Nathan Foster, 2018 AIP FYI Science Policy Communications Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Tufts University

I am a recent graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts with a BS in Physics. While I do not yet know what I will be doing next year, I hope to combine my passions for physics and public policy with my desire to have a positive impact on the world. In addition to studying physics, I served in Tufts University’s student government as a trustee representative, advocating for tuition affordability and a stronger student voice in decision-making. I have also worked as a legislative intern in the Massachusetts State House for the amazing Rep. Christine Barber, as a research assistant for mathematicians working to combat gerrymandering through the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, and as a news production intern for the Somerville Media Center.

As the AIP Science Policy News Intern this summer, I am excited to learn the ins and outs of Federal science policy, hang out with my fellow interns, and meet interesting people. I am looking forward to exploring Washington DC, but not so much to the humidity.

Internship

Host: American Institute of Physics

Project

Abstract

As an intern for FYI Science Policy News, I helped report on the many connections between the science community and the Federal government. One of the most important connections is science funding. Universities, government labs, and a phalanx of private corporations rely on Federal funding, all of which passes through just a few Congressional committees. I was able to see many different venues where the discussion surrounding research funding plays out, including coalition meetings AIP participates in, Congressional markups of spending bills, and a publication event held in a lobbyist’s office for a report celebrating the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences division. Beyond funding, I helped write about science policy issues such as the open access/open science movement. My presentation will focus on three key questions: what science gets funded? Who decides what gets funded? And who benefits from funding?

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week 1 - Ted Cruz at Half Speed

I have never been outside of Eastern Massachusetts for more than a few weeks at a time, and I just graduated college, so this summer will be a new experience in a lot of ways. So far it’s going really well. My fellow interns are awesome, we’re living in unreasonably nice dorms, and DC’s hockey team just won their first championship in two decades (Go Caps!). Walking around the Capitals’ home stadium last week, in the middle of what turned out to be the winning game, was an incredible experience that I won’t soon forget.

As for my internship, I’m a science policy writer for the American Institute of Physics’ FYI newsletter. After meeting my coworkers and getting settled in, my first work assignment was to watch Congressional hearings – one on the future of the International Space Station, and a more mundane markup session for an appropriations (funding) bill – and take notes.

Congressional hearings are LONG. And most of what’s said doesn’t require particularly close attention. But you never know when someone might say something important. Fortunately, as I quickly discovered, Congressional livestreams come with hugely helpful time distortion options. At 2x speed, for example, you can still understand everything that somebody says, but it takes half the time for them to say it – a big advantage when sifting through multi-hour hearings.

All this is to say that I have spent a lot of time over the past few days watching politicians and witnesses at Congressional hearings talk at double speed. At double speed, everyone sounds kind of impatient, like they drank too much coffee, have somewhere better to be, and really, really just want to drill some point into your head before they leave. The effect is fascinating.

So is the reverse. Slightly slowed down (at 0.75 speed, say), a speaker sounds unusually dignified and deliberate, with the occasional slurred word. Crank the speed down more, to 0.5, and while the sound is clearly distorted, you are forced to really pay attention to every single word they say. 0.5 is useful for taking a direct quote. 0.25 speed is barely intelligible, so after brief experimentation I quickly abandoned it.

I had to directly quote Senator Ted Cruz quite a bit – he has strong opinions about the future of the International Space Station – so I spent several minutes watching him at half speed, really listening to every word he had to say.

At Congressional hearings, most people have voices carefully calibrated to sound authoritative. Significant time dilation, in either direction, completely breaks the effect. In a way, speeding up and slowing down a video makes it easier to pay attention to what’s being said, and not just how it’s being said.

Maybe I’ll start doing it more often.

Week 2 - Parades, SQUIDS, and Fireflies

Multiple times this past week, I have felt like a spectator to others’ stories.

On Tuesday, the Washington Capitals held their victory parade. I got lucky: I was going to a series of events downtown that day, and the parade just happened to be in the right place and at the right time for me to stop by. So I ambled over to the parade route, accidentally finding myself in a good viewing spot just in time to see the crowd totally lose it as Alexander Ovechkin raised the Stanley Cup above his head. I was swept up in the energy of the moment, but I also felt like an outsider. I had never been to a victory parade of any of the teams I grew up with, yet here I was, less than two weeks into my first long-term stay in another city, celebrating their first major sports championship in 20 years. I took a video for good measure. Then I kept walking.

My next stop that day was a kickoff talk for the publication of a 40^th anniversary report on the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences division (Sorry if that was a mouthful! I’m slowly becoming numb to acronyms and department names). Anyways: the report itself was written by a half dozen Department of Energy scientists and administrators, who were all there to present their work. They talked about the technology BES has helped develop over the years, from quantum computers to superconducting magnets to these things called SQUIDS, which apparently measure very small magnetic fields. The point of the report was to advocate for funding for BES, as made clear when attendees started advising the authors to shorten their summary “because Congressional staffers are dumb” (in the words of a Congressional staffer). Again, I felt like a spectator. The report’s authors had all flown in to Washington to present months of hard work, and most of the audience seemed to be well-connected to DOE world in one way or another; meanwhile I quietly sat in the back, writing notes, eating fruit, and taking it all in. The event, strangely enough, was held at a lobbyist’s office.

The next day, I took a run and found myself outside the White House. It was a warm summer night. Fireflies flickered in Lafayette Park, a place that I now know exists. Several police officers, a lone activist for unclear causes, and a few dozen tourists loitered quietly. All the politics, all the symbolic resonance of the White House was certainly present, but it also felt surprisingly distant. It was just a beautiful public space on a warm summer night.

