and disability, and teach a workshop about writing these subjects.
My career has taken a lot of turns, even since I started grad school. I feel fortunate to have been able to cover so many wonderful subjects and to write stories and essays that resonate with readers. When I first learned about science writing, it didn't occur to me that something I wrote someday might be able to help someone. Now that's one of the biggest reasons I do it.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Follow what thrills you, and tell the stories you know need to be told. Your work can be a force for good.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I read Philip Ball's book Critical Mass. I was a PhD student at the time, and my advisor had plopped the book down before me, I think in the hope that it would inspire me to think more deeply about statistical mechanics. And it did. But I was also enthralled by the way Ball weaved together history, anecdotes, and crystal clear explanations of scientific concepts to tell an intriguing story. I had always enjoyed reading about science, but Critical Mass found me at a moment in my life when—maybe for the first time—it didn't seem ridiculous to think that I could write about it too.
I began to test the waters. I started a blog that no one read. I took writing classes here and there. I applied for jobs for which I was almost certainly under-qualified. And I somehow landed one of them, with Physics Today magazine.
Then I got edited mercilessly, by people who actually knew what they were doing. And that's when I became a science writer.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
You may have to spend quite some time being bad at writing before you become any good at it. That’s normal. Just don’t give up.
How did you get your start writing about science?
It all started with a blog where I wrote about urban wildlife habitat design. My degree is in landscape architecture, but when I graduated in 2006 firms were laying off people because of the recession. So I started writing articles on my own website and began brainstorming book ideas. Wanting to get serious about writing, I earned a certificate in nonfiction writing from the University of Washington and began networking with other writers, attending workshops and conferences. Thanks to networking I got my first local freelance assignments and then a book deal when I was quoted as an expert on urban nature in The Seattle Times and mentioned I was working on a book.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
READ for inspiration and analyze to learn the craft.
WRITE as much as possible and publish anywhere you can.
NETWORK everywhere possible.
How did you get your start writing about science?
My dreams of going into research went awry during college, when a half-year stint as an undergraduate researcher in an immunology lab went poorly. Working under the lab hood, streaking bacterial cultures, running assays—I was terrible at all of it. And worse, I dreaded how hyper-specialized lab research was. I didn’t want to spend decades investigating a single gene or protein.
At the end of the semester, my professor gently dissuaded me from thinking of research as a long-term career, and I’m so glad she did. More importantly, she spent quite a bit of time praising the papers I produced during my time in the lab, and suggested I think about a career in science writing.
When I heard that, the bulb went off in my head. I had always loved writing (I was pursuing a minor in English literature at the time), and both of my siblings were writers as well. I’m an information junkie who was already wasting hours on the internet reading anything and everything about any subject I hadn’t already learned about—and of course that included new discoveries in science. I was a voracious reader of publications like Scientific American and Wired, and loved digging through the science section of The Washington Post (my hometown paper). I adored writers like Mary Roach, E.O. Wilson, and Oliver Sacks.
What intrigued me most, however, wasn’t merely that I could do a good job communicating science to the public. It was also the idea of doing the things sharp journalists do: seeing patterns and ideas that others don’t normally see, doing the reporting and research that can validate those ideas, and synthesizing everything together into compelling narratives thrust forward by human voices.
So I spent the latter half of college moving away from research, and toward science writing. I began taking on whatever opportunities I could find to write about science. Most of this was confined to press releases for my school, on new research and news being conducted by the scientists on campus. Some of the work was for local newspapers and zines at my college. When I graduated, I took on internships around Washington, DC, while preparing to apply for a master’s degree in journalism where there were programs in science journalism. I got accepted to New York University’s Science Health & Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). I would say that my move to New York City (my dream city) in August 2013 was the official start of my science journalism career.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Start writing, however you can. Blog, comms / PR, newsletter ... your writing today will open up bigger and better writing opportunities tomorrow.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Although I can’t imagine having another beat, science writing came to me by accident. In college I applied to an internship program run by ASME—a program you had to commit to without knowing where you would work—and they placed me at Scientific American. I had no idea what I was doing, and almost felt jealous of the program’s other interns who worked at glossies and kept showing up to our intern lunches with freebie sunglasses. In my very first interview, a German scientist studying gram-negative bacteria hung up on me after telling me I did not know what I was doing, which was correct. I felt very out of place, which I think was a mixture of impostor syndrome and good old-fashioned incompetence. But I was very lucky to be taken under the wing of space editor Clara Moskowitz, who assigned me a story about commercial spaceflight and taught me how to fact-check a feature (Clara is the best!) The last story I worked on at SciAm, about a flawed study from SeaWorld, was never published, but I really cared about it and it eventually sprawled into my senior thesis in college. My thesis was not very good, but I did so much research and reporting on whales that I realized how much I loved writing about the natural world, and what a dream it could be to turn it into a career. It has been a bumpy, difficult ride, with a stretch of years defined by back-to-back internships and fellowships, but the passion clearly stuck, as I’m still here, and doing my best.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Embrace a nontraditional path, find what you can cover better than anybody, and never compromise your values—even if it makes things harder.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was graduated to be an accountant, as my family planned for me, but my real passion was always science. I worked as an accountant for three years, but was never convinced that this would be my life career. I started writing as a freelance writer for IslamOnline. Although it was the biggest website that publish in Arabic at this early time of the internet in the region, they accepted to publish stories that I wrote.
IslamOnline was a real incubator for young journalists at this period, by the start of the Millennium. After almost two years of freelancing I had the opportunity of my life: I was hired as an assistant editor in the science section of IslamOnline.
This was the real starting step of my career in science journalism, I was mentored by many high professional editors, and had the opportunity to study a journalism diploma.
Five years later, I was the managing editor of the science section leading a team of four editors, and training juniors and interns.
I returned to freelancing after spending 10 years in IslamOnline for only one year, then I started working for SciDev.Net as a news editor of the MENA region.
