Hello! I’m Chloe, a first-year Ph.D. graduate student at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with majors in Molecular Biology and Legal Studies and my career goals are to become an advocate for science communication, bridging the gap between scientists and non-scientists. Some of my biggest priorities include improving STEM education in K-12 public schools across the country and increasing the diversity of people in STEM.
My goal for Paths to STEM is to highlight some of the many different career opportunities a major in STEM can provide and hopefully motivate some of you reading this to join us STEMinists! Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields are typically dominated by white men. But I’m here to show you that there are many non-typical people in these careers, so don’t let it stop you from following your passion!
How I first became interested in Science
I first realized how much I loved science when I interned in a cancer biology lab at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities my senior year of high school.
Before this point, all I associated science with was boring lectures and impossible to read textbooks. I vividly remember dreading high school science classes because I could never understand the reading from the textbooks assigned the night before and knew another day of dry lectures regurgitating the textbook information would not help me either. Because both of my parents are scientists, I felt additional pressure that I should just “know” science because my parents understand it all. But all science seemed to me was endless amounts of information to memorize in formats that made it incredibly difficult to comprehend.
Then I walked into the lab on my first day of the internship, and my whole concept of science was turned on its head. These people in the lab weren’t studying textbooks, reiterating what has been learned, but experimenting to learn more about the world. Science isn’t this constricting set of facts like we are taught in high school but an ever-expanding world of looking at what else is out there!
From there, I enrolled in undergraduate university where I immediately joined a lab so I could continue learning about science the best way I knew how.
What Sparked my Passion for Science Communication and Advocacy
While I understood my passion for science early on, I didn’t know much of what I could do in science except become what all the other older scientists I knew became: professors in academia or researchers in biotechnology.
At the start of my freshman year, I entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison through their STEM Immersion program, a multiple-day boot camp for incoming STEM majors to learn how to transition to a large research institution. This transformative program uses older college students as peer leaders during the boot camp to mentor the incoming students, and so the following year I became a peer leader for this program.
I learned from STEM Immersion and the other programs also run by the same department, WISCIENCE, about the value of science advocacy in K-12 schools to motivate young aspiring STEM majors to continue and graduate with STEM degrees.
To learn more about how I could help diversify STEM fields, I became a BioCommons Ambassador at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Steenbock Library. My jobs here included providing resources to incoming undergraduate students in STEM and organizing events to promote various STEM majors, extracurricular organizations, and career opportunities. We worked to promote STEM outreach opportunities at local schools and helped students interested in research get into their dream lab.
From these roles, I came to understand the powerful impact of science advocacy, showing kids and even college students science is more than dry lectures and wordy textbooks. I was lucky, in a lot of respects, having parents who are both scientists and the opportunity in high school to do research which provided me my love of science. However, many students don’t have these experiences and if students’ only view of science is boring and difficult then no wonder we are having a hard time getting more people into science careers!
This is why I believe science communication is so valuable because it changes the misconceptions about science taught in school and transforms it into a field many more students will want to join.
How I am Getting Involved to Follow my Passion
After college, I felt at a loss on how to continue science advocacy. It had been so easy to do as part of the WISCIENCE department programs but now I was on my own. At this point, I had started my Ph.D. at the University of Miami and was thrown into a completely separate world I didn’t know the first place to start to continue my science advocacy.
I began by joining the Graduate Student Association at the University of Miami, hoping to learn about more opportunities for science advocacy and to create a voice for current scientists who are located at a completely different campus from most graduate students.
After being involved with the Graduate Student Association for a while, I learned there really weren’t many current initiatives at the university for science advocacy, which could be done through science clubs or science outreach. This is why I co-founded my department’s student government with plans to bring the scientists of my department together as a cohesive, supportive unit and promote initiatives of science advocacy in the community. Since being established, we are working with the regional science fair of South Florida and a handful of local schools to show how much fun science can be!
Beyond science outreach, I have created my own platform, Chloe the Scientist, to show anyone can be a scientist. This gives me a voice for science communication in a completely new way and increases how many people I can impact.
Future Steps to my Dream Career
I am still in graduate school so I still have a ways to go before I can get to where I want to be. After I’m done with school, I hope to end up working with government officials to improve the science education curriculum in K-12 schools and overall improve the way STEM is funded in the government.
The road to this dream career is not laid out in stone and I will likely spend some time as a researcher for a biotechnology company to learn more about science and continue volunteer and outreach initiatives to better understand how I can bring more people into the wonderful world of science.
Advice to Anyone Who Wants to get Involved in Science Communication
The best place to start is by finding an organization, department, or company with already established science communications actions and volunteer with them! This is a great place to learn the basics of science advocacy and science communications while getting a better idea of more specifics of what you are interested in helping with science communication. I did exactly this when I joined the various science advocacy initiatives the WISCIENCE department offered at my undergraduate university.
If you have already volunteered at the science fairs, after school science clubs, or however else you decided to learn, the next step is creating your own initiatives. I did this by starting my own platform, Chloe the Scientist, and creating a science advocacy organization at my university.
Find your niche, the platform you want to share, by volunteering with already established science communication, and then go out to advocate for your own platform!
Thank you for reading! If you have any questions or want to learn more, don’t hesitate to contact me.
