STEM vs STEAM
How Writing Changed My Life
Hi everyone! I’m very excited to announce that we just won an award for science communication: the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications.
Being a science communicator is pretty much my dream career because I get to merge my love for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) with my love for the arts.
I’ve been reflecting on the award and how much my life has been changed through writing and making videos online. My usual soapbox speech is about how I think math is for everybody, but I also think that writing is for everybody!
It’s common for STEM majors to scoff at the value of a liberal arts degree. When I was younger, my parents heavily encouraged me to go into a STEM field, and become a doctor, engineer, programmer, or scientist—these were the reliable jobs, or so I was told. What are you going to do with a degree in gender studies or medieval literature?
If you’re a student that writes all their essays with ChatGPT and you think English class is a waste of time, hear me out.
How Writing Changes Your Life
Communication skills are seriously underrated.
When I was 12 years old, I started blogging on Tumblr, and since then, I’ve always kept a public journal of my stream of consciousness in one way or another, whether through tweeting my random thoughts, posting my #OOTD on Facebook, filming Vines, making YouTube videos about drag, hosting a podcast about science, or making TikToks and Reels about math. And now this is my full time job!
I’ve won an award, written a book, and I travel the world giving talks! People call me a thought leader, all because I started writing and sharing my thoughts in public. It wasn’t my math skills that got me here, it was communication skills!
Social media maven Courtney Johnson says that writing publicly is the career move that 99% of people are too scared to make, but has the potential of catapulting your career to another universe. I can testify to that!
I didn’t start posting on social media for career reasons though. When I was 12 and blogging on Tumblr I just did it for fun and because I loved entertaining people. I’m also chronically online which doesn’t hurt.
But there’s another benefit to writing. It doesn’t just put my ideas on the page, it’s also the environment in which I develop and discover my own ideas. Writing about math helps me learn it and understand it in new ways. This was the most surprising thing I learned while writing my book--so many of those ideas weren’t plucked out of my head lying dormant, they were generated after I had already picked up the feather quill pen and the gears started turning.
STEM vs STEAM
STEAM is an approach to education that recognizes the importance of an arts education within STEM subjects. You can also do it the other way around, and emphasize the importance of STEM concepts in art, like my video on the math behind tiling patterns in the Alhambra!
With so many parents focused on pushing their kids into STEM subjects, it’s easy to overlook the importance of building soft skills like communication, creative thinking, and public speaking. This is why I don’t like the superiority complex that some STEM majors have over arts majors. Art is both necessary and awesome.
Science Communication
Now that I’ve won an award for it, I think I’m allowed to start calling myself a science communicator, though I tend to use the title math communicator. Anyway, science/math communication is just one example of an important intersection between STEM and the arts.
Science communicators act as a bridge between research scientists and the public, so we translate complex scientific ideas and make them easier to understand for non-experts. This is a crucial undertaking, especially when it comes to topics like climate change and public health.
It’s not enough for a scientist to know how to stop the next pandemic, we need to get everybody on board, which means sharing infographics, articles, videos, and all other sorts of public engagement projects developed by science communicators.
Tips On Writing
If you’re looking for a creative outlet, if you want to change the world, if you want to learn something deeply, or if you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry, start writing! And do it in public! You can put your thoughts on a blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, or you can even make videos or start a podcast. Just get started anywhere, and you can hop around to different platforms and mediums like I did.
All that stuff you learned in English class like the 5-paragraph essay structure and how you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition? Yeah, those are all a bunch of rules I don’t really abide by. Effective writing isn’t about having perfect grammar or using big words, it’s about being original, coherent, and concise. I think the reason why my math videos are popular is because I speak as if I’m explaining a concept to a friend one-on-one, instead of treating it like a homework assignment.
BTW, you don’t have to share every thought that pops up in your head. Be judicious about what you share. The internet is forever.
That said, don’t let fear get in your way. How many hours a day do you spend looking at a screen consuming other people’s thoughts, ideas, and media? Don’t you think your thoughts are worth sharing too?
You don’t have to be a genius or an artist to start sharing your thoughts with the world, you just have to have a certain level of delusional self-confidence. Just channel your inner drag queen.