biodiverseed:

glumshoe:

I’ve been seeing some posts that are basically “fuck Bill Nye he only has a Bachelor’s degree and isn’t a REAL scientist” and like… guys. That’s not what being a science communicator is about. I’m not just talking about Nye here.

Science communication is a whole field of its own. You can be the most brilliant, qualified research scientist on the planet and have no teaching skills whatsoever. The ability to synthesize complex information and then explain it in simple, accessible language is not easy, and the more you know about a subject, the more difficult it is. Making scientific concepts available to the general public is really important work – work that active researchers are rarely able to undertake.

Say what you will about individuals, but please don’t dismiss the entire field of science communication and start parroting conservatives with the “um you should have a Ph.D before you should be allowed to talk about science”. Accuracy is key, obviously, but don’t throw educators under the bus, jfc.

I am not a huge fan of Bill Nye, mostly just because I find his whole “saving the world” schtick grating (which is a matter of personal taste), but at the same time I have been working as a science journalist, science blogger, and science communicator for a number of years, and I only have a bachelor’s degree in anthropology (a “soft science”/”social science,” mind you I specialised in medical anthropology). I started doing this work as a passion project long before I even bothered to go back and finish my degree.

Now, I consult full time for a UN-accredited forestry research institute as a communications specialist. There is a huge need in any scientific research organisation to have people who understand scientific concepts well enough to communicate them to laypeople and “the general public” without being bogged down by the demands of research.

I’m starting an MSc in Science Communication and Public Engagement in the Autumn. Science communication is an interdisciplinary field with it’s own theories and institutes, that draws heavily on the social sciences and requires a high degree of generalised scientific literacy. It may not be working in a lab, but it is an essential part of the scientific process. 

I work with a lot of research scientists who couldn’t write a blog post if their careers depended on it: my role often lies in making their work bloggable so that people without a PhD can read it, or even so people without a PhD can find out about it. Without effective communicators, their important work gets lost in research silos.