My cousin decided to study Biology just like I did (same university, hence same program). While she wants to go on a different research subject, so far she also wants to follow an academic pathway, and so she has asked me a lot of questions to subjects I wished I knew more about when I was starting. These will be a series of posts based on that premise. Please keep in mind all these posts will be based on personal experiences
How
important is it to follow science news?
The short
answer is, off course, very important. But allow me to elaborate.
Just as it
is important for you to follow the “general” news, as part of general
knowledge, it is important for you to follow science news if want to work in
science. As you will notice, there is a LOT of news and new sites and it can
get overwhelming to know what to read/listen to.
Independent
of the field you might want to work in, it is important that you know about the
big developments in science in general. A relative good method to follow this
is actually the science section of your local paper, just because usually the
BIG developments will make it out specialized media. That said, take this
reports with a pinch of salt. Unfortunately, many of this newspapers do not
have a science writer on staff and might give the coverage to someone that
could not be properly informed on the subject. I discussed this on a previous post.
If you want
a broad image but with a more focused angle, I would suggest podcasts or
science blogs. These sources can give you the highlights and are produced by
people with scientific backgrounds. I personally listen to Nature’s and Science’s podcast every week;
they are short and will give you a good idea of what happened that week in
several fields. Another podcast I enjoy is The Naked Scientist;
now they also have specialized podcasts in Astronomy, Genetics and others. They
will give an even more relaxed view of the developments in each field, but they
will have all the supporting information. All these podcasts also have their
own blogs, where you can get more information as well as the link to the
studies they are referring to.
Something
that can be very interesting as it will allow you to see different point of
views is following science blogs, and you can do so through different methods.
I personally love Science Borealis
because it gathers a lot of different blogs which helps me to keep up to date
and to hear different arguments on Canadian Science developments. And off
course, there is social media. Twitter can be a source of news off course, just
be sure you read the whole post before you retweet, and even then, don’t forget
to fact check when possible.
As you’ll
continue moving on your career, chances are that your interests will also
become more specialized. While this doesn’t mean you won’t be interested
anymore in the type of news discussed above, it does means that you’ll have a
bit less time to follow EVERYTHING. Once again, specialized blogs or podcasts
can help, but you’ll notice that it might not be enough when you start focusing
on that specific side of your research only you and that other group in another
continent are working on (I might be exaggerating just a bit here, but you get
the gist). So, you’ll have to start looking for news, or rather papers about it
quite often. Every once in a while, I do a PubMed search for certain
keywords. While this doesn’t assure I won’t miss a particular article it helps
to know what else is going on my field. Through NCBI
you can also set up alerts (like Google Alerts) for your specific keywords.
Once again, you have to learn how to filter the information you’ll get and to set
aside the documents that might be pertinent immediately and those that, while
interesting, can wait a bit before you tackle them.
Nude as the News--Cat Power
No comments:
Post a Comment