About my current job
I commission and edit feature-length journalistic articles on all aspects of biology, including neuroscience. This includes searching for stories of interest to the general scientific community, commissioning them (occasionally writing them myself), working with the writer to refine the piece and working with the art team to illustrate it, devise and create graphics, source photos. I also advise other colleagues on neuroscience stories given my background.
Something important I learned during my time at EP
During my MSc research projects I learned the value, the excitement and the frustration of working on a question for which there isn't yet an answer. So much of my learning up to the point of arriving at university had been absorbing established facts and figures. Then as an undergraduate I developed my ability to critique and analyse. But it wasn't until I was given the chance to help out with real research, real experiments, real data, that I realised how new facts are made and the amount of sweat, ingenuity, tedium and debate that goes into each.
How did my education influence my career path?
Heavily. In my job as a science journalist. I rely on the skills I developed and the things I learned during my MSc course. Of course I learned a great deal about how the brain works, but I also learned how to read research papers carefully and critically, and the rudiments of how to conduct an experiment and begin to interpret the results. Without those skills I would find it much harder to pick out stories of interest to our audience and report or edit them well.
I also must be honest - I made the very helpful discovery during my MSc that I loved research, but that somebody else should do it and I should find a way to stay near the bench, rather than at it. I loved telling my friends what my projects were about, in general terms - about how the human brain creates language - but I found I did not have the requisite amount of patience or enough of a head for data to continue on to a PhD. I'm eternally grateful that I had the chance to find that out, though, and to road-test science and journalism (by writing for the Cherwell) before pursuing my career.
Fond memory of my time at EP
Halway through a practical involving Drosophila, my lab partner and I accidentally used too small a dose of either to knock out the flies and half of them escaped from the vessel they were in, dozily buzzing off into the lab to our surprise and dismay. we soldiered on regardless, ompiling our results on their coloration - but our methodology was shappy and I wouldn't have trusted our results!