In four years, I initiated the Arabic edition of SciDev.Net, and till now I am the regional co-ordinator of MENA region, and the editor of the Arabic edition.
These were the main milestones in my journey in science journalism, more than 20 years of my life in this career. Not bored yet, and still have the ambitious to do more.
In 2020, under the pandemic, I co-founded a social entrepreneurship company to organize online events that can help developing and building capacity of science journalists in the developing world. Through the company we organized the first virtual Science Journalism Forum, with 900 attendees from all over the world, 146 speakers, in 4 different languages.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Find a way to get a mentorship—this is how you will learn science journalism.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I did not become a science writer because I knew that I wanted to be one. I was lucky. As a kid, I wrote a lot—stories, cartoons, and failed imitations of Watership Down—and by college I was working on both fiction and nonfiction. I interned at my local county newspaper. At school I majored in English to learn from great writers, while doing my best to avoid getting sucked into the self-annihilating maze of literary theory. After I graduated college, I spent a couple years at various jobs while writing short stories on my own, but I gradually realized I didn’t have enough in my brain yet to put on the page.
In 1989 I wrote to some magazines to see if they had any openings for entry-level jobs. I got a response from Discover, saying they needed an assistant copy editor. I got the job, but I turned out to be a less-than-perfect copy editor, which means that I was a terrible copy editor. Fortunately, my editors let me start to fact-check stories, which is arguably the best way to learn how to write about science. I then got a chance to write short pieces.
At some point, I realized this was an experience unlike any previous writing I had done. In nature, I was discovering strangeness beyond my own imagining. And scientists were willing to help me understand their discoveries, in long conversations over the phone or visits to their labs and field sites. I began thinking of myself as a science writer, and I began trying to become as good a science writer as I could.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Move as fast as you can from thinking about how much you’d like to be a writer to actually writing.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I hated school as a kid (because dyslexia). I majored in writing and wrote a little bit of everything: journalism, poetry, fiction, essays (thank you, spellcheck). I graduated in the dot-com bust. I did AmeriCorps for a year. Then 9/11 happened. The job market tanked. I did clerical work and journaled to keep my wits.
Gen Z is up against a lot more than I was, but FWIW, my advice: Feed your passions, tread water however you can, and don’t be too hard on yourself.
In 2003, I enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s nonfiction MFA program, where I was mentored by Jeanne Marie Laskas. I also assisted her part-time for a while. Transcribing for her taught me how to interview.
I wrote for lots of institutional mags and was surprised to find my favorite was Pitt Med. The editor, Erica Lloyd, assigned me juicy 3,200-worders on biomedicine, which was totally foreign to me. She guided me with thoughtful feedback. She’s the best writing coach I’ve ever had.
I joined the staff in '10. In '12, after taking a course in audio production, I launched our podcast, Pitt Medcast—a dream realized for this NPR nerd.
I never would’ve guessed how much I’d love science writing until I tried it.
I’m terrible at remembering details, but great with the big picture (totally a dyslexia thing). I take naturally to playing dumb—which, kidding aside, really is important in interviewing.
I often ask how the scientist’s field has evolved through their career—origin stories are great vehicles for context. I ask if they think their specialty is underappreciated. There’s a little bit of an outcast school kid in everyone.
When I finish my interviews, I take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. I read my transcripts and jot the goodies on my paper: scenes, metaphors, images on the left; fun facts on the right. Then I draw lines connecting left-side things to right-side things. Voila: structure!
I often profile recruits who haven’t gotten here yet. So I bug tons of people in the person’s orbit. When I do finally talk to the person I’m writing about, I blurt out an observation. Something like: “Wow. You seem like a really [adjective] person.” Their answers tell me how they see themselves and how the world sees them.
In grad school, I asked Rebecca Skloot, an alum of my program, for advice. We turned our chat into a handout: bit.ly/2Rx9vYJ. I try to channel her generous spirit whenever I interact with new writers.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Seek connections. Ask for help. Then pay it forward.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was drawn to science by the sense of discovery and exploration. I enjoyed research in college but couldn’t imagine myself running a lab. But I did want to counter the idea that science was only for scientists. As a neuroscience major in a non-scientific family, I’d had plenty of conversations that started (and ended) something like, “Neuroscience? Sounds too hard for me to understand.” I considered teaching, then thought about the science books and magazines I’d enjoyed over the years … what if I could be a science writer? At the time I had never heard the two words linked together—I naively thought I’d hit upon a novel idea. I sent my graduate school applications with a personal statement about how I wanted to improve public understanding of science through writing or education. They received mixed reviews. At one prestigious eastern school, the department chair knotted his arms across his chest and peered at me over his glasses. “It says here you want to write? Hmph. If you get in, we’ll talk.” (I did. We didn’t.) Instead, I chose a school with an active outreach program. I hauled buckets of brains to elementary schools, ran short summer courses for high school students, and indulged my love of debating scientific ideas with my peers. And in the final years of my PhD, I rediscovered non-academic writing. I started with short “Ask a Scientist” pieces for the foundation that funded my graduate fellowship and subscribed to a jobs list run by a medical writer to learn more about the types of writing jobs out there. A few months later, when the medical writer advertised for an assistant—minimal experience required—I jumped at the opportunity to do some small jobs: transcribing, fact-checking, a bit of writing. The work gave me enough confidence (and a willing reference) to apply for the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship during my last year of graduate school. I was fortunate to be placed at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia, with A.J. Hostetler as my skilled guide and mentor. I finished the fellowship determined to make the jump to writing. During breaks from my dissertation, I applied for several science writing internships as well as a few “real” jobs that felt like a stretch. To my surprise, I was offered interviews for all the stretch jobs and none of the internships. Three weeks after my PhD defense, I started work in the news office of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’ve been proud to call myself a science writer ever since.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Read as much good writing as you can, write regularly, and be willing to go for things that might feel out of reach. You never know unless you try.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I remember the very moment I knew I had to be a science writer. I was a 22-year-old doctoral student, wearing a stained white lab coat and queuing to use the microwave oven at the Biochemical Research Institute of Buenos Aires. Close to me, a researcher was saying she had decided on following the science communication path after her PhD. Later, in the lunchtime lecture, everyone including the Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Luis Federico Leloir (our Director) was listening the scientific presentation. But my thoughts were far from there.
