Many scicomm careers are impossible to replicate

But that doesn't mean you can't have a scicomm career yourself!

Every shot in this composite image is me at a distinct stage of my scicomm career. In every stage, I though that was it. Some of the stages even had recognizable names: outdoor educator, community garden manager, communications staff for a research group, journalist, artist, professor, instructor. Spoiler: *none* of the stages was the final one.

I have recently received multiple emails from folks looking for scicomm career advice—how to interview more effectively, how to get a career like mine, etc., etc.

Since I’m on sabbatical right now, I’m really protecting my time. But, fortunately, I’ve written and talked a fair bit about my career paths, and the reality that my career has meeeeandered. I’ll share links to all that below. The key takeaway, though, is that what I do now isn’t something I could have planned for. I didn’t even know this kind of role existed until late in 2020, after working in academia for 5 years and adjacent to it for roughly a decade more. And, technically, what I do now is mostly an invented position, too. That makes it harder to aim towards having such a role.

I tell you that not just to caution against aiming for my current role. This is what you’re likely to hear if you talk with most folks who do scicomm, offer scicomm trainings, and/or study scicomm…unless they are a communications researcher or grad student based in a communications department [1]. The short story is that most folks you see doing/talking about scicomm aren’t trained communications researchers. Which means that most folks you see or would want to query about their career path into scicomm are going to tell you what I did—that they didn’t plan to do what they’ve done and that there’s no set roadmap for getting to where they are.

Certainly you can learn a lot from talking to individuals or reading the extensive research literature on what motivates and retains scientists doing science [2]. But the honest career advice is: it depends; be very agile; say yes to opportunities that compel you, even if they aren’t fully legible as career moves. AND BECOME A VERY GOOD, ADAPTABLE WRITER AND SPEAKER. All caps because those are the most transferable job and civic skills, and they’ll (help) open the door to virtually anything you have an instinct to try.

Here are the places online where I’ve talked about my career path. You’ll see those key takeaways show up in every one:

• https://www.commnatural.com/post/sciart-how-do-i-get-into-a-career-like-yours

• https://www.commnatural.com/post/not-being-a-scientist-made-me-a-better-scientist

• https://www.commnatural.com/post/article-in-the-space-between-public-information-officers-in-science

• https://www.commnatural.com/post/the-tension-and-inspiration-of-place-a-conversation-about-writing-learning

• https://www.commnatural.com/post/drawn-to-science-communication-art-science-synergy-as-a-career-and-a-way-of-life

One thing to note, though: those links don’t really get at what I do now-now. They are from the POV of a few years ago, when my work primarily emphasized art-science integration. While that is still an active area of my research and personal activities, it’s not the central focus of my academic work right now. You’ll get more of a sense of my current academic emphases by scanning recent-ish posts on my newsletter/blog and listening to the archive from Meteor: The (Overly) Honest Podcast about Scicomm with Impact (which I co-host with scicomm pro extraordinaire Virginia Schutte).

All that to say:

1. What I have done in the past professionally primed me to be more effective at my current work.

2. But I really don’t think anyone can (or would want to) assume that my widely varied career paths serve as a realistic model.

Above all, the keys to my current “castle” are hanging on the front door of the Dynamic Ecology blog, which has an incredible archive of advice about becoming an academic in ecology and related professions. (Other great blogs on that theme are Tenure She Wrote, along with The Thesis Whisperer and Science is for Everyone.)

Why???

As wild as it is to say it out loud, these days, my work is actually very much like a regular, tenure-track professor. The key distinction is that as a Professor of Practice I’m in a non-tenure-track role, and I focus on an aspect of science that is extremely devalued; administrators have spent ten years using these attributes as an excuse to ensure I have little job security and much lower compensation than tenure-track colleagues in my department. Apart from those (significant) differences, I’m responsible for teaching, research, administration, etc., just like a typical professor.

My route to this position, however, was anything but typical. I’ve written about that in those posts linked above and talk about that extensively on my newsletter/blog and podcast.

Lastly, on LinkedIn, I frequently re-post job ads that would likely be relevant to anyone looking for work in and adjacent to scicomm. And, when I’m back from sabbatical, the Scicomm Initiative I direct will resume weekly publishing of a newsletter that features jobs, resources, grants, etc., etc. Folks looking for jobs—or even a sense of the range of what could be a scicomm job—can track those outlets.

How about you?

How did you get into/interested in scicomm? Did you anticipate that interest? What helped you feel more prepared for doing work in this field?

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[1] The honest truth is that the comms folks don’t really seem to overlap much with most of the rest of the universe of scicomm, and vice versa. We can get into the nuance of that another day.

[2] as a scicomm research/practice/training nerd, I heartily encourage you to read that research base!