Being a Scientist Means Being a Writer
Writing will make or break your career.
Disclaimer: I do not and could not claim to be a decent writer. Like most writers I try to constantly work on training myself to be better. What I describe here is simply my brief perception of writing as a critical tool for scientific careers.
If you think you don’t need language skills because you are following a STEM track, you are gravely mistaken.
I was lucky during my undergraduate education. The geology program I participated in required a scientific writing course at the beginning of year two. This class was brutal and forced many students to switch their degree program. Knowing the reputation of the class, I viewed this as a challenge and spent more effort on that course than all of my other classes combined. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the skills I learned during that experience have carried me through graduate school and are still a constant presence in my career.
While scientists spend a lot of time designing experiments, collecting data, and interpreting data significance, the most important thing scientists do is share their data with the wider community. Decades of research work are worthless if they are not published for the broader community to learn, adapt, and utilize in future studies. But unfortunately because of the challenges (and rightly so) of getting research published, many career scientists retire with storage rooms full of unpublished data. This is a hindrance to the healthy progression of science and in many cases a waste of hard earned funding.
Being successful means getting funding; getting funding means writing well.
When I began my masters program, I sat down with my advisor and was informed that the research project I would design, collect data for, and write a thesis on in a less than two years had zero funding. In some ways I was shocked. I was half expecting to enter a program with a large chunk of funding and a fancy high-tech lab to do work in. But what I didn’t fully grasp was that this experience was critical to my personal and career development. In many ways even more critical than the scientific skills I was learning at the same time. I began writing small grant proposals, as many as a dozen, during my first semester. Each successive proposal helped me focus my research questions and justify why my work was even important at all. Although I was only awarded two of the grants and had to work on a shoestring budget, I had developed a crystal clear picture in my mind of what I was working on and why anyone should care.
When writing to request funding you must captivate an audience with a story that explains why your research is important, what you are going to do to collect the necessary data, and what impacts the results will have on the broader scientific community. You must do this in a way that exceeds your competition. As a career scientist seeking funding, you are in direct competition with every other scientist in your field, including those who have been doing that exact same work for 30+ years. You must be able to craft a story that weaves through all of the critical components of your research and not only keeps the interest of the reviewer, but gets them excited about your work. With an average “win” rate of 8% for National Science Foundation grant proposals, you must be able to write better than a vast majority of other scientists. More grants mean more job security and the ability to pursue the research you spent all those years fascinated about in school. Writing will always be fundamental to your career as a scientist.