Kate Golembiewski

TRANSCRIPT

​

Hannah Bernstein: Kate Golembiewski is the PR and Science Communications Manager at the Field Museum in Chicago. We spoke in February 2020 about the arc of her career, beginning as a chemistry major in undergrad, eventually receiving a master’s degree in science writing, and finding a job she really loves. Here’s her story.

​

[intro music]

 

Kate Golembiewski: When I was a kid, I loved science and I was going to be a scientist of some sort, a vet or a doctor or a researcher, or something, and when I went to college I was a chemistry major and I loved chemistry and I loved the classes and I was a TA and I loved TA-ing and I loved everything except I hate doing lab work, I am not good at it and I do not enjoy it and I realized that if I hate doing lab work I shouldn’t do lab work for a career and that was kind of terrifying for me because that was always sort of the plan, that I would do some sort of applied scientific, research sort of work. It was this moment of, “Who am I and what have I been doing all this for, then?”

 

HB: Kate loved to read, and writing also came pretty naturally — but as a teenager, she didn’t see it as a real career path. She had a lot of friends who took creative writing classes, so she took a few herself and ended up loving them. When she graduated, she had a double major in chemistry and French, with the equivalent of an English major, as well. She actually did her senior thesis in English, too. But she still didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do. Then, she attended a behind-the-scenes night at the Field Museum in Chicago where she had the opportunity to talk with the people who make the museum work.  

 

KG: I met some people who worked in the exhibition development department, so the people who research and write the museum’s exhibits. That kind of clicked for me and I was like, oh, that could be really cool, that’s kind of a nice mix between science and writing. It’s science writing, what do you know!

 

HB: She asked if they had any openings, and they didn’t, but they told her to get in touch in a year. After that, she was initially hired as an intern, but when an unexpected project appeared, she ended up staying on.

 

KG: The museum was going to be doing a mobile app in conjunction with one of their exhibits, and they needed someone to write all the content for it, and it needed to happen yesterday, and since I was already in the door, they were like, “You, kid, go, make an app!”

 

HB: After that, Kate bounced from project to project at the Field Museum in a contract position. But right when she was looking for something a little more stable, a position opened up in the public relations department and she applied. 

 

KG: I got that gig and over the last five years have kind of grown in that department so now my title is public relations and science communications manager. The overall goal of what I’m trying to do is letting people know that the Field Museum, in addition to being a place where you go on field trips or maybe you visit when you’re on vacation, is an active scientific research institution. That, behind the scenes, there are hundreds of people who are discovering amazing things that really make a big difference in the real world that we’re all living in. 

 

HB: That includes getting involved in politics — yeah, politics. 

 

KG: We also have been doing a lot of work to help position the museum as a forward-thinking scientific leader, especially at this time when we really in the world need more progressive scientific leaders who are willing to stand up and talk about things like climate change so it’s been a real honor to help lead the museum through a lot of that. There’s been both a lot of misinformation about science, from just regular folks all the way to the highest levels of the government, and that misinformation is really harmful, and it’s our obligation as a museum to speak out and to share what we know to help make the world a better place. That’s the whole point of museums.  

 

HB: What that obligation has meant to the Field Museum has been very wide-reaching. It’s included Field scientists speaking out against bad science policy, the museum participating in and organizing science marches, including the 2017 Chicago Climate Strike, which was one of the largest in the country, and more. All of that seemed pretty unique to me — so I asked Kate how she got such a large, establishment science organization on board with that strategy. 

 

KG: Honestly, the 2016 election was kind of a tipping point where we were able to see just campaigns involving misinformation and mistrust of science and mistrust of, prejudice against people who are different. We really did feel like it was incumbent upon us as a museum, as a place that the public trusts and who welcomes people in to learn about science and culture and the world, that we’ve got to fight for our world too.

 

HB: During her day-to-day job, she writes a lot of press releases, particularly when Field researchers publish papers or make a cool discovery. Her main goal is to translate that cool science into something more understandable by a mainstream audience, and then pitch the story to news outlets. And every day can be completely different: The week we spoke, Kate was writing about a new technique scientists developed to analyze the composition of dust from the moon, a study of millipede genitalia and mating behavior that had never been done before, and how scientists have discovered that fish populations in the rivers of South America can tell us a lot about the health of the Amazon rainforest. If that seems like a lot to juggle, you’re right – but that’s what Kate loves about her job.

