The MBL fellowship for science journalists has wrapped up and we all returned home over the weekend. Last week ended with a ‘symposium’ where all 11 journalists had to stand up and make presentations about our experiments and results. At first I kind of resented having to sit in front of a computer (I do enough of that in my day job!), fussing with Excel charts and Powerpoint slides, instead of doing more experiments, but of course this is part of science.

As we were putting our presentations together, we talked about how the experiments and the results fit together to tell a story. Our instructors used the word ‘story’ in a way that really resonated with me as a journalist, since I think about stories all the time too. By thinking about the work we did in terms of a story, those seven intense days of experiments finally began to make some sense to me: why we did them and why we did them in the order that we did. During most of my time at the MBL, I thought about how different science and journalism are. But I found one way that they are the same. In the end, we’re all just trying to tell a story, to try and get at the “truth” and to help us learn a little bit more about the world around us.