Week One: Summer in the City

This summer I am super excited to be the FYI Science Policy News and Communications Intern! FYI puts out weekly newsletters and bulletins related to science policy. My role as the FYI intern will be going to different events to take notes and report back to the team, writing blurbs for the weekly newsletter, and hopefully writing larger blurbs or even a bulletin as the summer progresses. Coming from a physics background, I still have a lot to learn about science policy and science writing, but I’ve already learned so much in week one! 

This week, I learned how to record and transcribe different hearings and meetings using a variety of online programs. Mitch, my mentor, has given me different writing exercises related to these hearings ranging from simply taking notes to attempting to summarize these long hearings in a five-sentence paragraph. It’s surprisingly very challenging! I’ve been trying to focus on recognizing what information in these long hearings is more important and then conveying the information in a way that is stylistically appropriate for FYI. Next week, I will be going to a hearing at NIST and another hearing on Capitol Hill related to ocean exploration. I’m very excited! 

Unrelated to work, living in Washington, DC is amazing. I’ve never lived in a city before or even been in a city for more than a few days, so I’m really looking forward to all that DC has to offer. Our apartments are in a very convenient spot where we can get to just about anywhere in the city. My roommate Cate and I are also very compatible, and it’s been great coming home at the end of the day and hearing about what she did. She’s working at the Neils Bohr library which makes her experience very different from mine. It’s fascinating to see all of us interns have such similar physics backgrounds but all doing very different jobs. On Monday we all went to the National Mall to check out the monuments, and yesterday we all went kayaking. I think we're a really awesome group!

I have a few goals for this summer: 1) learn as much as I can about how the government works in terms of science policy, 2) become a better scientific writer, and 3) figure out if science policy and/or communications is something I would want to pursue as a career one day. Week one has exceeded my expectations, and I can’t wait to see all that lies ahead in the next nine weeks!