Less than two years from that moment, I crossed the ocean, literally and metaphorically.
1989, Barcelona. My new life goal was to merge my love for science with the one for words, even with no formal preparation for the task. For a few pesetas, I bought a popular science magazine just to get the editor's name and telephone. A silly introduction, “I am an Argentine scientist wanting to write about science… ” led to a straight answer: “Come and bring a proposal.” Email was not a thing yet. A complaint in that issue's readers' section inspired me to write on the substitution of animal testing. My first printed piece. Soon I started as free-lance writer in the science section of La Vanguardia newspaper. My first article was based in a scientific research published in a peer review journal. My successful pitch to the all-male editorial team was: “How does father age impact kids’ intelligence?”
Since then I have been paying my bills with science journalism. My work was published in different languages, but science is the common theme. Science in daily life, taking us further, protecting us, solving problems, making us think or just for curiosity. It is relaxing to deepen on just one area, even if it is huge, and I focused on health. Still, health is becoming a broader concept, now includes even planetary health.
In my fifties, an editor invited me to bring fresh airs to the Penguin Random House Argentina catalogue writing science fiction. My quick answer was NO, with capital letters. Eventually, my “maybe” arrived. It was my second start. To be a novelist is a challenge, more as I decided that my science-based thriller would have research and imagination in equal doses. That is how I came up with a dangerous flu-like virus that emerged in Asia and went by almost unnoticed in a fully monitored but unprepared world. Biovigilados (Biomonitored) reached the bookstores two years before SARS-CoV-2 closed them.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Science writing routes goes in different directions. Read as much as you can, think out of the box, and then follow as many lanes as you like.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I am a science writer because I failed as a theatre person. My undergrad degree was in 20th-c poetry and 16th-c theatre (a reliable laugh line for scientific audiences); after graduation I toiled in theatre at night while paying the rent with day jobs, but couldn’t make it work. As a fallback I went to a short, affordable, practical journalism masters’ program, hoping to credential myself as some kind of writer. That experience spun me into newspaper work—something I never expected—and fairly shortly afterward I found myself hired into a team that was investigating the public health aftermath of pollution leaking from a shuttered nuclear weapons plant that dated back to World War II. The situations we uncovered were heartbreaking: cancer clusters, environmental contamination, conscienceless corporate and government stonewalling. But the disease detection they gave me access to was thrilling; not just for the intricacies of the science, but because within the science I recognized the patterns of story—hubris and tragedy and triumph over obstacles—that I had experienced as a literature student and an actor and dramaturg
The work my team did helped the people affected by that plant to win a lawsuit against the U.S. government. That was professionally vindicating, and intellectually intoxicating. Epidemiology became the science that I built my career on, through four newspaper jobs and then a second career as a freelance journalist and author of three books so far.
That is how I became a science writer—but I would not have stayed one without the extraordinary kindness and support that I received and have tried to pass on in return. Every genre of journalism has its worst actors, of course: people with sharp elbows and no ethics and a hunger for favors that they somehow never return. They are difficult to encounter and the wounds stay with you. But they were hugely outweighed for me by the confidence that editors inspired in me when they urged me to stretch, and the trust that colleagues showed me when they shared their close contacts and treasured routines. I’ve always felt that I came into science writing as an outsider, and it was the fellowship of other science writers that made me feel welcome and encouraged me to stay.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Aim to build your career; but even more, aim to be kind. Editors move and jobs end, but relationships last.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started working in radio in 1998, less than a decade after communism collapsed, and my country, Romania, opened its borders to the West. Back then, journalism was the most amazing job someone could have—after years of censorship, the media was finally free, and we could publicly speak our mind. Doing that was electrifying.
I was 13 in 1998. Being a straight-A student in school, I got the opportunity to work for an independent radio station that just opened an office in my hometown of Reghin, Transylvania. The station was looking for secondary school students to contribute to its weekly show for children.
I said I wanted to do a 3-minute segment on technology, covering cutting-edge things such as CD-ROMs, the Internet, or Windows 98. I had a little bit of coding experience (I learned BASIC at the Children’s Palace, a sort of Girl Scouts Club), so everyone thought I knew what I would be doing.
Since independent media was an elusive concept in Romania and across the former Eastern Bloc, nobody knew how to do radio. There were few journalism books, so everyone was playing by ear, learning by doing and from each other, trying to figure out things such as story structure or how to talk to listeners on air.
Yet, being live and trying to inspire kids my age to learn more about science and technology was something I saw myself doing my whole life—which is what happened.
My life has always been at the intersection of journalism, science, and technology. I got my B.Sc. in math and computer science while working as a full-time news editor, becoming the first in my family to graduate from university. And then, I received a master’s degree in communications, further merging the two fields I’m most passionate about.
I only became a freelancer in 2014, when I started to write science and technology pieces for international publications. Just like in 1998, I write about cutting-edge tech, and I know that I have so much to learn.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't be a lone wolf, learn from the pack. Build a community around you.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I've always had an interest in science, thanks to my grandparents and other elders explaining how the world works. They engaged in Indigenous science, which I learned later in life takes a whole-systems, holistic approach, whereas Western science approaches enquiries via a quantitative, modeling approach. But this just whetted my appetite to determine why two such disparate approaches resulted in similar conclusions. And, I was also hungry to learn why Indigenous scientists have been so disregarded by the mainstream. So I attended college with the goal of science writing in mind. Although life got in the way of my initial plans to engage in science writing full-time for a time, I've always gravitated toward science and environmental reporting.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Read, learn, and write—then start pitching!