 

KG: I really love being able to hop around from specialty to specialty. One of the things about science, about being a straight-up research scientist that I had always found sort of unappealing, was the idea of being hyper-specialized and really focused on one small area. I love being able to bounce around from discipline to discipline and work with a whole bunch of new scientists, and I like the pressure of, you know, sometimes you’ll find out about one of these papers and you have to turn around a press release in 24 hours and that makes me feel alive.

 

HB: Beyond press releases, Kate freelances as a science journalist and runs a science comedy show at a bar in Chicago called the Hide Out. 

 

KG: I have a show that I’ve been doing for a couple of years called A Scientist Walks Into A Bar, and every month I call upon another scientist to walk into the bar and we do sort of a talk show about their work and it’s the same overall goal of taking science and putting a human face on it and breaking it down into a way that people can appreciate and enjoy and connect with even if they’re not, quote unquote, science people. 

 

HB: Kate also went to grad school for science writing, through a low-residency program at Johns Hopkins University that was mostly online and allowed her to stay at the Field Museum while getting her degree. She said that program gave her the mentorship and resources she really wanted. 

 

KG: I think the best thing that the grad program did for me was force me to write and force me to write about stuff beyond just the scope of work, the stuff that I would do for my normal day job. I love the more journalistic science writing, explaining a concept and getting it out there, that I get to do in my job, but I also really love essays that hinge upon science and get into some of the more philosophical, emotional, what-it-means-to-be-a-person-in-the-world, and some of my favorite, favorite pieces of science writing I encountered in grad school.

 

HB: That style of writing inspired Kate so much that she used it to write her master’s thesis, an essay collection centered on natural history and death called Death and Taxa.

 

KG: Being in a place where I was encouraged to take those risks as a writer and really just delve into that sort of work that, you know, I wasn’t getting paid to do it so I am lazy by nature and, so yeah, it was really good for me to have an advisor and classmates who I was workshopping with holding me accountable to do that sort of writing.

 

HB: Kate also had a really good science writing tip: that it’s okay to be wrong. When you’re interviewing a scientist and you don’t understand what they’re saying, it’s your responsibility as the journalist to ask, even if you’re worried your question is stupid.

 

KG: Developing the self-confidence, I think, to be able to say, “Hey, I don’t understand that, let’s go back,” is a really valuable lesson for anybody, and the other thing you’ll learn is that most of the time when I’ve had a question that I think is maybe a dumb question, half the time the scientist who I’m talking to says, “No one knows and that’s why we’re doing this, it’s amazing right.”  I don’t want to say there are no dumb questions, some questions are probably dumb, but they are fewer and far between than you would think and you are ultimately going to produce a much better piece of writing or video or whatever it is that you’re making if you take one for the team and ask all those questions that you think possibly your reader or viewer might have.

 

HB: When I asked Kate what she’d tell her past self if she could go back in time to the moment she decided to stop pursuing research and try something else, her first thought was that teenager Kate would be way too stubborn to take any of her adult Kate advice. But she still had a few ideas. 

 

KG: I think a lot of my concern was, in changing tracks, was looking like a failure or feeling like I wasn’t smart enough or good enough to do the things that I had originally planned to do. I am someone who, I can get really fixated on a concept and then have a really hard time changing or pivoting away from it and so just the nature of making any kind of big change terrified me, especially one where I was like, ‘oh god, are people going to think that because I’m not doing this, is it because I’m stupid, is it because I’m not working hard, I think that worrying about what other people would think was definitely present. And, so yeah, I guess I would tell myself that it is ultimately so much more rewarding to go down a path even if it’s not the path you’d initially seen or planned for yourself, if it’s the thing that feels right to you, it is good, that you can be flexible, I think I would tell myself that as worried as I was then about like oh god am I not going to be having a good career, any of the fears that I had, I would say, everything worked out.

 

[outro music]

 

HB: Thanks to Ben Sounds for the music and Kate for being a great interview subject. Please stick around and check out the rest of the website, and if you like what you see, share it on social media. Thanks for listening!

 

##

​

Read more interviews.