Hale Stolberg, 2020 AIP FYI Science Policy Communications Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: American University

I am a rising senior at American University in Washington, DC and will receive my bachelor’s in physics with a minor in public administration and policy this December. When not in class, you can find me working a multitude of jobs including as a Creative and Technical Specialist (CaTS) at the Design and Build Lab, AU’s rapid prototyping facility, and this last semester as an intern at NASA Headquarters. Outside of school or work, I enjoy spending time on my bike, exploring DC’s museums, or having the odd political debate with my friends.

My path to physics was not a straightforward one. I’ve always known I’ve wanted to be a scientist. I specifically remember watching the PBS program NOVA and being enthralled watching what scientists do on a daily basis. The scientists that I saw on TV were able to explore and discover the universe by asking questions and seeking answers. From then on, I knew I’d be a scientist when I grew up. But as it turns out, my brain seems to be unsatisfied pursuing just one subject. In high school, I was alternately intrigued by chemistry, energy and environmental sciences, anthropology, and even architecture and urban design. But what I really loved was politics and policy. To me, science and politics aren’t that different. They are both systems we use to solve big problems. Combining these two passions then seemed like the obvious choice.

I’m really excited to continue working at the intersection of science and policy. While staying at home may not be the summer I had in mind, I am so grateful for everyone at SPS for being so diligent, and continuing to make this program a reality.

Internship

Host: American Institute of Physics

Project

Abstract

This presentation is styled in the format of a TED Talk and will connect the need for undergraduates in physics and the sciences to be engaged in politics and policy with my experience working with FYI: Science Policy News from AIP. In this presentation, I will discuss the need for scientists to be proficient communicators, how engagement with the policy process hones this skill, and how I personally have worked through my time with FYI. I will also discuss how policy can impact undergraduate physics majors and scientists, as well as my own experience covering those policies through FYI. I will conclude my presentation by discussing what undergraduates can do to begin engaging in policy and politics.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week 1: It Wasn’t Supposed to be Like This

[Disclaimer: all opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of SPS or AIP]

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of this was supposed to be like this. In mid-February, when I found out I was lucky enough for SPS to give me an opportunity to intern with them and FYI for the summer, visions of going to dinner with new friends, hearings on Capitol Hill, and hot muggy nights walking around the monuments filled my head. Instead, I write to you today from my basement in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Nor did I expect to have my first week amidst the backdrop of nationwide protests against the other epidemics of systemic racism and police brutality that our country has long dealt with. As AIP and other societies have made abundantly clear, racism has no home in the physical sciences and it’s my belief that silence on the issue is tantamount to endorsement. SPS has given me this platform, ostensibly to provide updates about how my summer is progressing, and to show other physics students how awesome this program truly is. While I will continue to use it for that function, I must in good conscious speak out and use this platform to its fullest extent. If you can, go to your local protest. You can also donate , especially to national organizations like the Black Lives Matter Global Network , the ACLU , or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund just to name a few. But most importantly, if you want to see change in your community, vote. Sometimes it may not seem like it, but the people from Capitol Hill to City Hall hold tremendous influence. If you don’t like how things are being run, the least you could do is try someone else.

Setting aside current events, the other point of this blog is to give you updates on my summer, so that is exactly what I will do. Trial by fire is probably a hyperbolic description of my first day at FYI. When I was told that I’d been assigned to FYI: Science Policy News from AIP, I was both thrilled and terrified. SPS was presenting me with an opportunity to use my skills and knowledge in an arena I had never worked in before. It would be a chance to look into areas of science policy that I had only scratched the surface of, and to flex my writing skills in a brand-new way. On the other hand, I have no experience with journalism or any kind of popular writing in general—heck, I’ve never even taken a communications class. I can write a well thought out research paper on federalism in the United Kingdom, a lab report on a single photon double slit experiment, or even a policy analysis on the current administration’s NSF funding, but in no way would I consider myself qualified to write for a news outlet. So when I logged on Monday morning for my first day, I had no idea what to expect.

