Soph's Path to Full-time Science Communication

Hi everyone. I’m Soph and I am a full-time science communicator! I still can’t believe that I get to say that! I have been working in science communication, or scicomm, for three and a half years now, but my scicomm journey started a few years before that when I was in the lab studying for my PhD. I studied stem cell biology for my PhD at the University of Southampton, UK after doing my undergrad at the University of Bath.

I currently work as the Communications and Engagement Manager for a medical research organisation in Cambridge, UK as my day job, but I was actively involved in scicomm and public engagement throughout my PhD and haven’t been able to give that up since. Thus, my three-pronged scicomm career was born. I do scicomm as a full time job, but I also have freelance work and clients I work with. Finally on top of that is my ‘hobby’ side of things and the content I create under my brand ‘Soph talks science’ on social media, my blog and my podcast. Together, I want to help get science out of lab books and into the devices of anyone interested, and help other scientists to gain the right tools and confidence to do that too.

How I discovered this STEM career

When I started my PhD, I, perhaps naively, had no idea what science communication or public engagement was, let alone consider it as a possible career option. I had always loved science at school but I’d also always loved to be creative. Between writing stories, trying my hand at photography or wanting to learn new facts, I was torn as to which direction to take my career down. I succumbed to the stereotype that you can’t mix science and creativity as a career so I opted for sciences. Taking it one step at a time, because honestly I had no idea where I was trying to end up, I did science A-Levels, a science undergrad and then a PhD. As for the next steps after that I was stuck. I didn’t see myself becoming a professor so just muddled along, until the middle of my PhD when everything changed.

As part of my PhD programme, I had to enter the 3 Minute Thesis competition. You have to present your research using one static slide to a non-specialist audience in less than three minutes! I cannot put into words how much I did not want to do this! I couldn’t see the point in it and I hated public speaking (the irony that I have now done a TEDx talk!). Ultimately, the fuss I kicked up didn’t make any difference, so I made my slide, wrote my script and then spent many hours in the dark room developing Western blots (think of a room filled with red light where they used to develop photos back in the day!) trying to memorise this script. The day came. I delivered my talk and I ended up winning the competition.

Safe to say I was amazed! But when I spent some time looking back, I realised that finding a creative way to describe and explain my research relit that creative fire inside of me. That lightbulb went off in my brain when I had the realisation that I could combine my love of science with a desire to be creative, and maybe there was a career where I could do that.

When I started looking into the options, I was blown away. They were endless. I suddenly knew what that next step for me was going to be after my PhD. The issue, however, was that I had less than two years left in the lab and zero science communication experience. It was safe to say that the last two years of my PhD were busy not just in the lab, but outside it too. I tried to find as many opportunities as I possibly could to experiment with different types of scicomm to see what I did and did not like, and get as much experience as possible to give me the best chance of landing a scicomm job at the end. A multi-award-winning science blog, over 10,000 Instagram followers, brand collaborations and two internships later, I reached that next step.

Making the leap out of academia

Making that decision to go ‘all-in’ on scicomm was scary! After all, I had spent all of my education ‘training’ to become a researcher and I had no formal qualifications in science communication at all – and FYI I still don’t! So deciding to basically jump ship from a career I had been trained for came with it’s challenges before even considering if I would actually manage to get a job in science communication with the trial and error experience I was gaining during my PhD.

The first, and probably the most crucial, being where I even begin to look for job opportunities! My network consisted of academics, and my PhD supervisors understandably didn’t know anyone to connect me to so I could find out more. My solution was to take to social media and Twitter was a bit of a life-saver for me. I slowly found so many people doing science communication as their career in all sorts of formats, and they had endless resources and helpful hints. But my holy grail when it came to finding science communication job opportunities was the PSCI-COMM mailing list. Yes I was sent a lot of emails, and not all of them were about jobs or even relevant to my interests, but every so often a chance would come up and I would jump at the chance to apply. I also looked at the websites of organisations I would love to work for and looked if they had any vacancies, and ended up checking them probably a little obsessively when I was looking for that first job post-PhD.

After many, many applications, several interviews followed by rejections, I had an invitation to interview for a job in London at 4pm the evening before my PhD viva! The timing wasn’t great I’ll be honest, but I took the train studying my thesis on the way, had my interview, passed my PhD viva the next morning and was offered the job as a Science Communications Officer by the end of the week!

What’s next?

I have just started a new role as a Communications and Engagement Manager, so for the time being I want to make an impact in this role, but I am excited to get back to actually writing about science again and back to engagement and outreach events (I explain more about this on my Instagram), but long term I still have many professional and personal science communication goals.

I dream of being my own boss and having a science communication company supporting organisations or individuals to share their research. I would love to do some science communication research. I would love to write a book and am already working on a book proposal, but also I want to advocate for and promote non-research science careers. I truly believe that if I had known about this career path in school I probably wouldn’t have done my PhD, and I could have found more relevant training opportunities earlier on. I want as many school students to know that you don’t have to choose between a creative and a scientific career and you can actually have both!

Final advice

If you are thinking about a career in science communication, my best piece of advice is to experiment with all the different formats. Find out what you enjoy, and just as crucially find out what you don’t enjoy so much. Think about what skills you want to gain and what skills you have. Then match that experience to your job opportunities and aspirations.

If you want to find out more about science communication careers and making the move into scicomm, or you are a researcher looking to boost your confidence doing scicomm, I share my experience and more tips across my platforms and my emails and DMs are always open to help anyone else navigate the path.