So, you want to be a AAAS Mass Media Fellow

My application materials

Now that I've shared some tips on the application, here's how I put them into practice. These were directly copied so any typos here were also in my application.

Applicant questionnaire (2021 cohort version)

1. Why are you, as a scientist or engineer, interested in participating in this program?

I am interested in this program because I want to lower access barriers to scientific knowledge, spread scientific knowledge, and strengthen my skills around science writing. I come from a low-income background and without science media such as news articles and books, I wouldn’t be a scientist today. I knew nothing about scientific journals or how scientists share research. My only connection to science was the media.

Through this fellowship, I hope to pay it forward and share my passion for science with others. As someone who was starting out in research recently, I know that interpreting science and its jargon can be challenging. I want to use the skills I’ve developed as a scientist and writer to make science more understandable and accessible. Working in the environment the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship provides would help me accomplish that.

2. What in your background has prepared you for this fellowship?

I’m prepared for this fellowship because I’m already writing about science topics, working with journalists and communicators, and developing my journalism skill set.

I created the now American Astronomical Society supported blog PERbites, where I practice writing about research for general audiences by highlighting recent publications. I’ve covered over 60 studies, focusing on how the results apply to a classroom or university department. Through this blog, I’ve also developed my editorial skills by supervising other writers and providing feedback on their articles.

Through Michigan State University’s Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, I collaborate with the university communications team to develop and implement a strategy for sharing project results with the university and local community. I’ve learned to communicate research to diverse audiences through various media and adapt my strategy based on the audience.

To strengthen my journalism skills, I’ve participated in two professional development workshop series led by veteran journalists. Through these workshops, I learned the basics of identifying potential stories and sources, interviewing, and reporting stories. One workshop led to a reported piece for a local newspaper.

I’ve also attended science writing and science communication conferences such as the ScienceWriters conference, Science Talk, and ComSciCon-AIP. Through these, I’ve learned about different types and methods of journalism and taken workshops to learn specific tools. For example, using Columbia University’s Workbench platform for data journalism.

3. How do you think the skills learned from the fellowship will impact your future career or academic plans?

I’m an education researcher in a physics department. The success of my career depends on communicating with people who do not do the same research as me or any research. Whether my audience is physicists who may be skeptical of education research, administrators looking to make evidence-informed decisions, or students worried about their own learning, I need to be able to succinctly communicate my results and why they matter.

Further, I am biased toward action. I don’t want my research ideas to stop after the journal publication. Instead, I want my research to have a real-world impact. I need to be able to learn my audiences’ concerns and present the full story rather than just one side. Journalists are proficient in these skills and I can’t imagine a better place to learn these skills than immersing myself in a science communication fellowship for 10 weeks.

4. Have you had previous media-related experiences? Please provide details.

I have experience in traditional media such as news and radio as well as social media. I’ve worked with a local journalist to produce a story for the Lansing State Journal about how the coronavirus restrictions may create teaching shortages at Michigan universities. I interviewed multiple administrators at my university and a nearby university. Initially, I pursued a different story, but through the interviews, I learned that story wasn’t as newsworthy as I had thought. Instead, I learned how to construct a story driven by insights from my interviews.

Outside of my reporting experience, I talked about my research on a local radio station, learning best practices for communicating my work conversationally for a broad audience and doing so without visual aids.

I’ve also served as the social media manager for a science communication student organization and for my research lab. Through these experiences, I’ve learned to communicate science in engaging, Twitter-sized snippets, infographics, and videos.

5. Describe any activities, other than previous media experiences, you have undertaken that involved increasing public understanding of science and technology.

The activity I’m proudest about is organizing an international, virtual science art exhibition this past year. My team recruited nearly 60 scientists and artists to share their science-themed artwork, covering topics as small as viruses to as large as the universe itself. The exhibition reached people in 29 countries spread across 6 continents! Through this experience, I learned the importance of exploring alternative media for communicating science and that doing so can reach audiences who may not engage in typical science outreach events.

Outside of the art exhibition, I’ve participated in informal science conversations. For example, I’ve given talks about my research through a Science-on-Tap type event at a local bar and served as a panelist for a public Q&A science session hosted by my university.

6. What community outreach or educational activities have you participated in, science-related or otherwise?

Outside of the activities listed above, I’ve participated in outreach events targeted at kids. For example, I designed science activities for middle school students as part of a summer camp hosted by the Michigan State University Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences. Through this experience, I learned how to present science content in an engaging way.

I’ve also been a pen pal to a low-income middle school student through Letters to a Prescientist. Through this experience, I learned to relate science to someone’s daily life and their interests. While my pen pal was initially indifferent to science, they were asking me to send along more science activities for them to do by the end of the program!

Writing Sample

Copied verbatum from my article in the Lansing State Journal.

Graduate teaching assistants taught more than 27,000 students at Michigan State University, last year, nearly half the student body.

Yet, with travel restrictions and delayed visa processing this year, there may be shortages in teaching assistants for the fall semester.

Some departments are expecting to have empty teaching assistant slots at the same time they may need to teach more classes than usual because of social distancing requirements.

Other departments may have teaching assistants who cannot come to campus teach online, possibly requiring international students to work in the middle of the night from the other side of the world.

“We will have to wind up working to get enough students to fill all the teaching assistantships needed” Gary Blanchard, the associate chair for education for the chemistry department said.

The Department of Chemistry’s classes do not transition easily to online, in part because the department runs many laboratory courses, which require the teaching assistants to be present.

During a typical year, the Chemistry Department hires around 130 teaching assistants, or one in six teaching assistants employed by the university. But due to travel and visa restrictions, the department is expecting as many as 30 of those graduate students to be unable to make it to campus and take those positions.