My mentor—Mitch Ambrose, the director of FYI—decided to throw me a bone. My first assignment was to take notes on a meeting between the National Academies of Sciences and NASA where they’d discuss nuclear propulsion for future spacecraft. Mitch knew that I’d been interning at NASA for the past five months and had a hunch that I might already know a bit about the subject. His hunch proved correct and I felt pretty comfortable taking notes on and then summarizing the meeting. Hopefully, that summary will show up as a blurb in next week’s edition of “FYI This Week.” The rest of the week sailed along smoothly. My week was full of taking notes and writing summaries, interrupted by funny quips and questions from the other lovely SPS interns in our group chat. Wednesday even found us on a group video call playing quiplash and other fun games. I’m excited to see what the future weeks hold for me.

Cheers,

Week 2: Settling In

I think I’m getting the hang of this. Take that with an enormous grain of salt. The only person I know who can truly understand my ineptitude is myself. As such, I really wouldn’t trust me to give you an objective opinion on my current level of “getting the hang of this-ness.” That fact aside, things at FYI are humming along.

Going through two weeks has given me an appreciation for “the process.” FYI has two distinct ways to publish updates in science policy: bulletins and FYI This Week. Bulletins are usually the length of a typical article you would see in your favorite newspaper, anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words on the long end. FYI This Week is a weekly newsletter and update about all of the things going on in science policy. It’s a great resource if you are at all interested in keeping up with the latest developments in the field. Not to do any shameless self-promotion but you can subscribe and get email alerts here ! Anyway, the process at FYI seems to focus on finding things to put in FYI This Week, going to those things or researching them, then summarizing them into a blurb that will be published the next Monday. The process repeats endlessly.

I think I’m getting the hang of fitting myself into this. I had a pretty god idea of what my week would look like, the only deviation being Wednesday’s strike to #ShutDownSTEM. AIP, and my mentor encouraged me and the rest of the staff to use the day to continue educating ourselves about the history of racism and exclusion within STEM and academia. I’d like to say I put the day to good use reading through the recent TEAM-UP Report , and trying to read through as many articles on the Particles for Justice resources page. I’d really recommend watching this debate from 1965 (!) between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley and if you’ve never heard of James Baldwin, check out this video from TED-Ed. In addition to educational resources, a lot of good experiences were shared over Twitter under #BlackInTheIvory. Hearing and acknowledging the experiences of our Black colleagues is the first way we attack racism in our own community. The second is by engaging in systemic and long-lasting culture change that promotes Black voices with STEM. I’m glad I could participate and was happy that the team had a thoughtful discussion on how we could help to promote black voices in science policy and do better ourselves in highlighting the inequities in the field.

Aside from the strike, one thing that I really liked from my week was listening to an American Nuclear Society panel discussion on the use of low enriched uranium in space propulsion technologies. I already have some knowledge of the technology so hearing a completely different perspective on it was supper interesting, and boy was the discussion spicy! Hearing scientists from all different backgrounds give their differing opinions and sometimes having completely contrary analyses of the same facts is endlessly fascinating to me. This is what attracts me to science policy. Being able to analyze and communicate policy that inherently requires technical knowledge and a scientific background is why I study both. I find being able to put that into practice by writing about it and disseminating that knowledge to a less technically minded audience really rewarding. I’m looking forward to what the next week will throw at me.

Also included are some pictures taken at different points during my week. I’ll probably expand on some of them in a later post

Cheers,

Week 3: Appreciating the Pedantic

Pedantic is one way to put it. This week, I learned that every detail counts, and that scientists are not afraid to call someone out when they believe a statement is wrong.

This week at FYI, we published a bulletin detailing the progress of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (LBNF/DUNE), one of the premier U.S. physics experiments being built today. Eventually, the project will send neutrinos created at Fermilab here in Chicago 800 miles through the Earth to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. As we say in the bulletin, “by analyzing the elusive particles’ behaviors with unprecedented precision, the project aims to probe the foundations of physics and shed new light on processes that shaped the history of the universe.” Unfortunately, the cost of the project has risen by more than 40% and may result in the project being scaled down, or its full capabilities being set aside for a later upgrade.

The way the article came together was really instructive for me in the journalistic process. The author, Will, had been working on the bulletin for at least three weeks and had multiple moving parts, including conversations with the project’s managers at the Department of Energy. The bulletin went through multiple rounds of editing and revision (parts of which I had a teeny tiny part in). In the end, the bulletin went from a series of coherent ideas about a topic, to a single flowing story about problems at a premier U.S. high energy physics experiment.

