Jenna Gallegos

Jenna Gallegos received her PhD in plant biotechnology from UC Davis. She completed a AAAS Mass Media Fellowship at the Washington Post and an internship at Monsanto before returning to academia for a postdoc. She has since then pivoted her career into science communication and marketing and is now fulfilling a management role, overseeing client accounts at Samba Scientific. 

Can you describe your academic and professional background? What path led you to pursue this field?

I got a PhD in plant biology at UC Davis, and while I was there, I did a lot of science communication and outreach activities, creating education videos, etc. This led me to apply to and be accepted as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow. After I finished my PhD, I spent 10 weeks doing an internship with The Washington Post and published roughly 20 science journalism articles. I decided I didn’t want to work in journalism, but was still interested in science writing and communication. I wanted to get back closer to working alongside scientists and started a postdoc in synthetic biology. During my postdoc, aside from my own experiments, I spent a lot of time writing publications for projects that were completed but needed to develop into a full story, so it was a writing heavy postdoc. I saw a job posting with Samba Scientific for Technical Content Specialist and the job description was largely writing science-based content. I started with Samba 1 year ago, and after 4 months, I moved from writing into management and so now I am managing a few of our clients and overseeing the assets we create for them and the activities we do on their behalf. 

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 learned about this position through a listserv. I did a lot of networking and got connected with an academic industry alliance. To look for similar jobs, I would look for science marketing or science sales positions. I didn’t know this was an area where PhDs could work in. I thought that people in sales and marketing have business backgrounds. For the interview process, I had a phone interview and an in-person interview. I was asked to give a presentation on why I was a good fit for the position, describe my technical skills and research background, as well as activities I had done to develop other skills relevant to marketing such as communication and experience with various digital platforms and development of graphics and videos. 

Can you tell us about your current responsibilities? What is a typical day or week like in your role?

It can be split into thirds. I spend a third communicating with clients, figuring out what their needs, expectations, and deadlines are, and coming up with suggestions for what kind of marketing activities they should be engaging in, and making sure I’m familiar with their technology/product, mission, vision, messaging as a company. We are a scientific marketing agency, which means that we do marketing for smaller start-up companies who don’t have an in-house marketing team. Larger companies typically have an in-house marketing team, but sometimes we’ll work with them to supplement their activities as well.  

I spend another third of my time communicating with my own team. I work with a group of professionals with a range of skills including graphic designers, web developers, and marketing specialists, all who have little to no scientific background. I communicate to them what I need and review the assets they put together to make sure they are scientifically accurate and meet the client’s expectations. 

The last third of my time is spent working on developing assets myself and that involves writing copy for web pages and mocking up a wire frame of what’s going to be on a webpage before I hand it over to designers and web developers. I also write white papers and blogs and come up with ideas for graphics and find ways to distill complicated information down to simple infographics. 

What do you enjoy about your current job and work environment?

I like that I get to wear a lot of different hats. I’m always learning something new and different, and am working with diverse people. I get to work closely with technology too even though I’m not in R&D, but I have to understand my client’s technology to better communicate the benefits of their technology and how they fit into the competitive space with other companies that develop similar related technologies. 

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?

You’ll deal with similar challenges as anywhere else. I’ve hit roadblocks for suggestions of how I think things should look or say, and there might be disagreements there, so I have to convince other people why I think we should go the way we should go. Sometimes, scientists don’t make great marketers and communicators, but marketing is something that everyone thinks they can intuitively do, so many people tend to have opinions about it. That is something that is challenging. Also jumping between different types of tasks. Have to find ways to designate times for certain tasks so you can still do that high value deep think work despite juggling a lot of things at the same time.  

I wish I had known that someone trained as a scientist could fill a role in marketing, I might have learned more skills to fit this position such as training in business, taken more interest in marketing and done more self teaching. There haven't been any unpleasant surprises. Marketing really comes down to storytelling, so all the things I learned through my training in science communication are relevant. 

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? 

I hope to stay where I’m at for a long time. I would like to move into sales to some extent, and a more managerial position. Samba Scientific is a start-up company, so I’m doing a little bit of everything all the time. I hope to advance to where I’d have a more defined role and in the long term, possibly move into sales related positions or up into Director or VP of marketing. 

What’s changing in your industry? Are there any future trends we should be aware of?

COVID has changed everything. For us, that means marketing is a lot less face to face, it’s more virtual. We aren’t going to conferences, but attending virtual ones, which are a shallow reflection of in person conferences. I hope the way we interact virtually will innovate and that there will be new models for virtual conferences that aren’t just trying to replicate in person experience online. We’ve also had an increase in demand since companies have more funds to allocate towards marketing. As an agency, we have a lot of new opportunities opening up. 

What activities, internships, or organizations would you recommend someone get involved with to help them break into this field?

Behind effective marketing is effective storytelling, which comes back to writing skills. Developing strong writing skills will be a strength in any job, especially since it is a rare skill, even among academics. Anyone interested in this sort of position should get as much writing experience as they can whether it’s a blog or other writing organization. The Conversation is an organization that pairs professionals with academics to write stories on topics of broad public interest and advertises the new stories out to other news organizations like Scientific American or Discovery. These are easy ways to get more experience and build up your portfolio. Any activities outside of the lab that are interesting to you is a plus. If your narrative is nothing but working in a lab, and now I want to do something else but haven’t demonstrated any other skills or interests, then not wanting to do benchwork anymore isn’t a convincing reason to be hired. You need to get out of the lab and build other skills and do things to truly demonstrate a diversity of interests. 

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?

At our agency, we’re split into thirds: people with PhDs, people with some scientific background (BS), and remainder without any science background. Some of those working in sales and marketing have PhDs, but most have a relevant Bachelor's degree. Besides having the technical knowledge (which is also something you can learn), the advantage of having scientific training in graduate school is that you’d have a familiarity with the industry, know which conferences to attend, what are the frequently visited websites, and other valuable intangible knowledge. But I don’t think that a PhD is really necessary. There are professionals in similar positions as me who have Master’s or Bachelor's degrees. Scientific background helps, but it’s not sufficient, and you need to demonstrate that you have other skills. 

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? 

The best advice is to talk to people all the time. If you see a job title that you think is interesting or don’t know what the title means, reach out and schedule a meeting with them to get to know the role. If you don’t know the names of job titles, then it’s difficult to search for job openings. Talk to people in a diversity of positions. 

You can do a lot of things besides R&D with a PhD. Universities are improving connecting students with careers outside of academia, but that typically looks like R&D or patent law, but there’s a whole variety of tracks and careers in science policy, communication, medical writing, medical science liaison, sales, marketing, etc. I would encourage people to apply to jobs even if they think they are not qualified for them because the list of qualifications is more like a wish list than a requirement list.