I'm not sure how I feel about this.

[lea_hazel]

I've decided that if my Master's degree and research options don't come through as I've hoped, it would be the best course of action to look into a career in popular science writing. Among other options, I mean.

I guess it just suddenly occurred to me that I have the basic skill set for this, and I've always been interested in explaining things to my family based on a high school level of science understanding. When I study I imagine myself explaining complex concepts to people who have no background in science. I've always been most interested in biology out of all the sciences because it's best grounded in day-to-day life.

Maybe I'm being ridiculous, but I guess I just like the idea that I have another career option in front of me, something that might actually combine two of the things I like best. Although I'd still rather work in research, it's looking more and more like that might never happen.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I don't think that's at all ridiculous, it's something I considered. I got a job as a science communicator at a hands on science museum as my first job after my Phd, I don't know if there's anything like that near you. It was pretty awesome, and there were opportunities to get more into the exhibit design/writing side of things, though for various reasons I didn't really get into them and eventually changed career paths. Have you ever done tutoring? I found that used similar skills and was good training. You could write blog posts too (I'd read them :)) There's also technical writing, which is less fun but has more jobs.

EDIT (I hope this isn't annoying! I just remember spending ages thinking about this myself unsure how to proceed): Ok, after thinking about it some more, and about people I know who got into paid writing: I think it could be good to start a nice, semi professional looking blog and try and write to it regularly. Even if noone reads it it will be good training and hopefully enjoyable, and if you're lucky it will gain popularity and you may even be able to leverage it to guest blogging somewhere more professional as a stepping stone to paid article writing. If you create some social networking way to promote it (tumblr, twitter etc) I promise to reblog/retweet etc at least once :)

[lea_hazel]

That was going to be my plan. If by the end of this academic year my prospects aren't looking too good, I was going to start a biology blog under my real name and try to have a good number of posts on it. I wasn't so much thinking of building an audience, but mainly that I have writing skills but not "on paper" so to speak. The blog would serve primarily as a portfolio of sorts.