By Friday, DOE had responded to us and all of the edits were hashed out; Mitch gave the green light to publish. I took one last look at it and had no problems. It seemed like another bulletin had been pushed out of the office smoothly.

Two hours after publication, I received a cc’d email from Will. In it, he had forwarded a message received from a well-regarded physicist who had taken the time to point out a slight change in wording from a report we had quoted late in the bulletin. In the bulletin, we had said “the 2014 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report recommended LBNF/DUNE as the ‘highest-priority large project’ to be pursued over the following 20 years.” The physicist pointed out that the text of the report said “LBNF is the highest-priority large project in its timeframe.” The physicist took great issue in the fact that we had changed the wording of the sentence. In its timeframe was not the same as the following 20 years. The physicist believed that such a discrepancy represented a mischaracterization of the report and that quoting the report out of context did a disservice to its recommendations.

At the end of their email, the physicist added an aside saying “I am sorry if I sound overly didactic, or that I am taking you to task. I am by no means taking you to task. I only mean to inform you of things that you may not know.” I could not help but laugh when reading this, because to me, this statement encapsulates what is so special and increasingly rare in scientists: that they are extremely passionate about the work they do, and that they deeply care about how that work affects others.

Think about it. It takes a special type of person to read a news article and then type out a well written 500-word email to the author telling him why eight of his 1500 words are wrong. The normal person accepts the small imperfection and moves on, but the scientist must fix the error—not because the scientist must always be right, but because the scientist cares how the error affects those who may not know it exists.

I hope you are like me and can both laugh at the preposterousness of the email, and greatly appreciate the type of mind that writes it.

Cheers,

Week 4: I’m Learning

Not much has happened this week so it’s going to be a shorter post.

Things at FYI are still busy as usual. We decided that it might be nice to have 20-minute coffee break meetings twice a week and our first was on Friday. It was really nice to be able to sit down with the people I would have been sharing an office with for the past four weeks and get to know them a little better. I hope you can join me in wishing Mitch good luck on his first attempt at baking a pie.

I’m still enjoying the work we do every day. I’m really appreciating that I get to work on a wide range of issues in science policy and am expected to have a working knowledge of those issues and fields. I know for a fact that I don’t always have a full understanding, something that was obvious to me when I watched a fusion energy panel. While I knew I didn’t have full knowledge, I knew that I had enough training and experience to be able to watch now and understand later after some further research. It shows that I’m learning, and that’s what’s really important to me.

I’m also glad that I’m learning the FYI style. I’d like to remind you that I have no training in journalism, nor do I claim to be a journalist. When I got this opportunity, I thought that I’d read enough print media to pick up the style pretty quickly. While not entirely false, it was not true either. FYI has a very specific style to it, something that Mitch and Will know seemingly instinctively, but something that was so far elusive to me. This week, the gears are seeming to start to turn. I was very proud of myself on Friday when writing copy for FYI This Week, I could see where my writing didn’t fit the style. It was small, maybe a wrong adjective, or a misplaced sentence, but I could understand why it didn’t fit, and how to correct it. It was a small moment of understanding that showed me I was learning.

Anyway, no major updates from me. I’m still working on my first bulletin on space nuclear technologies and got my first rough comments back. I’ll take those suggestions and incorporate them into a formal first draft. I think it’ll be published come the first full week in July.

Cheers,

Week 6: Patience

[Disclaimer: all opinions are my own and do not necessicarily reflect those of SPS, AIP, or FYI]

In the words of Capital Cities, “Patience Gets Us Nowhere Fast .” While not only being an excellent Capital Cities song from nearly seven years ago, (really, listen to the album, it’s a blast) the wisdom is both a great and awful motto to live your life by.

This week, us interns planed a (virtual) SPS picnic. It was a nice way to see all the other lovely interns and meet many of their mentors. I decided to sit in my backyard with a red-and-white checkered blanket, chatting with people across the country through Zoom. In the course of the event, I was asked 1) what my plans are for the next year and 2) what I missed from having an in-person internship.

Over the last week, I’ve been thinking about my answers to these questions and their relationship to Capital Cities’ advice. Planning for the future and reflecting on a hypothetical past are both awful ideas in the middle of a pandemic. Neither one is entirely real, and both may change in an instant during times of great uncertainty. The last four months have shown me that even the best laid plans may change in an instant.