How did you get your start writing about science?
I didn’t start my career intending to write about science, but I’m delighted to have wound up here.
Growing up, I just wanted to be a journalist, period—to read, write, learn, and somehow get paid. My entry into the industry was as traditional as it gets. I was a reporter and editor at my college paper, and interned at dailies all over the country (which, sadly, is an ever-dwindling option). Whatever got thrown my way, I wrote about it: elections, tuition debates, protests, concerts, zoning disputes, zoo animals.
One of my stops after college was the San Francisco Chronicle, where I did a reporting fellowship and mostly covered City Hall. When it came to an end, I wasn’t sure what my next move would be, though I did want a break from politics. In an absurdly lucky turn of events, a spot as a health reporter opened up, and my editors believed in me enough to give me that chance.
I can’t say that I came in with years of lab work or secret ambitions to be a doctor. I’d majored in comparative literature, and spent that time reading widely—from different nations, cultures, time periods. But all of it, along with my hands-on news experience, was useful. I learned how to find and tell stories about any subject, to recognize big themes in small details, and to be unafraid of jargon and complexity.
So I approached the health beat like any other: a foreign but fun challenge. To my surprise, it was a good fit right away. Talking to medical experts about their discoveries, and to patients about how those findings were changing their lives, felt deeply meaningful.
From there, I joined BuzzFeed News in 2015 and expanded my focus to include science. It’s a big umbrella, and I’ve gotten to chase my curiosity wherever it leads: from health-tech startups and biohackers, through vaping and food, to psychology and pharmaceuticals.
My favorite stories, though, explore themes that were on my mind long before I was on the science beat, like conflict, money, power, and accountability. How does industry funding influence research? Why does academic misconduct happen? And during a global pandemic, who suffers and who profits? On my best days, I’m digging into questions like these and sharing the answers with the rest of the world.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Talent and results are overrated. Focus on the work: Always be reporting, reading, thinking. Surround yourself with smart people. Take risks. Be patient!
How did you get your start writing about science?
My origin story is a testimony that our seemingly unshakable beliefs can be shaken to the core. I was born into an academic family. I wanted to be a professor who, like my parents, advances knowledge and teaches students. An academia career was the only thing that mattered. It was my destiny, or so I thought.
When I started to have doubts during my PhD, and when those doubts intensified during my postdocs, I was utterly and totally lost. It was my first mid-life crisis. I was in denial initially. I tried to convince myself it was just a phase. My parents tried to convince me that my research was important and meaningful. But I couldn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life. My heart was not in it.
I knew I couldn’t go on. But I had no idea what else I could or would like to do. I had never thought of any other career alternatives. Then one day, I came across a story of a prisoner-turned prison correspondent and my life was changed forever.
A habitual thief, Eric Allison had spent most of his life behind bars. He had not worked for 40 years and suddenly, at the age of 60, started a career as The Guardian’s first prison correspondent. Over the years and during his countless trips in and out of detention, Allison had become an activist advocating for prison conditions and campaigning for issues on racism and abuse in prison. After writing endless petitions and campaign leaflets, he realised that he got a similar buzz from writing as he did from stealing. I almost cried out: “That’s me! That’s exactly how I feel!” Well, not the buzz from stealing, of course. But the buzz from writing and the astonishing things one can do with words.
That was the beginning of my love affair with writing. I did an evening class on freelance journalism. I shadowed top journalists at The Guardian and The Times. I read all the major publications intensely for six months. I volunteered writing for BioMedNet and the Science Museum in London—before I sold my first stories to The Economist, Irish Times, and Nature. I did all these in evenings and at weekends for 3 years while I was a postdoc at King’s College London and then an associate editor at Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
It soon became clear that writing was a calling I could not resist and that I needed the freedom to explore my interest and potential as a writer. So I quit the editor job and became a full-time freelancer. I soon went back to Beijing, my hometown, to write about Chinese science. I’ve never looked back.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Sometimes it takes a leap of faith to ignore that little voice in me that constantly torments me with the question “what if I’m not cut out for it?”
How did you get your start writing about science?
As long as I can remember I was always writing. And though I loved reading fiction what I loved writing were my own detailed observations of the world. Writing, from a young age, was how I made sense of the world. How I took its irregularly shaped puzzle pieces and assembled them in a way that created a holistic vision of the world. Still, it took me awhile to find my way to writing about science—definitely after college. It was my interest in environmental issues that finally blended the two.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
It's easy to get distracted by the trappings of what you think you need to do as a science writer. Make sure to always bring it back to the work. Focus on the work.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I stumbled into science writing quite by accident. My kneejerk bit of advice to aspiring science writers is usually, "Don't be like me." That's not false modesty. The subtitle to the story of my bizarre career trajectory could best be summed up as, "How I Did Everything Wrong and Still Managed To Become A Successful Science Writer." My degree is in English lit, with a minor in journalism; I was editor of my college newspaper. I'd spent much of my college career avoiding science—which I'd quite enjoyed in high school—after a dreadful astronomy intro course put me off college-level courses. (I'd loved astronomy since I was a kid. For a lazy, curmudgeonly professor to crush my love so completely with just one class is quite a feat.) After moving to New York City to pursue graduate studies in literature, I soon concluded that the academic life was not for me. But leaving grad school left me rootless and floundering; I didn't really have a B plan. Fortunately, I ended up working for the American Physical Society (APS)—the largest U.S. professional organization for physicists—in an administrative role, just to pay the bills until I figured out what to do. This was at the tail end of my East Village Punk/Goth Girl phase. It's probably not a good idea to show up for meetings, or physics conferences, with purple hair, leggings, studded boots, and a black leather jacket. But the physicists didn't care what I wore, they cared about whether I was good at my job. And I was. They soon noted I was a good writer, too, and I began writing about physics for the APS, learning the subject pretty much in the job, thanks to a series of very patient mentors. I had no idea that science writing was even a viable career—yet it turned out to be perfect for me. I fell in love with writing about science, and physics in particular. Eventually I struck out on my own as a freelance science writer, initially writing for the science trade press and gradually branching into more mainstream popular science writing as my subject knowledge deepened and I honed my craft. All that experience, in turn, led to my first book, as well as setting up my blog, Cocktail Party Physics (now on hiatus, because my day job is all-consuming). Three more books followed, and a stint as science editor at Gizmodo. I am currently a senior staff writer for Ars Technica, covering science and culture—pretty much my dream job, TBH. Bonus: I met my spouse of 13 years (and counting) through our respective physics blogs.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Writing is first and foremost a craft; you get better by doing it. So start a blog, apply for internships/fellowships, write for the science trade press or local news outlets—anything to get those first few clips under your belt.
