{"id":10111,"date":"2021-07-01T10:21:42","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T09:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/?p=10111"},"modified":"2021-07-01T12:35:46","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T11:35:46","slug":"meet-me-in-another-stem-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/meet-me-in-another-stem-career\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Me in Another STEM Career"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In science communication, we often talk about science capital: the concept of feeling like science is \u201cfor me\u201d as a result of sum of all the experiences and resources we\u2019ve encountered that build up an interest in science. Everything from having parents in science, being taken to science-related events and having just one excellent teacher can change our lives to one where we pursue a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s sometimes difficult to work out exactly what might have pushed us into ambitions within science as a child, especially as we don\u2019t know what we would have ended up doing if it wasn\u2019t for that one teacher we had, or we had been ill the day the school trip went to the science centre. But what if we did have the opportunity to live our lives over and over again? We\u2019d be able to work out exactly what it is that leads to the career paths we take. This is exactly what happens in Catriona Silvey\u2019s \u201cMeet Me in Another Life\u201d, a soft sci-fi novel coming out on 8th July 2021. The novel follows two protagonists, Thora and Santi, who share the same preoccupation with science, the stars, and astronomy. They live their lives over and over, with each chapter painting them in a different relationship (e.g. friends, parent\/child, teacher\/student, colleagues, lovers, doctor\/patient, etc.). In each life, they\u2019re the same people, but due to different circumstances and relationships they don\u2019t always end up following the same careers. Their careers are usually science-related, but not always, and it\u2019s interesting to think about where they end up in their lives through the lens of science capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Catriona Silvey<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I recently interviewed <\/a> for Catriona Silvey<\/a> for The Cosmic Shed<\/a> and asked her about science capital. In her answer she lays down barriers resulting from internal, personal struggles, interpersonal relationships, and structural barriers in our society. She said: “I realised that I\u2019d written book about these two very driven, very passionate people who mostly repeatedly fail to achieve their dreams.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBarriers can be very different for different people depending on their circumstances. Thora\u2019s problem, especially towards the beginning of the book, is that she feels like she has too many choices. Which is quite a privileged position to be in, but it means she sort of ends up sabotaging herself, because quite often she won\u2019t pick the thing she really wants to do because, fundamentally, she\u2019s scared she\u2019ll fail at it, and there\u2019s nothing worse than failing at the thing you really, really want to do. So that\u2019s very much a personal, internal barrier.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnother barrier for her is her parents,\u201d Silvey goes on, \u201cher parents have a very fixed idea of the person she is and what she should focus on, and it\u2019s the humanities. And that, in some of her lives, really strongly influences her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSanti\u2019s problem is kind of the opposite of Thora\u2019s problem in that he has a lack of opportunities. He\u2019s a man and he\u2019s straight, but on every other access he has less privilege than Thora has. His parents are working class, whereas hers are professors. He is not a native English speaker, whereas she is. Thora\u2019s family are usually immigrants by choice, whereas Santi\u2019s family are immigrants through economic necessity. For all these reasons, he often doesn\u2019t have the opportunities he wishes he would have, and so his barriers are a lot more structural.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While investigating what leads us into our careers certainly isn\u2019t the central point of the book (the most pressing theme is really the need to find out why the protagonists are stuck in a time loop), I think for those working in science communication, Meet Me in Another Life offers an interesting meditation on science capital, giving us an experiment we can\u2019t do in real life and wrapping it up in a vivid, gripping, beautifully-written novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can listen to the podcast here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Hannah Little, Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at UWE Bristol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In science communication, we often talk about science capital: the concept of feeling like science is \u201cfor me\u201d as a result of sum of all the experiences and resources we\u2019ve encountered that build up an interest in science. Everything from having parents in science, being taken to science-related events and having just one excellent teacher … Continue reading “Meet Me in Another STEM Career”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":10112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,17],"tags":[675,676,673,322,92,674,672,163,657],"class_list":["post-10111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-of-health-and-applied-sciences","category-science-communication","category-science-communication-unit","category-science-writing-journalism","tag-career-barriers","tag-careers","tag-catriona-silvey","tag-cosmic-shed","tag-hannah-little","tag-meet-me-in-another-life","tag-science-capital","tag-stem","tag-stem-careers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10111"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10126,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10111\/revisions\/10126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}