Sunday, June 7, 2020
By:
[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,
Hale Stolberg