How I Became a Professional, Full-Time Science Writer

Please Note: The below is a lightly-edited transcript of the above video. For the best experience, I recommend watching and/or listening to the video if possible.

Hey, there! If you're stumbling across this, let me take a second to introduce myself: My name is Alexis Dahl, my pronouns are she/her, and I'm a professional science communicator. Over the last few years, I've worked on small teams writing articles and video games for classrooms, and I've worked on slightly bigger teams, writing science videos for millions of viewers.

I've had people ask me recently how I got into this field, so I wanted to share about that — because I came into science communication with no formal training and virtually zero professional connections. So, here's my story so far. Here's how I went from your standard college science major to someone who professionally tells people how cool the universe is.

(Also, as a quick preface, I just wanna note that there are SO many ways to get into science communication, so if this is something you're interested in pursuing professionally, please don't take my story as a one-size-fits-all roadmap.)

But that said, here's how I ended up, well... here.

The first question people usually ask me when we're talking about my job is what I studied in college. And... honestly, this sounds weird to say, but I'm not actually sure it mattered that much.

See, I got two degrees in undergrad: One was a minor in writing, but although that program was genuinely great and gave me all kinds of experience writing for digital media, there was never an opportunity for me to learn how to write about science for a general audience. The other degree was a Bachelor's of Science in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience. And again — fine program, except I very rarely write anything related to psychology or neuroscience.

(Mostly, that part happened because I didn't learn about science communication until, like, halfway through undergrad. Before that point, I thought I maybe wanted to be a doctor or get a PhD, and by the time I learned what I actually wanted to do... well, it didn't make sense to just completely change my major, especially because my university didn't have a journalism program.)

So, in that regard, the specific things I learned in most of my classes about the brain and the mind haven't really had a huge impact on my professional life.

That said, though, I do think majoring in some kind of science ended up being extremely helpful for my career. Even though I'm not a neuroscience or a psychology writer, for my coursework, I /did/ have to get familiar with research and how to read scientific papers and just how the process of science works in general. I think I could have picked up those skills from any kind of science, or probably any kind of engineering for that matter, but having those skills at all made it just so much easier for me to make thoroughly-researched, accurate pieces for the general public later on.

That was really my schooling, though: I had this Bachelor's of Science, I had basically this digital media writing minor, and no formal training beyond that. But! What I did have was just a love for this field and also a pretty decent ability to pick up on patterns.

Especially when I started exploring going into this field, I spent a lot of time reading, watching, listening to, and just consuming other kinds of science communication and popular science media. And I tried to pay really close attention to what these writers were doing. And then, when I was working on my schoolwork or just my personal, fun science projects (I’ve made a lot of science YouTube videos over the years, many of which are now private), I would try and mimic those things.

I don't think doing that was, like, an incredible substitute for formal training, and I definitely don't think it made me a perfect science writer. Even then, though, just paying attention to and trying to mimic those patterns meant that I was practicing my science writing on a regular basis — and that ended up being huge. I am convinced that that kind of informal, scrappy practice is ultimately what led me to getting two science communication internships my last year of college.

One of them was a summer internship with the Smithsonian Science Education Center. (I did a video right at the end of that experience just kind of recounting how it went, so if that's specifically something you're interested in, you can find a link here.) And the other internship was a student job as a writer and the social media coordinator for my university's Aerospace Engineering department.

Now, did that mean I was able to get a job in science communication immediately after undergrad? No. Not, it did not mean that.

Really, science communication isn't a huge field; I think that's a helpful thing to know going into all of this. Also, in my case, although I did have some clips of my writing, I didn't really have a ton of them, and although I definitely wasn't a bad writer, I mean... I'll be honest: I wasn't a phenomenal writer, either. (Really, I think if I could go back about seven years and give College Alexis some advice, it would be to focus more on being clear, and focus less on being clever. I used a lot of truly awful analogies in my writing that I thought were clever.)

At that point in my life, I think I was set up pretty well to be, like, a hobby science writer. So, how did I go from /that/ to someone who has actually gotten paid to do this kind of work? To be honest with you, the answer to that question is some incredibly good timing.

The summer after graduation, I got a message from someone I had been in marching band with, and it was something to the tune of, "Hey! I saw on Tumblr that the YouTube channel SciShow Space is looking for freelance writers — and based on what I know about you, it seems like a good fit, so I thought I would send the link your way."

That was absolutely my kind of gig, and the requirements were pretty relaxed at the time: a Bachelor’s degree, plus some experience. So, I applied for this position, and the very sweet and kind editors at SciShow brought me along for one script. And then, that went well enough that one script turned into a few more. This relationship actually ended up going on for, like, a year, and a year later, I was at the point where I wanted to leave my social media job, and conveniently, SciShow was looking for a staff script editor.

Fast-forward almost four years, and by the time I left the team in 2021, I had directly worked on more than 500 episodes — some long, some short, some about science I was really familiar with, and other videos about topics I had no clue about.

At this point, I would absolutely not say that I completely have my feet under me in the science communication world, but looking back, I truly can't believe how much I have grown as a writer and an editor in only the last five years since leaving college.

If you have any questions for me about my career, or if you'd be interested in hearing some of the things I've learned and some of the mistakes I've made as a science writer, let me know in the comments — either of this post or at the YouTube link above. But that’s my story so far. I've got a long way to go, but for now, thanks for joining me for this part of it.