Ariana Remmel

Ariana Remmel, MS/MS, is a science journalist and current Editorial Fellow at Chemical & Engineering News. Ariana honed their science communication skills while working as a PhD student in Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego, eventually leaving the program to pursue science writing full-time. They have since graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Master’s Program, which included an extensive internship at KQED Public Radio. Ariana is also a National Association of Science Writers Diversity Fellow, and an avid birder.

Can you describe your academic and professional background? What path led you to pursue a career in science writing?

In my undergrad, I was at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and I did a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. While I was at college, I did an REU [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which I ended up working at as a lab technician and then a research scientist for a year and a half after I graduated. I really enjoyed what I was doing, and I decided [to] go to grad school. So I applied to UCSD and got in. I joined the chemistry department and was in a glycobiology lab, which used chemical tools to try to solve biological problems.

While I was a grad student, I had my Master's exam, and that exam was so much work. I had zero results to present, but I put together this phenomenal presentation. And I can say it's a phenomenal presentation because my whole committee told me it was a phenomenal presentation. That was a moment where I was like: Hmm. I can talk about science. I can share ideas. I can make really complex concepts easy to understand. But I do not want to be in lab actually executing this proposal that I came up with.

So I started taking night classes at UCSD Extension through the Science Writing program, in addition to doing my PhD work. I was doing online and in-person classes, and I was the first person to finish their Science Communication Certificate Program. That got me through December of my third year in school.

I was really miserable. Nothing was working out. I didn't feel like my interests were aligned with my advisor's interests. I didn't think that I was going to be able to make the changes that I wanted to see in the community as a scientist. So I applied and was accepted to the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz.

UC Santa Cruz was a nine month program that gave me internship opportunities at newspapers and radio stations. I worked at KQED for six months, and that gave me exactly the skills that I needed to get to my current position, which is the Editorial Fellow at Chemical & Engineering News, a six-month fellowship with the magazine published by the American Chemical Society. So on a day-to-day basis, I now write and read more about chemistry than I ever did as a graduate student.

How were you able to break away from the traditional definition of success in academia, and instead work towards something that was more authentic to you?

For one, I spent a solid year trying to break out of the mold that I felt I was being placed in. Besides taking night classes at the Extension program, I was taking classes in history, philosophy, and sociology of science through the Science Studies program. I actually proposed to my advisor that a chapter of my thesis would be either a "History of Chemistry" chapter or would be a "Chem Education" chapter. But at the end of the day, it was seen as a distraction.

I really had to make the decision of, "I feel like this is important because it is important, and I need to trust my gut," or "I feel like this is important because I am broken and I don't fit with what a scientist is." That was a really hard place to be in. I will absolutely say that I went through a lot of therapy trying to make that decision. But the other thing I did was I started looking for people who did things that I thought were interesting. I started expanding my network as far and wide as I possibly could. I went to conferences. I started talking to journalists, public information officers, anyone who would talk to me about what they did and why they loved it. Once I saw people who were successful – and not just successful, but actually happy in their field – suddenly there was a different model.

It wasn't that I was broken because I couldn't fit into this one place that wanted me to be this thing that I wasn't. It was that I just needed to pick myself up and move. I love working, and being in a lab made me feel like I was lazy. I really thought that I was just a lazy person because I didn't want to do the work. And it was like, no, I'm on the wrong mountain. There's a trajectory going up, but I had chosen the wrong mountain.

Coming to terms with the decision to leave my PhD was a hard one because it really did feel like failure. It felt like I had failed at the thing I'd been working towards over my whole career. But I cannot stress enough how much happier I am right now in what I do, and how much more engaged in science I am right now. I learn something new every single week, and that's why I got into science – to learn and to explore and to discover – and I do that now.

What impact did the UCSD Extension Science Communication Certificate Program and the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Master’s Program have on your training and career?

The UCSD Extension program showed me that there was a real possibility to do something beyond research. It opened up a set of awareness that I did not have before. The UC Santa Cruz program gave me a full toolbox. When I left the UCSD Extension program, I was able to confidently say, "I am a science writer." When I got out of the UC Santa Cruz program it was like, "I'm not just a science writer, I am a science journalist." I'd call people and be like, "Hi, my name's Ariana Remmel. I'm a science reporter for KQED Public Radio. I need 30 minutes of your time." I had the confidence to do that because I had been through all of the stages of how to source a story, how to report a story, how to write and edit – I knew the process.