For me as I expect it has been for you, it has been extremely scary to be an American during the pandemic. Even in the Before Times, every week for the last five years seemed to bring new horrors. We have come to the brink of war with Iran and North Korea , multiple times . The US has failed to address climate change, and deadly fires , storms , and droughts have come as a result. Our reputation as a world leader has been chipped away brick by brick with even our closest allies openly laughing at American leadership. Domestic problems aren’t much better. Americans spend more on health care for worse outcomes . Young people like myself are saddling ourselves with debt not to secure a better future, but to ensure we don’t have a worse one than our parents. Black people are still being attacked and killed every day by police.

A lot of the time, I see the news and ask myself “when will this end,” “why haven’t things gotten better,” “what have we been doing with our time,” and to this, Capital Cities give their wisdom. There is no magic fix to our problems. The only thing that will help is being patient. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If we want to see justice, improvement, a better world, our best bet is to be patient. But patience is not enough. Practicing patience “gets us nowhere fast.” While the arc may bend, it will not do so unless we pull. Reader, I urge you to be patient, but keep pulling.

Cheers,

Week 7: Ramblings About the Future

You might have noticed from my previous blogs that I’m a pretty introspective person. I don’t talk about the happenings of my week at length and when I do, I like to keep it short. I don’t know why this is, I mean, I like talking about myself and my experiences as much as anyone else, (maybe a bit too much sometimes) but spending the summer at home has really put some things in perspective. When every week is mostly the same, it seems that nothing truly rises the status of blog-worthy.

This week I’ve been thinking about the future. As I said last week, this is a bad idea. There is no good reason to try and make plans for the future when the future is so uncertain but plan I must. As the summer comes to an end, I have to make plans to get back to school. AU has decided that classes will be some type of “in-person optional” so I am planning to return to DC in mid-August. This is my last semester of undergrad which makes planning for the future particularly difficult. I have no idea what the world will look like come December, let alone what my world will look like.

But I take comfort in knowing that I’ve made the most of my time in undergrad so far. I don’t know about your school, but AU has a pretty bad hustle culture. To many students it can seem that if you aren’t taking 5 classes, interning, are on the board of a club or society, and have time to see your friends on the weekend, you aren’t succeeding. This mindset is completely false and can be very toxic, but for a while I believed it. I thought that if I want killing myself, I wasn’t going to succeed. Coming to the end of my college career has taught me not to accept that culture, but to appreciate the drive and passion that motivates it. Looking back, I’m glad I decided to step into my university’s maker space one day and ask about working there. I’m glad I decided to apply for an internship with NASA, and I’m especially glad I decided to apply for an internship with SPS.

While I still have a few more weeks to go, my time with SPS and FYI has already been amazing. I have learned so much about science policy, writing, story, and style, not to mention been able to enjoy meeting my colleagues, making friends via zoom, and meeting so many great people at AIP. This opportunity has given me so much and I even feel comfortable stepping towards the future without a detailed plan. I know that my experience here will already help me in my future pursuits in science policy and journalism whatever they may be.

If you’re thinking about applying for this next opportunity next year, do it. I promise you it’ll be amazing.

Cheers,

Week 8: Rose, Bud, Thorn

Between 5^th grade and Sophomore year of high school, I’d spend my summers at a Jewish sleep away camp in Wisconsin. I have many good memories of living in a sweltering cabin with some of my best friends in the world.

Growing up means that I’ve had to leave that place. While I’m glad that I’ve been able to spend my summers in college working, and am especially grateful for the opportunity SPS and FYI have given me this summer, I still long for those muggy nights when all that mattered was the next adventure with my friends and if we were going to the canteen the next day (the canteen had slushies btw).

One thing that we used to do at camp as an evening activity was Rose, Bud, Thorn. If you are not familiar, here’s a rundown: share three things about your week, 1) a Rose is something that you liked, appreciated or was overall good, 2) a Thorn is something that was a bummer, made you sad, or that didn’t go well, and not to end on a sour note, 3) a Bud is something in the next week that you’re looking forward to. In the spirit of camp and the summer, I’d like us all to play Rose, Bud, Thorn, and I’ll go first.

