Sunday, June 28, 2020
By:
Not much has happened this week so it’s going to be a shorter post.
Things at FYI are still busy as usual. We decided that it might be nice to have 20-minute coffee break meetings twice a week and our first was on Friday. It was really nice to be able to sit down with the people I would have been sharing an office with for the past four weeks and get to know them a little better. I hope you can join me in wishing Mitch good luck on his first attempt at baking a pie.
I’m still enjoying the work we do every day. I’m really appreciating that I get to work on a wide range of issues in science policy and am expected to have a working knowledge of those issues and fields. I know for a fact that I don’t always have a full understanding, something that was obvious to me when I watched a fusion energy panel. While I knew I didn’t have full knowledge, I knew that I had enough training and experience to be able to watch now and understand later after some further research. It shows that I’m learning, and that’s what’s really important to me.
I’m also glad that I’m learning the FYI style. I’d like to remind you that I have no training in journalism, nor do I claim to be a journalist. When I got this opportunity, I thought that I’d read enough print media to pick up the style pretty quickly. While not entirely false, it was not true either. FYI has a very specific style to it, something that Mitch and Will know seemingly instinctively, but something that was so far elusive to me. This week, the gears are seeming to start to turn. I was very proud of myself on Friday when writing copy for FYI This Week, I could see where my writing didn’t fit the style. It was small, maybe a wrong adjective, or a misplaced sentence, but I could understand why it didn’t fit, and how to correct it. It was a small moment of understanding that showed me I was learning.
Anyway, no major updates from me. I’m still working on my first bulletin on space nuclear technologies and got my first rough comments back. I’ll take those suggestions and incorporate them into a formal first draft. I think it’ll be published come the first full week in July.
Cheers,
Hale Stolberg