botany, shoes, books, and justice
The Sword of Damocles by Richard Westall
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett:
“We could live like kings on a dollar a day, Arnold.”
“What, you mean someone’d chop our heads off?”
“No, I –”
“Someone’d climb up inside the privy with a red-hot poker and –”
“No! I meant –”
“Someone’d drown us in a butt of wine?”
“No, that’s dying like kings, Arnold.”
Several months ago, my aunt asked me a bunch of questions about climate change. I answered her here in a serious of carefully researched posts, many of which took me hours to write. Her answer? “You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to” with a link to an abc news story insinuating that snow in winter means climate change science is bunk. At first I was angry with my aunt. She’s not stupid, but I gave her the data and she didn’t change her mind! What’s wrong with her!
But reading back through those posts, I realize that I forgot something very, very important about science communication:
Communicating science means telling a story. Communicating science well means telling a good story.
This is not an easy thing to do, but doing it well pays off. Every format – a blog post, a phone call, a book – requires the story to be tweaked and edited. One of the formats that I’m most comfortable telling stories in is the scientific poster. Making a good poster is trickier than you might think. Posters are a bit like haiku – you’ve got a very small amount of space and not a lot of flexibility in structure, but you need to get across a whole lot.
sickle moon –
reaping
the emptiness– Gabriel Rosenstock
In a haiku every single word is chosen with exceptional care: each carries a wealth of meaning and a heavy structural burden. The same is true of elements of a poster; everything included must be necessary and information rich without seeming complex or crowded.
my dead brother…
hearing his laugh
in my laughter-Nick Virgili
My first poster was a complete disaster. Ugly, confusing, overwhelming, and boring.
My posters since have gotten much better. I start each poster now thinking of the moral of my story – the one (short) sentence version of the research finding I want to share. Then, I outline the plot – why do we care? what do we need to know to understand the topic? what data makes my point? where did my data come from? Anything that doesn’t contribute to the moral of the story is cut.
There’s a lot more that goes into getting this on the poster in a visually appealing way, but all that is easier once you’ve pared the story down.
Photo by John Ingold. Artist not credited.
by Brian Dettmer
Like the old weekly top 5, but with less work (and fewer songs.)
My first grad school visit was a lot of fun: lots of exciting science conversations, casual dinners, and even a little field trip. The interviews were pretty informal – I only felt like I was being interviewed for about 5 minutes of the entire weekend. I also got to dress up most days, which was fun for me. Unfortunately, there was so much walking that I didn’t dare bring out my extra fabulous shoes and stuck to some stylish, but practical, flat boots.
A friend of mine told me she wishes she’d applied to more graduate schools just so she could have gone to more places to interview. I kind of thought she was crazy, but now I get it. I met so many interesting grad students and professors! My ecological network just got a lot bigger.
Migraine conversations with my prospective advisor and the professor that manages TA assignments went very well. I’d briefly mentioned it in one of my essays, so it wasn’t the first time they’d heard about the problem, which helped. I had time to sit down with both of them and explain how I might be limited and to discuss how we could work around the problem. They were more than accommodating.
The advice I got from you readers here really helped! I heard that I impressed a lot of people I spoke with. To be honest, that kind of surprised me; I felt like I did a lot more listening than talking, a lot more question asking than talking about my own experience/knowledge, and said I don’t understand more than a few times. But who am I to argue with fancypants scientists if they liked me?
From the field trip
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett:
“We’ve always looked beyond the walls for the invaders,” he said. “We always thought change came from outside, usually on the point of a sword. And then we look around and find that it comes from the inside of the head of someone you wouldn’t notice in the street. In certain circumstances it may be convenient to remove the head, but there seem to be such a lot of them these days.”
I’ve got lots to share with you – how my first grad school interview went, what I think of Anthony Trollope, culling my show collection, an ode to dendrochronology. But my head hurts today, so I’m just going to leave you with a list of bloggers I wish I could have coffee with.
Kriti, Mike, Lady Quantum, Jeremy Yoder, Dr. Isis, and Girlpostdoc
PS Migraines can have very weird symptoms. Today, my left nostril is tingly and numb and my tea tastes like soap.