Monday, June 3, 2019
By:
My first attempts at science writing weren’t Pulitzer stuff. My second grade teacher tasked me with explaining how robots work in an essay. I thought I got pretty close, but Mrs. Long wasn’t buying that they ran on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was a decent kind of start.
I now have the privilege to be the Physics Today science writing intern. Coming into the job, I didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect. I met my mentor once in an interview over an obscure video chat app (Zilch? Zoom? Who comes up with this stuff?) and didn’t have any contact with him after that. I jokingly told people that I would be fetching coffee, but as the day to arrive in D.C. neared, I started to take the joke more seriously.
Finally, it was time. I finished undergrad and without a moment for the most cursory of existential crises about employment was whisked away across the Mason-Dixon line. The land down here is beautiful. I thought my home state New Mexico was the undisputed queen of the dramatic sunset, but the pink-and-golden castle of clouds outside the window of the budget bus carrying me to D.C. was alright, I guess. If anyone from New Mexico is reading this, I’d like to apologize for my treachery but still recommend you take a trip to our nation’s capital. The Mexican food isn’t even that bad here.
I was too late for the pizza social when I arrived, and the post-sunset Target trip wasn’t a great opportunity to socialize, but I got to meet most of the other interns at the Memorial Day parade the next day. I’d like to pause for a second to recognize the incredible young people with whom I’m sharing the summer. The blog posts from SPS interns of previous years, especially the entries near the end of their summers, all mourn the loss of daily contact with their fellow interns. Reading those over, I was excited to meet such charming people, but ultimately I was smug. “No,” I told myself in a stupidly masculine moment, “that won’t be me tearfully composing a blog in ten weeks’ time.” About halfway through the first day with these funny, lovely, sharp-as-a-tack young scientists, I thought, “Oh, OK. I see it now.”
But that’s the future. For now, I still have nine weeks with the 2019 SPS group and at Physics Today where, as it turns out, I’m not fetching coffee. I spent the first week analyzing the online magazine, figuring out which made each sections’ articles tick, and writing potential social media posts for popular articles. I was aware that all of this was training but part of me was still surprised I was doing this much this quickly. I thought “errand boy” would be a pretty apt description for my first couple of days, but Andrew—one of the online editors for the magazine and my wonderful mentor—already had me digging through texts and getting a feel for the style.
On Friday, Andrew came to my cubicle (I have a cubicle!) to give me weekend work. He told me to look over the Research and Technologies section and get a feel for it in the way I’ve been doing for other parts of the magazine. He told me that we could go over my notes on Monday. I assumed the next thing he’d say would be that I would keep working on my rolling assignments once I were done with those articles, but what he said next—with a grin—was: “We can maybe get you started writing one.”
My heart leapt: I’m doing science writing. This is it.
I’m very much looking forward to the next nine weeks with my fellow interns, and I’m trying to think about goodbyes as little as possible. Working with Physics Today has been more fulfilling than I could have hoped for. I was even invited to a pitch meeting coming up on Tuesday. They seem like a pretty open-minded crowd, but even still, I think I might keep my peanut butter and jelly theory to myself.
Jeremiah O'Mahony