Brianna Barbu
Brianna Barbu received her MS in Chemistry from the University of Michigan where she made molecules, linked them into polymers, played with electricity, and much more. But she was much more interested in how science and story can work together to not just explain the world, but also change it... so she decided to take the leap and venture outside the lab to start building a career on those principles! Brianna’s passion for communicating and promoting science, both within the scientific community and to the public, led her to pursue opportunities in scientific writing and join the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. She is currently a Production Editor for Chemical and Engineering News and you can check out her portfolio on bri-barbu.com!
Can you describe your academic and professional background? What path led you to pursue this field?
It was a winding path for sure! My academic background is in chemistry. I got my BS from a small college in Michigan—with a minor in writing because I liked taking English classes for fun. I was a straight-A student in undergrad and people generally expected I’d go on to grad school, but I’d heard it said that you shouldn't go to grad school without a clear goal or motivation, so I worked in the chemical industry for a year in my hometown. It wasn’t a particularly exciting job, which gave me a lot of downtime to think about what I wanted for my future.
Around this time, I also did some informational interviews with science journalists working at the magazine where I now work and learned that they had graduate degrees, either in journalism or in science. I also couldn’t see a lot of potential for advancement in industrial science with just a BS. So I applied to PhD programs in chemistry and ultimately ended up choosing to go to the University of Michigan because there were more tenured women in that department than the others I was considering and that seemed like a good sign about the culture.
I ended up leaving the program after 3 years because I was getting burnt out. I was struggling to balance research expectations with trying to take care of my mental wellness and also exploring career options beyond lab research. Something had to give, and that something ended up being the research.
I enrolled in an undergrad-level science journalism class in winter 2020 and right from the start I felt right in my element. I loved thinking about how to communicate what makes science cool, but also what makes it important and why non-scientists should care. I got to draw upon my science skills and my love for words and my interest in making a positive difference in the world. And then COVID came along to highlight exactly how crucial good science communication is to society—and how high the stakes are for getting it wrong—in real time. It was an excellent education, even if it cratered the job market just as I was officially parting ways with academia.
At this point, I have to acknowledge that I wouldn't have made it through 2020 to where I am today without a bit of privilege. I was able to move back in with my mom for a few months while I tried to build out my portfolio and apply for writing jobs, never feeling like I was doing enough of either. And certainly not enough paid freelance writing to make a living.
Eventually I landed an internship at Fermilab to write about particle physics. And after that, the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship at Discover Magazine. And then I got my job here at C&EN.
How did you find this particular position, and what was the hiring process like? Is there a typical structure for this in your field?
I found the posting on Twitter, actually. Two different people sent it to me because they knew C&EN was on my list of dream places to work—given my background in chemistry, a lot of the science writers that inspired me early on worked for C&EN. I put more effort into my resume and cover letter than usual, even having someone read over my materials before I submitted.
Then HR basically ghosted me for two months—at one point, the job listing disappeared from the website and I figured I hadn’t gotten the position, but then out of the blue a couple weeks later the posting went back up with a new hiring manager and within a week I had an interview.
I don’t know if this played into the hiring decision at all, but I had been doing some freelance work for other departments at ACS (the American Chemical society, which publishes C&EN as well as many academic journals) and trying to network with people in various positions at the magazine for a while, so I was at least a somewhat recognizable person to them I hope.
Can you tell us about your current responsibilities? What is a typical day or week like in your role?
I’m a production editor at Chemical and Engineering News, a science news magazine published by--but editorially independent from--the American Chemical Society. I’ve been in this job since the end of August 2021.
It’s hard to concisely summarize my job because PEs do a range of things at the magazine. But basically, the production team makes sure the daily news gets posted and that a new issue of the magazine comes together correctly every week. I do a bit of light editing; a bit of coordinating between the editorial, art, and web teams on the execution of creative ideas; and a lot of doing battle with the CMS (content management system) to make sure the articles are set up correctly for both the print and web versions of the magazine. I also recently started helping with production tasks on the newsletters the magazine sends out every week.
In between all of that, I help curate the Chemistry in Pictures blog and I also do a bit of writing for the print magazine here and there.
What do you enjoy about your current job and work environment?