Rose: I successfully upgraded my computer on Saturday! While I would not consider myself to be an expert in electronics, computer science, or computer repair, I decided to upgrade the Mac Mini I’m currently typing this post on. Y’all, before I upgraded this, this machine was sloooooooow, like wait a full minute for Chrome, or Slack, or Spotify to open slow. On Thursday, I decided I’d had enough and looked up how I could improve my performance. As it turned out, my spinning disk hard drive was causing the problem, so I decided to replace it with a solid-state drive. While the thought of taking apart my computer, especially a Mac may have seemed daunting at first, the process was well documented and straight forward. I had my computer disassembled and back together in under an hour and it works like a dream. I’m so happy I decided to try something new and slightly adventurous.

Thorn: I feel like there can be many thorns this week, especially as we all continue to endure this pandemic. One thing I’ve been frustrated about with myself is how productive I see myself. During the pandemic, we receive conflicting signals about what we should expect from ourselves. On one side is a chorus of voices saying carpe diem, make the most of lockdown, pursue things you wouldn’t normally have time to do, and just get good at doing what you do. On the other end, there is a group saying that you don’t need to do anything, it’s ok to just exist, if you want to spend a whole day watching Killing Eve and eating Takis, go right ahead. I think I fall down somewhere in the middle, and unsatisfied with the results from either side. When I sit down to try and make myself be productive, all I want to do is do nothing, and when I do nothing, I feel guilty for not being productive. It’s a fickle cycle, but I hope you can relate to me with my pain.

Bud: I know I’ve said this multiple times, but this week should be the one where I publish my first article with FYI. My mentor Mitch has given me another set of comments and this time it’s much more concrete. I can see the flow of the article shifting and starting to take shape. I am already working on it, but I will continue early in the week and hopefully publish before the time the week is out.

I’m glad I got to share a bit of camp with you dear reader. I hope you have your own Rose, Bud, and Thorn for the week, and maybe you’ll even share it with family or friends.

Cheers,

Week 9: Published!

After 9 weeks, I have finally published my first (and so far, only) article for FYI. To be honest, I’m very proud of myself. If someone had told me Freshman year, or even last summer that I’d be writing articles for a science policy publication and I’d really enjoy it, I’d have been pretty skeptical. Science is written in the language of math for a reason and the thought of having to write essays all day did not seem appealing to the young physicist within me. But writing for an English professor couldn’t be more different than writing for a news-focused science policy audience and I’m very glad it is. I’m pretty sure I’d have a very different opinion of my summer otherwise.

If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here . I hope you enjoy.

With the summer coming to and end and the next week being my last, there are a few things I want to reflect on.

1) Internships are amazing opportunities

I’ve mentioned my experiences with AU’s internship culture before, but I also want to give a more personal story about my internship journeys. Last summer between sophomore and junior years my goal was to stay in DC for the summer. I applied to more than twenty positions and internships including SPS and got rejected from all of them. Maybe I was a bit young or just extremely unlucky, but it still hurt. Drafting personal statements, cover letters and resumes for each of those opportunities was hard and took time away from other things I could have been doing.

Still, that didn’t deter me. I continued to apply for opportunities through the fall and spring, and it paid off. So far, I’ve had two wonderful opportunities with NASA and now SPS, and I wouldn’t trade either of them for the world. What I think is so valuable about internships is the opportunity it gives you to think. College can be a bubble that doesn’t always prepare you for work in the real world. Internships are that bridge that let you understand if you actually enjoy the work that you’re doing, pointing you in the right direction in the long run.

So keep on applying. I know it’s hard, at times soul-crushing, but the only way forward is to keep moving. You’ll be rewarded for it in the end. Also apply to SPS because it is such an amazing program. I truly couldn’t have asked for anything more under the circumstances.

2) Editing never truly ends

There are currently 6 versions of my article sitting on my computer right now, and those are just versions that I wrote. There are at least another 5-6 that Mitch or Will sent back to me to review. And even after that entire process, there are still things in the article that I could see changing. As I—or should I say we—were nearing completion, Mitch told me that editing at FYI isn’t really like a normal news organization where something might be written by an author and then passed up the chain to an editor, instead we have a much more collaborative process where we end up with a consensus document. In each article, I can see the little pieces the team contributes and writing my own article from scratch has really made me appreciate that.

3) Time flies

My favorite song from one of my favorite bands is JR JR’s A Haunting off their second album. My favorite lyric from that song goes “I am so inundated by the speed of things.” I urge you listen, ponder an enjoy.

Cheers,