Julie Thole

From Plants to Planets
AAAS/ASPB Mass Media Fellow Reports In
Julie Thole is the fifth AAAS/ASPB Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow

Only a week after defending my PhD thesis, I said goodbye to my husband, my dog, and our comfortable St. Louis home. Ready or not, I was off to Washington, D.C., for a crash course in journalism at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). There were 15 of us in the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship program, ranging from fresh BS graduates in math to fresh PhD recipients in biology, and we had varied journalism backgrounds. Having no journalism experience myself, taking the AAAS version of Journalism 101 was essential before I was sent off to New York City, where I would be working at Discover magazine for 10 weeks.

After a splendid evening sleeping on the floor of Reagan Airport (thank you, airline industry!), I finally arrived in the Big Apple. Once I settled into my apartment in Queens and got acquainted with the city, I headed to the office of Discover in downtown Manhattan, excited to learn everything I could about science writing.

In my first week at Discover, I read through the past two years of issues to get a feeling for the style of the magazine. My first real assignment from my editor was to help with the next special issue of the magazine—“Think about how we would put together an issue about the universe.” What?! I’m used to a little more . . . direction.

While I thought about how to accomplish such a gargantuan task, I also was put to work researching exoplanets. These are planets around stars other than our sun—as of a few weeks ago, 307 exoplanets had been discovered. I learned about how these planets are identified and about the scientists who find them, and I discovered that most of these exoplanets are very large and very hot.

The special issue, called “The Whole Universe Catalog,” slowly came together, with a lot of work on my part. We decided to organize the issue by “zip code,” starting close to home with the Earth and our solar system and going outward to explore other solar systems, stars, and ultimately the entire cosmos. The stories in special issues are mostly repurposed features from past issues; I read through eight years of Discover’s astronomy features and made a list of my favorite articles, and the editor used my list to choose most of the stories for the issue.

I also helped out with photo research, digging around on the Internet for the newest and coolest images of outer space. And after all of my research on exoplanets, I was assigned to write a short article, basically a Top 10 list of the weirdest and most interesting exoplanets. For this story, I did phone interviews with some of the most famous “planet hunters,” which was undoubtedly the most fun I had all summer.

Being a part of putting together this issue, from conception to (almost) completion, was by far the most rewarding experience of the summer. I can’t wait to actually hold the magazine in my hand and have concrete evidence of my hard work.

In the end, I didn’t get to write as much as I hoped. But I guess if you compare the number of stories in a monthly magazine to a month’s worth of articles in a daily newspaper, it’s not surprising. Most of my time was spent helping editors with research and doing fact checking, which was still helpful in learning about science writing.

I feel lucky to have been so involved in the special issue. Before this summer, I had no idea how much work went into putting together a magazine—the coordination is truly an art. When I started in June, the majority of issues were planned until February of next year! I will never look at a magazine the same way again.

All in all, the summer was a truly rewarding experience. It was also kind of like a long vacation with really expensive rent. When I wasn’t working, I was exploring New York—I went to just about every art museum and yarn store in the city and saw some great concerts. I had always thought New York was a great place to visit but that I could never live there. Now I can verify that!

I am now back home in St. Louis, easing myself into a postdoc position at the Danforth Plant Science Center, where I am actually looking forward to some bench work. I will keep my eyes open for opportunities to write about science, and I hope to eventually find a job communicating the importance of science to the general public. Regardless of what the future holds, I know that my 10 weeks as a science journalist have at least made me a better scientist.

Julie Thole
juliethole@gmail.com