If we’re going to be missing 30 people who we were counting on, we got a little scrambling to do to make sure we’re covered in order to teach,” Blanchard said.

Further, this year is not a typical year. With smaller class sizes required to fulfill social distancing guidelines, the department may need to offer more sections and hence, need to hire more teaching assistants than previous years.

“Shrinking sections sizes to be able to accommodate in-person teaching when we might want to do in-person teaching might require that we need more sections and therefore more people” Thomas Jeitschko, the dean of the Graduate School and associate provost for graduate education said.

One solution is to convert graduate students employed as research assistants to teaching assistants.

However, having previously paused their research in response to Governor Whitmer’s “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order, faculty and graduate students may be reluctant to take more time away from their research.

“In principle, we have the bodies that we need to cover the job. The problem is that the faculty want the graduate students and the graduate students want to be doing research because the research is what gets them their PhD,” Blanchard said.

Additionally, like other teachers, graduate students may not feel comfortable teaching an in-person class, especially if they or a family member are at an increased risk for severe illness.

The Graduate Employees Union, which represents Michigan State University teaching assistants, said in a statement that all teaching assistants should be “able to request and be granted remote assignments.”

Departments teaching most of their classes online are not exempt from these staffing concerns. Nearly half of the incoming graduate students who would serve as teaching assistants for the Department of Computer Science and Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering are international students. Many will not be coming to campus this fall and will need to teach from their home countries. For teaching assistants from China, an afternoon class at Michigan State University would be a middle-of-the-night class in Beijing.

Further, US embassies and consulates remain closed and are only taking emergency appointments, meaning that international students cannot obtain visas. Without visas, departments are uncertain whether they can even hire graduate students who are not physically in the United States.

“[We] don’t have full information on how that will work with respect to immigration issues,” Sandeep Kulkarni, the computer science graduate program director said. “There are open questions in terms of are we allowed to pay a student who isn’t physically here.”

These potential problems are not only a concern at Michigan State. Many universities are faced with similar situations.

Administrators at the University of Michigan, which is also planning to offer a mix of in-person and online instruction, have expressed similar concerns about graduate students being able to teach in the fall semester.

“For students who start as graduate student instructors, every effort will be made to enable them to begin in those roles.” John Godfrey, the assistant dean of the Rackham Graduate School said. “All of this is in anticipation that at some point in late summer or early fall, U.S. consulates will start to reopen and schedule visa appointments.”

Concerns about teaching assistants might not only be a short-term concern, however.

First-year graduate students fill many teaching assistant positions. Whether a similar situation could occur in future years depends on how many people decide to attend graduate school.

Given widespread unemployment, future graduate school enrollment may depend on how quickly the economy recovers. Those seeking employment may find that earning a graduate degree opens new opportunities, a trend the chemistry department has seen in the past.

“When the economy is good, the incoming class is smaller. When the economy is bad, the incoming classes get bigger,” Blanchard said. “We don’t know how fast or to what extent the economy will recover.”

At this point, though, it may be too early to tell.

“What we expect to see in the coming years, we’re in a waiting game. Everyone is.” Godfrey said.

Sample News Story

Learning from Virtual Reality isn’t an immediate reality

A new study suggests users need time to adjust to a virtual reality environment before they can learn science from it.

If you consider yourself as someone who has problems visualizing things in 3D, you aren’t alone.

The world is three-dimensional but learning tools such as textbooks, videos, and diagrams are two-dimensional. As a result, interest in using virtual reality for learning has skyrocketed.

Virtual reality, or VR, allows the user to view and interact with a virtual 3D space. While in principle virtual reality offers many new opportunities for learning, the science hasn’t necessarily shown that.

A new paper by Ohio State University researchers suggests that the lack of learning may be because virtual reality is still too new of a technology and hence, introducing students to virtual reality before using it as an educational tool may help.

“We were bending over backwards trying to find [evidence of improved learning from virtual reality] but we weren’t seeing it. We had long suspected that at least one factor could be that there’s cognitive overload,” said Chris Porter, the study’s lead author. “People are not accustomed to the VR learning environment and so it’s pretty hopeless to teach them anything while they are awed and overwhelmed by the medium.”

To test their hypothesis, the researchers created virtual models of 3D phenomenon that often are part of university students’ first year physics classes. Some students played a short VR game before viewing a VR lesson while other students only viewed the VR lesson. To measure their learning, both groups of students later took a test in the virtual reality environment as well as a test of the concepts presented in a traditional online, two-dimensional format.

While both groups of students scored equally well on the tests, their performance on the lesson differed. Those who played the VR game before viewing the lesson did slightly better than students who didn’t play the game.

“It was not an impressive [improvement], they were pretty small, but it was from only 5 minutes of play,” Porter said. “This seemed to indicate that if it were important to use VR in instruction, then you can improve student’s engagement with it through the use of play and preliminary training and just repeated exposure.”

Other researchers were not surprised that playing in the VR environment first helped the students but expressed concern that the experiment may not have been designed well enough to determine if students were learning.

“It makes sense because the vast majority of people don’t have experience with virtual reality technology,” said Jared Canright, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and VR researcher at the University of Washington. “They had a really equivalent VR versus non-VR treatment, and I feel that that design choice is pretty fundamentally dooming. Because if you can have an experience you consider equivalent on a screen to the one you are showing in VR, chances are you are not making good use of VR.”

Even though virtual reality wasn’t as beneficial for learning as the researchers hoped, it still showed promise as a tool for creating interest about the science concepts.

“The group that gets the VR experience always says that they enjoyed it more than the other groups,” Porter said. “It’s like an instant student enthusiasm tool.”

Disclaimer: The author has previously worked with some of the authors of the study but was not involved in the study discussed here.

Return to posts