How did you get your start writing about science?
When I was 12 or so, I went on a reporting trip with my journalist dad into the heart of rural Colombia, with prior approval from the guerrilla of course, in search of an endangered yellow-eared parrot. We found them and we found the story. But I didn't find my calling. Not yet. After many years studying microbiology, I found myself disenchanted with the job I'd gotten out of college at a gene therapy lab building viruses and injecting mice. I started blogging, albeit poorly, about the scientific world outside of adenoviruses. And as I transitioned out of the lab, I picked up odd jobs all over New York City, each bringing me one step closer to science writing: burrito roller, TV commercial production assistant, Grateful Dead guitar teacher, hedge fund analyst, seed-stage biotech intern, Biotechniques news intern. The last, lasting three months, was my ticket into a producer role at the radio show Science Friday. A dream job! The rest is history.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
https://twitter.com/aleszubajak/status/979030017630982144?s=20
How did you get your start writing about science?
I got my start a decade ago by creating a blog called Facto Diem—now defunct—where I would write a post each day about an interesting scientific fact. Blogging allowed me to practice writing and finding topics while also generating clips that I could show editors. Meanwhile, I tutored first-year college physics students for money. The blog clips led to a handful of freelance magazine assignments and, within six months or so, to an internship at Science Illustrated and Popular Science, sister magazines that shared offices in New York City. The internship paid a meager $100 per week, so I sold my car, shook every last penny out of my piggy bank and moved to the big city. At SciIll/PopSci, I learned a ton about every aspect of magazine journalism from generous editors including Jen Abbasi, Martha Harbison, Bjorn Carey, and Mark Janot. When Bjorn left PopSci toward the end of my internship to run a science website called Life’s Little Mysteries (goofy name, fun site, now part of LiveScience.com), he brought me along as a staff writer. I started the job exactly a year after deciding to pursue science writing.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Write! If none will pay, write anyway and post publicly. Get clips out there that show what you can do; get practice so you know what, in fact, to do.
How did you get your start writing about science?
For about as long as I can remember, I envisioned becoming a scientist. I set my sights on paleontology at about the age of five—thanks Jurassic Park—and later developed interests in marine biology, entomology, genetics, and neuroscience. I ultimately ended up in a PhD program focused on pharmacology. I barely lasted a year and was miserable the entire time. It was the best mistake I ever made.
School was my forte, and I loved learning, but lab work ultimately bored me. I should have seen this coming after nearly two years of unfulfilling undergraduate research in a lab that studied bird eyeballs. My graduate school lab rotations weren’t any better, and professors openly questioned whether I was smart enough to succeed. My urge to earn a PhD obfuscated the obvious: I needed to quit the program, and probably leave lab work altogether.
By the middle of the spring semester I was scrambling for an escape hatch. I applied to entry-level lab jobs, and almost accepted a four year fellowship to become a high school science teacher, thinking, stupidly, that I might one day return to lab work and give the PhD another try. As the deadline approached, I stumbled upon the website for Boston University’s science journalism graduate program. I had a small science blog, and wanted to someday become the kind of scientist that writes books for the public. Yet until that moment, I had never seen the words “science journalism” strung together, yet alone thought of it as a career.
I applied to BU at the last minute. People told me I was making a mistake. Some worried that I was trading a lucrative career in science for meager writer’s wages, while others questioned why I’d want to write about what other people discover, rather than making the discoveries myself. Even some journalists that I met at a science writing conference during graduate school lamented that the golden age of science journalism had passed, and that the jobs had dried up.
Fortunately, I discovered that each of these arguments was at least partially flawed. And more importantly, I discovered that I loved journalism. I relish the excitement of constantly learning something new, and probing how people, politics, and money influence how science gets done. After a trio of internships, and many late nights, I landed at Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) in the fall of 2017, where I’ve covered biotechnology, drug discovery, and gene editing ever since.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don’t be discouraged. Take multiple internships to learn different writing styles. Use your experience to find stories that others are missing.
How did you get your start writing about science?
In my third year of grad school, I started a newsletter for my department, and then joined the editorial team of the Berkeley Science Review, which covers science news on campus. I also blogged a bit on Tumblr, and through PLOS's student blog platform. By my fifth year, I was sure I wanted to write full-time, so I applied for the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship and spent the summer at Slate. I went on to take a science communication job at a university, where I freelanced on the side to build clips; in that time, I also got invaluable mentorship through TON's early-career fellowship. Eventually, I left that job to go full-time freelance, which I've been doing ever since.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Connect with writers! There are many excellent written resources, but I've learned so much from talking with peers about their paths into science writing, their writing process, and what they struggle with.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was pursuing an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts, with what we called concentrations (basically focus areas) in English, biology, and chemistry. I had plans to go to medical school, but pivoted to science journalism in my final year as an undergrad. At that point, I tried writing about science for a lay audience as part of composition and biology classes. I also used my senior thesis as a way to further explore science writing—as part of it, I analyzed some award-winning pieces of science writing to better understand the elements that made them successful pieces.
