So Long and Thanks for All the SciComm
file under: PROCESS NOTES
this one is from: AMBIKA
Almost two years ago, when I was starting to think about moving away from academia, I was faced with many different possibilities for my next job, and no clear sense of my path forward. I reached out to Liz, just to talk through where I was at and what might lie ahead for me—I didn’t know the term yet, but we were sensemaking my career together. Liz asked me about all the things I wanted to do, and we discovered a deep resonance between my hopes for science and science communication and Liz’s goals with Liminal. Liz also talked about her plan to take a sabbatical from Liminal in 2023 and then return to it with renewed and expansive energy in 2024. This conversation was the beginning of our partnership, which led to me joining Liminal at the start of 2024.
Joining Liminal right after leaving my job as an assistant professor was exactly the right decision for me. Departing academia is a multilayered and many-stepped process, which for me involved a complex journey of discovering a new sense of self. As a member of Liminal, I was lucky to go through this process while still working towards a vision of science and science communication that I deeply believe in. Ever since being a participant on the first iteration of Storymakers, I’ve known that what Liminal offers scientists is truly transformative, and it’s been magnificent to be part of creating such transformations for others.
But along the way, I’ve realized that the day-to-day work of doing science communication training and consulting isn’t quite right for me. I’m learning that I don’t actually enjoy being at the front of a room in a teaching or facilitating capacity, and that, given my complicated feelings about the processes of science, working with scientists is tricky for me. So at the end of this year, I’m transitioning away from my full-time role as a core member of Liminal (I’ll be continuing on as a cloud member instead!).
It’s been so much fun to learn from and alongside Liz, not just about scicomm but also about running a business and setting up a worker-run collective. I’m so grateful to her and to all our clients and community for the many exciting opportunities I’ve been afforded this past year, and I’ll be taking everything I’ve learned with me! My next stop, professionally, is leveraging my research skills in the realm of policy. But I'm not entirely done with scicomm yet—I have a popular science book coming out in March next year (which, among other things, explains why I have complicated feelings about the processes of science)! If you’d like, you can follow what I’m up to at my personal-and-book-related newsletter here.
Now that there are no longer two of us running this newsletter, you can expect some changes. Liz will still be posting—she’s very excited about the upcoming series on threshold concepts!—but her posts might not be especially regular or frequent. We have been incredibly grateful to those of you with paid subscriptions to Making Science Make Sense; but as we come toward the end of the year, and because there are so many places and people that urgently need financial support, we think this would be a good moment to re-evaluate your level of support for this newsletter.
My first post for this newsletter was about when, how, and why we can trust science. In it, I also talked about remaining strong in one’s trust of oneself, remembering that we are the experts in our own lives. Navigating big changes that affect our future involves a huge amount of trust in ourselves, but we don’t build that trust alone—we can talk to each other, bounce ideas off of one another, seek out and listen to others’ experiences and reflections, and watch carefully and fearlessly for what emerges within us in response to all that. My hope for all of us, as we approach a new year that promises plenty of change, is that we find, within ourselves and with each other, the deep wellsprings of trust we all need.