Week 3 - Fireflies

When I wrote last week about watching fireflies flicker in Lafayette Park, I thought I was having a special experience. I was mistaken. Fireflies are all over the place in this city.

First I started seeing them in other parks, and I thought, “Wow! That’s really cool.”

Then I went walking around GW’s campus at dusk, and saw tons of fireflies on the thin strips of grass and mulch running next to the sidewalks. It felt very mundane, and seeing fireflies hovering a few feet above dirt patches sort of reminded me that they’re just bugs with glowsticks in their abdomen.

To be fair, they were still pretty cool.

Other recent sightings: Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait, a really freaking long escalator, the back side of the Lincoln Memorial, and a turtle in the grass by the American Center for Physics.

Week 5 - Writing About Writing

Reading this, you may be wondering: what happened to Week 4? The truth is, I completely forgot to write a Week 4 blog post. Forgive me, James!

Fortunately, despite that one glaring exception, the past few weeks have been extremely good ones for myself and writing. At FYI, I am receiving some of the best writing instruction of my life. So far, other than notes, I have written a number of short blurbs and two full-length bulletin drafts (one currently in progress). Everything’s gotten extremely heavily edited. But that’s a good thing. It’s not like I was a bad writer going in; I’m just working alongside extremely good writers. And, honestly, getting your writing heavily edited by extremely good writers is one of the best things that can happen to it. There’s also a very specific straight-news style that FYI uses that I’m still getting used to. Among other things, I’ve noticed my writing become far more straightforward, with fewer commas and clauses per sentence. There’s definitely a style element to that – all the social science papers I was reading a few months ago were full of flowing descriptions and complicated sentence structure. But while I don’t necessarily want to use super-clear journalistic writing for everything, I certainly appreciate learning how to do it.

In addition to the content of my writing, my ability to sit down and actually put thoughts on paper (or computer, or whatever) has gotten way better. Nonetheless, this remains what I struggle with the most at work. Producing content on a consistent timeline seems to be at least as important as speed, if not more so, so I have lots more room for improvement. Since I have been improving, though, I feel pretty good about it.

Finally, there’s one kind of writing I should be doing much more of. Job applications! They’re somewhat tedious but undeniably rewarding.

Week 6 - Capitol Hill

This past week, I got sick, visited the center of American government, and did yoga.

First, the yoga. Two of my roommates and I biked about half an hour to Crystal City, Virginia for a free yoga class. On the way, we past one of DC’s airports, crossing a large field where planes would periodically pass a few dozen feet overhead. It seemed to be a popular spot – the field was packed with people. I, inattentively, forgot to bring a change of clothes. So I did yoga in jeans. Not the best idea.

Last Thursday, Sam and Sarah, the two Capitol Hill interns, showed us around where they worked. Signed passes from Sam’s boss, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, gave us permission to stand in a series of increasingly stringent lines and security checks before finally entering the Senate chamber’s viewing gallery. Lines notwithstanding, it was really cool. The Senate was in session; however, the chamber was mostly empty. There were a few stenographers, a line of pages sitting to the side of the dais, and Senators or staffers sitting behind desks in the center of the chamber. But there was only one person in attendance who wasn’t involved in running things, a Senator giving a speech for the cameras.

I also, unfortunately, got sick with some sort of bacterial infection in my throat. As a result, I didn’t do all that much outside of work and even had to stay home for a day. I’m more or less better by now.

Week 8 - NASA has better sushi than NIST

This past Tuesday and Wednesday brought the whole intern crew to NIST and NASA. At the main NIST campus in Maryland, a huge collection of connected buildings with a middle-school-built-in-the-sixties architectural vibe, we met Jesus’s mentor, stopped by several labs, and visited the in-house museum. The museum was especially interesting. Among other artifacts, it contained the world’s first neon sign, from the 1903 St. Louis world’s fair, and what used to be the official US meter, a meter long (duh) metal rod.

We also visited a NIST lab where we were shown the insides of an Atomic Force Microscope. Atomic Force Microscopes work by dragging an extremely small tip over an objects. The tip is so incredibly small that it can detect the bumps caused by individual atoms. To be more precise, the tip usually isn’t dragged over objects – that’s the old-school way of doing it. Instead, it is vibrated extremely fast so close to the surface that it picks up on inter-atomic electronic forces. While the tip itself is way too small to see, the lever it sits on is just barely big enough to make out if you look really closely. Zoom in on the photo and you can see it.

In short, NIST was awesome. So was NASA. While NIST feels like an enormous school, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is a whole self-contained city. Goddard even has its own bus system. It needs it, too, because the various buildings are far too far apart to walk.

At Goddard, we visited the cosmic microwave background radiation lab where Daniel works, saw the outside of a big climate-controlled box containing an exact working replica of the Curiosity Mars rover’s main chemical analysis instrument, and went to an event where various NASA departments and spacecraft teams manned tables and handed out cool stuff. The event was in the same building as NASA’s main climate and weather science supercomputer, so I got to see that. Very much worth it.

As for the sushi: NIST’s cafeteria had solid turkey and mashed potatoes and an incredible apple tart, but its veggie sushi was sorely lacking. NASA, on the other hand, had by far the best cafeteria sushi I’ve ever eaten. I can’t say that this is a very important fact about either institution. But if you ever find yourself in the cafeteria at Goddard, you know what to get.

Week 10 - Goodbye

Well, I’ve been home for a week now. I hope to stay in touch with a whole lot of people from this summer - all the interns, my coworkers, everyone in the SPS office - and I still have a lot of thoughts, opportunities, and feelings from the summer. But for now, I’m just relaxing and figuring out what to do next.

It’s been good.