But I got my formal start at Boston University's graduate program in science and medical journalism. I found going to a formal program to be beneficial because I had no prior journalism experience, and was also relatively new to science writing. I figured that a structured program would help bring me up to speed and also introduce me to all the different ways in which I could be a science writer. In my case, this route worked. When I started the program in 2011, BU was offering it as a three-semester program, so I was immersed in quite a range of topics, from news and feature writing to documentary making and other forms of multimedia journalism. The connections I made through the program were also helpful, as folks who came to speak to the class often advertised internships, and that really helped jump-start my career after graduation.
Harvard Medical School's multimedia director at the time was one person who came to speak to the class, and my first internship was at the School's office of communications. A reporter from Nature Medicine also spoke to our cohort, and I tried (and failed) twice to get an internship. But that helped familiarize folks there with my work. So, when a job opportunity opened up a couple of years later, they reached out and encouraged me to apply (and it was a job I ended up staying in for nearly five years).
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Few—especially minority journos—can follow a "good story" without thinking about rent, our health, etc. It's okay to prioritize these alongside your craft.
How did you get your start writing about science?
My path to being the news editor at a science magazine began with two key initial conditions: I like science, and I have a short attention span.
I went to university to study science, and majored in chemistry. As my undergraduate went by, however, I grew increasingly bored as I saw the scope of what I was learning narrowing. Where at first I was studying a huge range of things—physics, biology, chemistry—later on it was largely different flavours of one. I realized that if I stayed in science, if I kept going to be a chemist, it would just get more and more focused. That wasn’t going to work for me.
Disillusioned, I started slipping in my classes, and the school set me up to meet with a guidance counselor. I told her that I still liked science, but I hated the looming specialization. She asked if I’d ever thought about science writing, and I said I’d always cherished my subscription to Discover Magazine and the Canadian Discovery Channel show Daily Planet. She suggested I look in to science writing and science journalism. On her advice I changed programs, switching from chemistry to a more general “physical sciences.”
Now I knew where I was going, but I had none of the skills to get there. I had no idea how to write. So I started volunteering at my campus newspaper, and read the copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Journalism that my dad got me. I applied to journalism schools, and was eventually accepted into Western University.
Western didn’t offer a specialized science writing program like you can find in the United States, but I did my best to twist each assignment so that I could write about science. My big goal was to work for Daily Planet, so I specialized in television journalism, and even got to spend a month writing for the show as a co-op placement. I also got permission from the school to conduct an independent study project on science journalism theory rather than take one of the offered courses. As I researched and wrote about the science of science communication, I published it all on my blog.
Fortunately, those blog posts caught the attention of the American Geophysical Union, where I had just applied for a paid science writing internship. The AGU chose me for the program, and after navigating a number of hurdles at the border, I was off to the District of Columbia for my first ever position as a science writer.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Avoid press releases. If you’re pitching a story based on one, others are too. Look to smaller journals for interesting research that isn’t getting such saturated attention.
How did you get your start writing about science?
When I was in my second year of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I attended the keynote talk of the university's Science Writer in Residence program. It had never before occurred to me that people were paid to write about science and it was an epiphany for me to realize I could pursue it as a career. The following semester, my program offered a brand new class, Communicating Controversial Topics in Science, taught by the science and environment reporter at the local newspaper. I took the class and gained a foundation in news writing. I subsequently learned about and applied for the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship. I was lucky to be chosen for the fellowship in 2011 and spent my summer writing for the Chicago Tribune. From the minute I walked into the newsroom I knew I had made the right career move. I earned a terminal master's degree from my PhD program and became a newspaper reporter within months of completing the fellowship, at the state paper in Delaware (The News Journal). I am now director of research communications at UW–Madison, where I write about science and help manage a team of writers covering the research landscape of the university. I also freelance and have been The Open Notebook's engagement editor since May 2019.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Want a career in science writing? Read, write, repeat. Check out fellowship opportunities. Join @ScienceWriters.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Ever since I was a child, I have found science fascinating. Growing up with a scientist mom, I played with lab mice and looked at weird things under the microscope for fun. I enrolled in a biomedical research program at university. In the last year of my bachelor’s, I fell in love with neuroscience. So, I started reading news and features about it, and I slowly found myself falling in love, again, with science communication.
My first endeavor in science writing was writing a blog post for Historias Cienciacionales, a science blog produced by some friends. Without much thought, I proposed to them a story about the brain and storytelling (I didn’t know what pitching was at the time).
I slowly realized I really enjoyed writing, but I only saw it as a hobby at that point. That was until a colleague convinced me to apply for a travel fellowship offered by the NASW to attend the 2015 AAAS annual meeting. The meeting was a turning point for me because I saw first-hand that science journalism is a serious job.
I continued to write as a freelancer and my stories kept getting published. Before I knew it, I was offered to write a column in a new science and technology magazine, I published my first feature story in the most famous science magazine in the country, and became a correspondent to Medscape’s Spanish edition. Along with the few and dispersed science journalists in the country, we formed the Mexican Network of Science Journalists in January of 2016.
All of this, while I was still doing experiments in the lab.
Then, I was chosen as one of the 2017 The Open Notebook early-career fellows. During this fellowship, I got to work with mentors and editors who taught me the very basic things of journalism. The TON fellowship was crucial for me: It gave me a purpose, it made me realize that I could make a living out of writing, and that there are kind people in the science writing community that want to help you find your way. But after being heavily edited, I also realized I needed some serious training. With no career-development options in Mexico, I decided to enroll in the master’s program in science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz after finishing undergrad.
