First Post

"If you want to be a writer, then you should write.  That's what writers do."

Or so I've been told.  And it makes sense.  Therefore, it's time for me to overcome my phobia of most things technical and start an online blog.

As a PhD student and aspiring science journalist (and on the personal side, a mountaineer and a musician), I'm trying to juggle my research with active steps toward building up experience in writing about science and research.  As far as I can tell so far, this seems to involve some combination of reading, networking, schmoozing with editors, begging to do unpaid work, agonising over the wording of a pitch, and writing.  But not enough of the last one.  There should be more writing!

A good friend of mine from the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club (a source of many good friends and inspiring people) blogs about his own zoological research and related findings.  A journalism mentor from Science Careers pointed out that by spending just a half hour each day writing about science, I could learn a lot about writing about science.  In a discussion over Thanksgiving dinner about why people write academic articles, my Scottish mountaineering friend argued that it's done to share information about a topic that is worth sharing.

With a tendency to get pigeon-holed into my own area of research, I need to pay more attention to interesting science that's going on in other areas not only related to my own field of geophysics, but to broader areas of research.  This blog's purpose is to provide an outlet to write about interesting science, ask some questions, and hopefully attract the attention of other folks who will comment and bleed over what I've said.