Taking a Leap of Faith

This year’s Climate and Society class is out in the field (or lab or office) completing a summer internship or thesis. They’ll be documenting their experiences one blog post at a time. Read on to see what they’re up to.

By Sruti Devendran, C+S ’18

A framework of the website structure that I built.

When I started my internship at the Center for Climate Systems Research (CCSR), I was very about excited to contribute to cutting edge research and communicating the results. As part of that, I was offered the chance to develop a website for the Agriculture Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) team, which studies the impact of climate change on global agriculture through models that link the climate, crop and economic study groups across the world.

I had no idea of how to build a website from scratch. Given my background in software engineering, my mentor at CCSR trusted that I would be up for the challenge. Still, I was intimidated and worried that it would not work out well, but I accepted the challenge.

I spent my undergrad years studying science. It was through the C+S program that I leaned the nuances of science communication and realized that this tool is a significant part of the decision making and informing the public. This was a major step toward doing that in real life, but it was not without its challenges.  First of all, I had to organize the program’s copious amounts of information in a more condensed form for the site. Second, I had to build the website itself.

A few weeks into the internship, I found myself developing web pages. My colleagues and my mentor were very encouraging. I was very motivated, to learn the coding to develop the website, after realizing the importance of the website, as a tool to enable better access to the information. I was also excited to implement my ideas building the layout and structure of the website.

A month into the internship, I was immersed in developing the infrastructure for the website. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t really been applying the science I’d spent years studying, and for a moment, I was not feeling great. But the more I worked in communications, the more I liked it. In fact, I realized that science is never complete without communicating it.

As, I started moved forward with building the website, I came across various software that could help tell stories, such as Adobe Spark, ArcGIS Online, and Web maps. I realized through websites we can implement ideas to present the information in an interactive manner, to make it easier for the public to understand it.

The class on Writing about Global Science for International Media, which I took in the summer, further helped me think deeply about reporting.  By the end of the two months of my internship, I felt like I gained a multitude of skills in the field of science communications.

The whole summer experience transformed me to better translating the science through website and software development and I was so grateful for the experience.

At the end of the internship experience, I recalled, an oft-repeated line: “You never know what you can do till you try.” From a person, with limited knowledge about communications, the summer experience was crucial in developing my interest in the field.