Grad school gave me the opportunity to intern at a local newspaper and at Knowable, and gave me the necessary tools to do print, digital, multimedia, and investigative journalism. It also helped me get important internships at Science, Quanta, and Inside Science. All of this allowed me to jumpstart my career when I came back to Mexico as a correspondent for Science, where I focus my reporting on diversity in STEM.
Through journalism, I get to share cool, impactful discoveries with a curious audience. But I also get to talk about some of the uncomfortable realities about academia and research, with the hope to make science a more welcoming and equitable career for everyone.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don’t overthink and start writing—it’s the first and most important step. Forget about your impostor syndrome, structure, impatient editors, and tight deadlines for some hours, and just type. The rest will follow. Also, reach out to other science journalists—you’ll find a generous community eager to see you thrive.
How did you get your start writing about science?
Another Friday morning, another bone seminar. Every week, our far-flung labs would gather for a lecture aimed to unite us in the world of skeletal research. The problem was, I wanted out. I’d already started taking evening journalism classes, but didn’t know what to do next.
Usually on these Friday mornings, I sat in the back, pen in hand, notebook on my lap, waiting for the lights to go down, my mind already divided in half. From the outside, I looked dedicated enough to take notes. In reality, only a small part of my brain paid enough attention to the lecture, in case I had to comment on it later. The rest of me wrote. I wrote bits of essays, and drafts of homework assignments from my classes.
On this Friday, I actually looked forward to the lecture. We had a guest speaker—Millie Hughes-Fulford, an astronaut and a bone specialist, who flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first such mission dedicated solely to biology. By the end of the seminar, I knew with certainty that every hour in the lab was one hour too long—that I would rather write about science and the adventures of scientists, than decode the lives of osteoblasts and osteoclasts.
Later that morning, when Dr. Fulford visited the lab, I took a gulp and told her that I was transitioning into journalism. When the time came, could I interview her about her work? She graciously said yes. I doubled down on selling the stories I’d written in my journalism classes. And then I heard about a job opening for a science writer in the university’s media office. I applied. After four hours of interviews, I could tell that they were seriously considering me, and I thought, if they think I can do this, then I can freelance. I also knew that in three months, a bone meeting I’d attended as a scientist was coming to St. Louis. I applied for press credentials, and started selling stories ahead of the conference. By the time the conference opened, I was out of the lab and in the press room as a freelancer.
And I did interview Dr. Fulford for my first big feature: a story about what happens to our bones during space travel, for the late, great web magazine HMSBeagle. I called it “Heavenly Bodies.”
After the story was published, Dr. Fulford sent me a thank-you note, written on a card holding an image of Earth that she’d taken during her mission. I still have it.
My regret is not in leaving the lab, only in staying far too long.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
My single best advice for early science writers comes from the character Mathesar in the movie Galaxy Quest: “Never give up never surrender.”
How did you get your start writing about science?
I was a biochemistry major, and between my junior and senior years of college I was working in a lab and it became clear that not only did I not have a knack for bench work, but I found it kind of tedious. So I was thinking about what else I might do, and I'd always liked writing, so I thought I might be able to combine my interests in science and writing—so far, so cliché. I didn't know any science writers, or have any idea of who I might ask for advice on how to become one, but I did a search for science writing graduate programs and ended up applying to the four I found. I also started doing some writing during my senior year for an online publication called the Journal of Young Investigators, which gave me some of my first feedback and editing outside of a class-assignment setting. Those articles were probably my first published work.
I got into the UC Santa Cruz science writing program, and that's where I learned the basics of journalism. I applied for a lot of internships for the summer after the program ended, and the one I ended up getting was at the particle accelerator CERN outside Geneva, Switzerland. They were in the process of building a new accelerator at the time and there wasn't a lot of interesting science going on there, but it was a memorable experience anyway. I helped with an event where the then-head of the UN sent an email from the world's first web server, for example.
I hadn't landed another job or internship by the time my fellowship at CERN ended, so I went backpacking around Europe for a few months, checking my email and applying for jobs in internet cafes because this was before smartphones or widespread wifi. At one point, feeling discouraged and thinking I should keep my options open, I applied for a PhD program in biochemistry from an internet cafe in a subway station in Munich. Eventually I went home to my parents' house in Colorado, got a part-time job at a state park, and studied for the foreign service exam (another backup plan). I finally landed my second full-time science writing internship, this one at Stanford Medicine. Days before that started, I was offered my first "real" science communication job, as the only comms person at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca. They were gracious enough to let me do the Stanford internship I'd committed to first.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Don't be afraid to make unconventional choices. Your career path doesn't need to look like anyone else's.
How did you get your start writing about science?
It took me longer than it should have to realize that I didn’t belong at the bench. I was three years into a PhD with zero clue what to do next. So I contacted the only alum from my lab who hadn’t become a professor or a pharmaceutical company researcher to ask about her job. One introduction led to another. Eventually, I found a path forward when I met a science writer. She described a career where it was possible to learn about all kinds of new research. It sounded perfect, because I was constantly switching research fields.
From that point, I focused on finding writing opportunities while finishing my degree as a way of hedging my bets. My original contact helped me land a column for AWIS Magazine. I audited a science journalism course and wrote for my university’s press office. To practice writing on my own schedule, I started a blog. Before graduation, I applied to something like 50 jobs and internships. The response was mostly polite rejection, but Chemical & Engineering News took a chance and hired me. That job taught me how to write news and features, and I got to dabble in multimedia projects and audience engagement. I worked there for seven years before becoming a freelancer and working with publications including Science News, Scientific American, and Forbes.
I’ve occasionally taken another staff job, but the ability to set my own project mix keeps luring me back to freelance life. Not that I have this career thing all figured out. I most assuredly do not. But now I know to reach out to my network whenever I’m itching to make a change.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Try writing on for size. Pick the platform you scroll through for fun and make it your sandbox. Start today.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started studying medicine but then I moved to journalism school. When I came to El Espectador newspaper, I didn't know that those two sides of my brain could be connected thanks to science journalism. One story led me to another and when I realized it, all I wanted to do was write stories about science, health, and nature.
