Note: Professor Holly Stocking's J554 Science Writing class traveled to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco last month. Students covered and reporting on presentations as well as wrote their reflections on the experience. Below are some of those.


Ken Kingery
It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.

The old adage, it turns out, is true in science writing as well as other fields. On my first day at the AAAS conference, I was lucky enough to meet and talk to Kurt Riesselmann, the deputy head of the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After a brief conversation about particle physics and scheduling a meeting to visit the lab, he informed me of an internship available at the lab and suggested I apply

I was actually aware of the internship but had been told a month before that the position was frozen due to budget restraints. But Riesselmann assured me that funding had come through the government and the position was once again available.

Later that weekend, I was standing and socializing with a group of people and Riesselmann passed by. He made a point to stop and say hi, calling me by name. It was a small gesture and may not have meant much, but it made me feel accepted and hopeful of a future internship at the lab.

Ken Kingery is a journalism graduate student.


Maria Karapetyan
Even on our way out of San Francisco, we found ourselves talking science, this time applying our newly developed skills as science writers in a “non-scientific world.”

Crammed in the shuttle on our way to the San Francisco International Airport, we became the target of a former chemist-turned-salesman’s last attempt to sell his company’s new project – a chemical compound used to produce cancer-treating drug. After a couple of days of talking, interviewing, listening and observing scientists, science writers and journalists, we were fast to use our experience in an informal chat with our fellow passenger.

Curious, but skeptical, we asked questions about the drug. Delighted to answer our questions, the stranger was even more delighted when one of us suggested a business-card exchange — something we had come to see as another very important practice.

Assuming, wrongly, that our shuttle moment was going to be the last science drop on our trip, we soon got engaged in yet another scientific conversation with a different stranger — this time at the airport terminal. An older man, a retired physicist, jumped into our animated discussion of global warming and climate change, offering his opinion — which by now we all disagreed with — that there is no such thing as global warming.

Both incidents exemplified the contrast between the science world we had spent a couple of days in and the world we were coming back to, making us even more aware of the importance of communicating science to the larger public in an accurate way.

Attending AAAS annual meeting put the entire science writing course into a real life perspective. It made me realize both the need for science writers and the importance of science writing.

Maria Karapetyan is a journalism graduate student.


Ben Blackman
Saturday afternoon, I went to an unsurprisingly well-attended lecture on stress, health and coping by well-known neurobiologist and author Dr. Robert Sapolsky. The small lecture room could hold about 200 people, but twice as many were trying to fit. I fortunately arrived early enough to nab a spot standing behind the last row of chairs. Many others were stuck in the sprawling overflow out the door in back of me.

Just before the lecture began, a small woman dressed all in black deftly eased her way through the crowd and squeezed herself into the narrow space beside me. Curious about this person who showed little apology for displacing numerous others there before her, I glanced over at her nametag. It said, "Claudia Dreifus, New York Times."

As this is someone who has made a strong career interviewing scientists for the Times, I was a more than a little star struck. Actually, I was also fascinated because her demeanor was so different from what I imagined based on her written voice.

So when, in the middle of the lecture, a divider was removed to allow spillover into the adjacent room, I kept tabs on her. As the crowd readjusted, she hustled her way through and impressively garnered a seat in the second row of the new section.

Following the interruption, the talk continued and soon it was time for questions. Dreifus asked one. While the question may have been noteworthy both for its incisiveness and for Sapolsky’s deft response, it was most notable to me for what this journalist did next.

As Sapolsky responded, a man in the first row, directly in front of the podium, rose to leave. Immediately, even though Sapolsky was answering the question she herself had posed for the audience, Dreifus jumped up, propelled her way between the two people sitting in front of her and scurried over to the seat.

Thus, minutes later, when the session adjourned, the New York Times reporter hopped up from her chair and had no competition for getting Sapolsky’s undivided attention. Her undeterred ambition had paid off completely.

Ben Blackman is a graduate student in biology.



See the list of other student essays.

Read the main story, "Students attend, cover science conference."