Now that I'm in my fellowship, I certainly still have a lot to learn. But I look at all of the publications out there and I know what I need to do to write for them. I know who I would need to contact. I know what kind of stories they'd want. And I know that I have the skills that I need to be successful in this career path, as long as I just do the work. Because I'm on the right mountain now.

Can you tell us about your current responsibilities? What is a typical day or week like in your role?

I am the Editorial Fellow for Chemical & Engineering News, which is a journalistic news magazine published by the American Chemical Society that comes out every week. The magazine is divided into a couple of different sections, primarily the "news" section and the "feature" section.

News is like: a study comes out, we interview the authors, we interview someone not involved with the study to get their perspective on the research, and then we write that up. Those are max 500-600 words. A feature story is going to be talking about a bigger picture. It's going to be multiple studies, multiple researchers. It's going to be closer to 1000, 2000, maybe even 3000 words depending on how big the topic is, and those projects take a lot longer.

The way that my work week is divided: Monday, I have already found a paper. Tuesdays I have a pitch meeting in the morning with my editors and I say "This is a study that I want to write about. This is why it's important. This is how long I think it will be. This is when I can turn it into you. This is the art that I think will go with it." At this point, I need to have done at least one interview about the story. I need to know that I've got something substantial. The editors will ask me a couple of clarifying questions, and then I finish the reporting generally on Wednesday. I write the story, submit it, do the edits with my editor. Thursday it goes to the production team who make the magazine actually in the format that magazines look like. I finish those and then the story goes online on Thursday. It's a really quick turnaround. The story gets assigned on a Tuesday and it is done on Thursday. But that leaves Monday and Friday mostly for doing small reporting, looking for stories for the next week, and working on larger feature stories. At any given time I am working on generally two news stories and maybe one big feature project, plus one or two smaller feature projects.

Science writing can be very different depending on who your target audience is. What do you enjoy and what do you find challenging about the type of science writing you do?

At the UC Santa Cruz program, I was writing primarily for very general audiences. I was working for a local newspaper and a public radio station. It changed the kinds of stories that I could tell, and it changed the way that I told those stories, in a way that I really enjoyed. You're talking to your Lyft driver, you're talking to people who are on their commute, or who are picking up the newspaper on a Sunday morning drinking their coffee. That's a fun audience to have a conversation with.

Chemical & Engineering News is different because I'm talking to chemists, so I can make a lot more assumptions about what they understand. I would not say that my audience is any more intelligent than the general audiences that I wrote for before. I would just say that they are more particularly informed about the kinds of things that I write about.

Fact checking those two stories is a little bit different. It's always important to me that I get the facts right, but when you're presenting to a science audience, you can get way more precise and detailed, and there's more opportunities to mess stuff up. Even though I have my realm of expertise, that's a fraction of what I write about. That's one of the reasons the outside comment can be important. When you are writing for other scientists, you're writing for an audience that has basically made a sport of picking things apart and looking for holes. So that's a little bit different.

I love both kinds of storytelling, but there are pros and cons to both. And I think in my ideal world, I would find a way to mix and match the two.

How have you dealt with receiving feedback from readers who want to correct details in your piece?

I am so much happier when my editors ask those questions and not a source from a story. That's what editors are for. The comments I've gotten from sources that I've interviewed generally have an issue with a lack of precision in the language. That is a very common comment from scientists. If you are an expert in that individual field, that might make a difference to your understanding of the key results. But if your expertise is in a different area and you're reading this as a way to get an introduction into a new kind of research – we link to the paper, they can read the paper. So I try not to lose too much sleep over that. I do try to take it into consideration, but it's like, learn something and move on to the next thing.

Journalism has changed dramatically in recent years. What future trends should we be aware of within the field of science journalism and its job market?

It's hard to get a job in any industry right now and journalism is not an exception to that. I think that science journalists are a little bit better positioned in the journalism industry as a whole, just because there is such a need for good science communication right now. I mean, you look at issues around climate change, health disparities, coronavirus – all kinds of scientific topics that have real implications for human survival in our country and the world. Science journalists are particularly trained and practiced in being able to make that information accessible, such that regular people without that background can make decisions for themselves in the ways that they vote, in the ways that they buy products. I think that's really important. And I think that there are people who are trying to adjust the industry so that it's better prepared to support that kind of journalism.