I think science journalism became the glue to unite my taste for different areas of science. If throughout my education everyone had insisted on creating categories of thought that were disconnected from one another, science journalism taught me to connect them. It also became a way to help advance science in my country.
From then until today when I sit around a coffee or a beer with science journalists and listen to them laugh and tell stories, I understand why I decided to belong to this species full of curiosity about the world around them.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
You always know when you made a mistake. It's just that sometimes you don't hear that inner voice that warns.
How did you get your start writing about science?
My story is a common one: I came to science journalism via science, and after a slow realization that research would do little to satisfy my curiosities.
My mother writes fiction and poetry but, growing up in India, I was drilled to think anyone who is good at science is obligated to become a doctor. So, when I came to the U.S. for college, I dutifully became a chemistry major, even as I took classes in Milton and Chaucer. Like many other science journalists, it wasn’t until I was in a PhD program (in my case, for biochemistry) that I found the idea of life in a lab deadly dull.
In my third year of grad school, I came across Deborah Blum’s Monkey Wars, and it’s no exaggeration to say that book changed my life. I realized it was possible to write about science and imbue it with as much drama as in a novel. I also interviewed Deborah for a local radio show (called, don’t laugh, The Perpetual Notion Machine) and was sold on the idea of journalism.
To unlearn all my bad science writing habits (passive voice, jargon) and make valuable contacts (networking does matter), I enrolled in the science journalism program at New York University. As a foreign national with no bank balance, my options for internships and jobs were limited. Some I took out of desperation, some for money, some really because I had no clue where to go next.
But I learned valuable skills at each. I worked at a community newspaper—which taught me to be fast, fair, and very, very clear—an internet startup where I adopted inbox zero and, finally, the first online news for scientists, BioMedNet News, where I wrote an article nearly every day. To this day, I can bang out a 400-word news story in an hour.
Trade publications are more willing to hire foreign nationals than mainstream magazines, and I moved from BioMedNet to Nature, and then to launch Spectrum, an autism site I led for 13 years. More lessons: Accuracy is paramount to credibility; scientists have flaws and foibles like everyone else; there are incredible stories—and indelible beauty—in the tiniest of details.
Nearly 20 years after I started, I’m back at a newspaper. I wrote story after story about the West Nile Virus then, and I’m writing them now about the coronavirus. I couldn’t have predicted I would end up at The New York Times, although I certainly hoped I might. But my career shows there is no one path. Do what you want to, or what you need to. Just keep showing up, and keep writing.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Writing is a craft. The only way to become a writer, and to get better at it, is to write as much as you can—even if it's just for yourself.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I pursued a degree in environmental science from Tribhuvan University in 2005. Fascinating earth science had then newer and worrisome stories of climate change in the age of Anthropocene—an epoch created by the humans in a very short time. Determined to be a scientist at the beginning, I had a feeling that telling these complex stories to all is equally important. One day I rushed to a local radio station to participate in a radio program called Show Your Talent and demonstrated how I would host a program. They liked it very much so I grabbed an opportunity to ask them if they would be interested to allow me to host a science program. Yes, the answer was. What good news for me, but I didn’t know how to do it. However, I learned quickly a bit, and then managed to prepare a demo of the show I would like to do and named it Bishwo Bigyan (World Science). But I could not survive there for long, as they used to pay just about 5 USD per show per week.
My father died before my birth, so I was raised in an absolute poverty by a single mother who brought me from a remote village in western Nepal to the capital city, Kathmandu. So, I had a huge pressure to earn for my living and support my mother. My first science venture didn’t show me a brighter pathway as it wasn’t possible to earn bread and butter. Though it was financially stressful, my program was received quite well. People used to send me letters with questions, wishes, and their expectations for future shows that kept me searching for better opportunities. Later I joined the largest radio network of Nepal, but I still did not have enough time to delve into issues I wanted to, as I had to run the shows, ranging from music to current affairs. So in 2009, I jumped to a newspaper called The Himalayan Times, with hope to do in-depth reporting with a focus on earth science. It proved to be a right pathway.
Later, I became probably the first science reporter in mainstream media of Nepal when BBC Nepali (BBC’s Nepali service) hired me as a science reporter in 2013. I have written for several national and international outlets in the last one and a half decades. Currently, I write for a South Asian environmental online publication, www.thethirdpole.net. Besides, I work as South Asia Content Coordinator for a global network of environmental journalists, Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, which has more than 10,000 members globally. The journey has been tough but I'm still surviving, so it is possible to tell science stories.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
If you want to be a science journalist, do not wait for it to happen as it starts only when you produce a story. The journalism world needs you.
How did you get your start writing about science?
I started in 2012 when I was an undergraduate. I joined an NGO named "Zewail City Friends" at that time and volunteered to manage their Facebook page. That was my starting point with science communication. I wrote about science stories, tried to simplify theories and science concepts to public audiences through the Facebook pages. Later, I engaged in organizing science events and initiatives for the public. I created my own science website/blog in Arabic in 2013, Then I started to work with some websites as a science blogger. My first paid article was in 2014 with Arageek.com, one of the largest youth websites in MENA. Then I worked with science websites including SciDev.Net MENA, For Science (the Arabic version of Scientific American), Huffpost Arabia, and others. In 2019 I worked as Editor in Chief of the Arabic version of Popular Science magazine, PopSci.ae. I worked for a year and a half, creating 10X growth in readership then quit to focus on my personal science communication projects like Science Journalism Forum.
My advice for people breaking into science writing:
Practice makes perfect. Know your audience, select a segment, build your own channel or page, start writing, and follow the comments. The best time to start doing that is NOW.
