I am a graduate of the science journalism program at Boston University.
I send in story ideas or “pitch” editors and write on commission once they give me the go-ahead. (Sending in the entire story worked only for this fictional character created by R.K. Narayan “The Universal Correspondent.”)
In the same week, I could be interviewing a MacArthur Genius about gravitational waves, researching why asafetida fell out of favor in European cuisines, or getting a sneak preview of a science-based art installation in Cambridge. I am also a correspondent for the careers section of Science.
No news story has written itself for me, thus far. I say this not as a complaint, but as a boast. As a science journalist, I work hard to file good articles or copy as we say in the business. I translate jargon into narrative for a living. I have to coax intelligible sentences out of some very smart scientists, so I can make sense to my readers. I am also a book critic and I focus on science-related books.
There are many, many paths to science journalism. Here is mine:
I studied at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, a sylvan campus with banyan tree-lined avenues. The wildlife here made for an everyday safari if one had the eyes to see it. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I was part of the finishing team on the Human Genome Project. (A quick roundup on what has been achieved thus far thanks to the mapping of the genome.)
Being part of a big science project was exciting, but analyzing strings of A, C, G and T all day — the four letters represent the nucleotides that constitute the DNA — could, and did, get mind-numbingly boring. Surely, there was more to the alphabet! I signed up for an evening writing class at MIT. Soon, I enrolled in the graduate program for Science Journalism at Boston University.
I have peer-reviewed publications but they are a souvenir from my lab days. These days, I write for a general audience. You will find my work online, or in magazines and newspapers you can buy at the news stand.
It is a good life! Most of the time, at least. Let’s not get carried away here…
I live within walking distance of Harvard and MIT. So much going on -- so much science, so little time to turn all this good stuff into stories. It is a wonderful world!