One of the big things is people changing their pay models. The industry is suffering because for so long newspapers and other outlets have been paid for by ad revenue, and no one's buying anything…so there's no point in selling ads. That particular thing has crashed the market pretty badly.

Freelancing is always an option. It's not an easy way to make a living, though you can. I will say that it's made particularly hard if you don't have access to health insurance. With that said, you just have to keep writing. You just write what you can for who you can and negotiate pay. If you have any experience writing in a journalistic style that you can show with clips, you deserve to be paid a fair wage for your work.

What activities, internships, or organizations would you recommend someone get involved with to help them break into this field?

Science Writing I with UCSD Extension is by far my best recommendation for an intro to science writing. The other place that I would start looking is The Open Notebook, which is a resource of articles, how-to's, storygrams, anything you need to know about doing science journalism, it's there in The Open Notebook.

As far as internships, they're going to be really hard to come by, but there are a ton of different internships at all sorts of different places. I started out doing PIO [Public Information Officer] internships at UCSD. That was really helpful to me. As far as conferences: SciComm Conference, ComSciCon – wonderful resources, highly recommend.

If you are interested in doing freelancing, Wudan Yan has a freelancing podcast, which is pretty exceptional. I would definitely read some guides about how to pitch effectively, about good pitch hygiene, before you [begin]. You just need your foot in the door with 1-3 editors to start out, and maybe that one will lead to the other two, which will lead to the rest of it. You just have to start making relationships. In San Diego, joining SANDSWA (San Diego Science Writers Association) is a really great place to meet people who are in the industry.

When applying for jobs or internships, how important is having a certificate or degree to demonstrate professional training in science writing?

I feel like having one of these certificates or going through a program like UC Santa Cruz is an amazing opportunity and it will open a lot of doors in the same way that going to an Ivy League or one of those big, name brand schools would. It is great because it has some recognition. It has a network that you get access to. But that in no way guarantees any kind of success because science journalism is a trade. What gets you jobs is the proof that you have done good work. Maybe my application will get picked up more because I have UC Santa Cruz on my resume. But what people ask me about in these interviews is not what I learned in the program or what classes I took or who I met. They asked me what I've written about and why I like that story, what I think I did well and what I think I missed. I am evaluated based on my writing. My writing is good because I've been through all of these programs, but I have been exceptionally privileged in being able to take the time to go through these programs. And it is entirely possible to do it on your own. It just takes a little bit more effort. I think you have to be prepared to have the energy to reach out to people, and the fearlessness to ask for the help that you need. And at the end of the day, you just have to show that you can write and edit and take edits and work with people in a team. And if you can do those, that's all you need. 

Any final thoughts for scientists navigating these sorts of career questions?

I think about what I do as a science journalist as the last step of the scientific method. If you look at the scientific method, you make an observation, you come up with a hypothesis, you test that hypothesis, then you refine the test, refine the hypothesis, then you do the analysis. And then you get to the point where you share, right? The first step of that sharing is writing a journal or doing a presentation at a conference. But the last step is making sure that the people who are most impacted by your research get the information. And that's what I do.

Every single part of the scientific method is important for us to progress as a society. I think that what kept me miserable in a project that I was not well suited for was the feeling that one part of the scientific method is more important or more valuable than the other. And I just don't think that's true. I think that if we are going to use science to make the world a better place for all of us – not just the scientists, not just students, not just the people who have the privilege of having an education to understand what the science even is – if we're going to make science for everyone, we have to put the energy and the time and the funding into making sure that it reaches everyone.

People do that to different degrees in their career. I've chosen to dedicate the entirety of my work week to that particular effort. But you don't have to leave research if you love research. There are ways to incorporate communication in the work that you do, whether it be taking the extra time to explain to a family member or to a stranger or to little kid, or if it means actually following through on those "Broader Impact" statements at the end of grants. We have to think about who our science is affecting, and whether we're doing the best we can to affect them positively. And I think science communication is a way to do that.

To learn more, follow Ari on Twitter: @science_ari