Hi everyone!
I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit lately, simply because I haven’t felt like writing it. I’ve been writing a lot this year actually. I’m writing a paper at work. I’m writing a diary of sorts, which is a kind of new thing for me. And I’m writing some some science blogging articles. I guess it’s all left me feeling a little drained for writing on the blog. To be honest, my life feeling right now can generally be described as ‘a little drained’. Or ‘simultaneously drained and panicked’. The visual I have in my mind is both falling very slowly, in a floaty way, and at the same time spinning very fast like a tornado.
Anyway, I wanted to do a quick update to mention something positive.
At the end of last year I started working as an ‘assistant features editor’ at the Plant Cell. The Plant Cell is a prestigious journal in our field. Assistant features editor is a fancy way to say ‘volunteer’.
I’ve mentioned before that I value science communication quite highly, and that one of the downsides of speaking terrible German is that I can’t really communicate well in this country-of-my-current-choosing. It was nice to be picked by the boss for the job, even though, when I responded enthusiastically to the offer, he said something like ‘I thought you wanted to be a Professor’.
Cue mild anxiety about whether the offer was some sort of test, and I’d failed by not responding with ‘I’d love to, but my one calling in life is to do lab work.’
Anyway, we started officially in September last year, but it took a while to get it off the ground. In January they made An Announcement, so you can see my pretty mug in the paper. Thanks to the parents for giving me a surname from the first part of the alphabet. Apparently this not only lets me be first(!), but will help me get more citations, and generally succeed in life. The double-barrelled kind of screws that up though.
One thing I find tricky is that I’m still not super sure of the level of my audience, which makes it hard to choose what to represent and how. So far, feedback suggests that I’m still pitching them too high.
But I enjoy the practice.
Anyway, enough babble. Here’s a link to the two articles I’ve written so far:
- One about plants that are better at photosynthesising in places where there’s not much water than your average green friend
- One about the very tricky process of making proteins.
That’s it for now.
(by the way, the photo is by Joram, from ages ago, when we did some science outreach for our institute).
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