Even though a lot of what I do is behind the scenes, this job has taught me a lot about journalism and how to write and edit good stories about science discoveries, business and policy, from reading others’ work.
I feel like I’m building towards the science journalism career that I want!
What are some of the challenging aspects of your job? Is there anything you wish you had known about your job or industry before joining?
Overall, I'm really fortunate to have the job I do. I have a decent salary and benefits, which is something not all journalism jobs can offer. I might have negotiated some things differently had I known exactly how long I would be working entirely from home though. And it really can be difficult to connect with coworkers on a personal level when you’re all virtual.
Journalists in general are quite prone to burnout, especially if they cover a lot of heavy topics. And the past two years have brought more than their fair share of that. Seeing a bunch of tweets about journalists leaving their jobs was really disheartening when I was starting out because I’d had enough of burnout and hustle culture from grad school.
C&EN has a great culture and really takes care of its people and overall it’s a much better environment than academia—and probably a lot of the newsrooms that people tweeted about leaving. But we’ve still been touched by the Great Resignation like so many other places—though in a lot of the cases since I've been here, departures are happening because people got recognized for their great work covering science so they got recruited to outlets with bigger audiences.
Do you have any professional plans for the future? What are some future career paths that could open up for someone in your position, 5-10 years down the road?
My hopeful next step is to land a position on the editorial team. I don’t know exactly what my beat will be, but I want to have part of my niche be stories about mental health and how we can improve the culture of scientific research. That's an issue that I care deeply about that the magazine would like more coverage on.
What’s changing in your industry? Are there any future trends we should be aware of?
I’m seeing a lot of great conversations happening around pay transparency and pay equity and I’m really interested to see what comes of that. I’m also hoping we can find a way to get more voices from historically marginalized groups in science/journalism and not just the people who had the financial privilege to attend the highest-tier schools.
And obviously multimedia and digital tools are becoming increasingly important to newsrooms’ strategies for getting people engaged with stories.
What activities, internships, or organizations would you recommend someone get involved with to help them break into this field?
Campus publications are useful—for example my department in grad school had a “science communication fellows” program where students would write “news” for our department website as a way of getting exposure. They may also be science communication workshops on campus that you can get involved in; I had a friend who participated in and then led those workshops.
The National Association for Science Writers and the Open Notebook have some excellent resources! SciCommers (formerly NPR Scicommers) is an online community that also connects people to training and resources. For specifically journalistic content (as opposed to general science communication, which includes other types of things like PR for research institutions or creating educational content), the Knight School at MIT has some great guides.
Is it common for people in your field to have a scientific/academic background (i.e. have PhDs)? Can you think of any advantages or disadvantages someone with a PhD might experience while pursuing or working in your field?
I thought I needed one at first, which is why I initially pursued grad school. And it’s true that advanced training in science gives you a lot of transferable skills for journalism—finding information, thinking critically about that information, working well under pressure, dealing with rejection, managing up, teaching yourself new things—but obviously I’m getting on just fine without a PhD, and so are a lot of other people. There are other ways to gain those same skills if you don’t finish a PhD or even if you never start one.
One downside of coming into this field from academia is that the writing style is completely different, so there can be some unlearning to do in terms of what kind of reading level and terminology you need to use (for the general public, you want to write at a middle school level).
Do you have any final words of advice for those navigating these career questions? Is there anything you would have done differently given what you know now?
There’s a lot I wish I had done differently, depending on how far back I want to go. I wish I had built SciComm into my schedule earlier in grad school so fitting it in later wouldn’t have been such a disaster. I wish I hadn’t gone to the grad school I did. I wish I hadn’t gone to grad school at all. I sometimes wish I’d majored in something different in college.
But I’m here, now, on a path that makes sense for me, and that’s all that matters! That’s one takeaway I’d like people to get from my story: just because you start down one path doesn’t mean you can’t pivot later. You’re not bound to a single track forever. Also, don’t choose your path based on others’ expectations of you. Go towards things that align with your values and what kind of life you want to build for yourself. That doesn’t guarantee your path will be smooth, but it’s a more sustainable decision-making framework than always trying to do what will make you look good on paper.
