second entry at barnard college.

Over the past month, Professor Kay, Professor Rodriguez, and I have made significant progress on our articles. Professor Kay and I now have a completed interview transcript which is further undergoing additional edits. Professor Rodriguez and I completed our interview over two sessions and are now working to fill in the gaps of our transcript with additional data and information. 

I now feel that I have a better sense of my role as an editorial intern. I am here not to serve as an actual interviewer, but rather to help the professors organize their thoughts. With this better understanding in mind, I approached the interview with Professor Rodriguez by first brainstorming an article outline with her. We then conducted the interview in smaller chunks, and I reorganized and edited her responses into the article outline. During interviews, I’ve noticed that it’s easy to get off track and begin discussing topics that, while relevant to the interview question, do not fit within the structure of the article. By sticking to the outline, I noticed that we were less tempted to get off topic. 

Through this process, I am learning so much not just about writing and working as a collaborator, but also about the fields of astronomy and environmental science. The connections between these scientific disciplines especially stands out to me. In order to understand Earth’s climate and the current changes it is undergoing, it is important to understand how climate works on other planets and how Earth’s geological history has shaped climate. I realized how much my understanding of climate change had improved through this process through a discussion with my fourteen year old niece last weekend. We were discussing the merits of vegetarianism including cattle’s effect on climate and she asked me point blank “what is climate change?”. I was able to provide her with a detailed, well-thought out answer about rising carbon dioxide levels and the difference between climate change historically and current climate trends. I realized that I would not have been able to provide her with this amount of knowledge before the beginning of the summer. 

Moving forward, I need to work on my biggest challenge in this process: time management. Working independently means that I need to set time out to work on this project, and working as a collaborator means that I often have a lot to do after me and the professors meet, and then not much until they have looked at my work and expressed their opinions. With summer travel, it has been difficult for both of us to stay on a schedule and complete work in a timely matter. I hope that, when we are all back in New York as we will be next week, it will be easier to communicate and speed up the editing process.