Communication in the Health Sciences Research Fellowship
In the Health Sciences Research Fellowship, the most important skill fellows learn is how to communicate our work across disciplines. Even during the application process, we were asked to write our proposal as if people from outside our field were going to read them (which I later found out was the case). At first, I didn’t understand why we needed to learn such a skill because I thought most of my career would be spent interacting with people within my own field (i.e., psychiatry and general psychology). However, I soon realized that was far from the truth. The whole point of scientific research is to discover novel information that can be used in societally impact applications. And that is rarely accomplished by a single individual or even within a large laboratory. Academia requires collaboration and cross-disciplinary communication to effectively thrive.
Whenever I’m communicating my work – whether that be writing an application or explaining it to my friends – to those outside my field, I try to use these two strategies. Firstly, minimize the use of niche terminology and technical jargon. Just because I understand what I’m saying doesn’t others will too. In any discipline, we tend to get caught up in our fields’ terminology and technical jargon, especially if we’re working in a very specialized area of research. For example, my research project aims to understand the day-to-day relationship between sleep restriction and attenuated positive symptoms in adolescents at clinical high-risk for psychosis. Although I know what these terms mean, I don’t expect other people to know. Here’s another way I can frame this statement for an interdisciplinary audience: my research project aims to understand how nightly sleep loss affects daily experiences of perceptual abnormalities and unusual thought content (termed as attenuated positive symptoms) in adolescents at clinical high-risk for psychosis. Albeit I’ll likely still need to define some of those terms (e.g., clinical high-risk for psychosis) since the use of some technical jargon is inevitable, but I think this statement is much more digestible compared to the first.
Secondly, I ask people around me (e.g., friends, family, coworkers) to tell me if my project description makes sense. I usually do this when I need to complete an application and need a second (or third or fourth) opinion, but you can also ask people to listen to your verbal explanation or look over your presentation. When I was writing my HSRF application, I had people from my lab, my friends in other majors, and even my mom read through my application and make sure that my proposal wasn’t complete nonsense. And now I’m in the fellowship, so that means something worked!
Communication in My Future
Right now, I’m preparing my application materials for the upcoming graduate application cycle. And since I’m applying to several PhD programs and potential mentors – all of whom come from various backgrounds – I’ll need to repeatedly communicate my research in new ways that are tailored to each specific person and the interests of their lab. Thus, I’ll need to have a good grasp at effectively translating my work across disciplines. It’ll be a lot of work but beneficial in the end.
And then for the rest of my career in graduate school and academia, not only will I interact with those within my lab but also researchers and professionals from other disciplines. From requesting lab equipment from suppliers to presenting at conferences to collaborating with other researchers both within and outside my department, these are all situations in which it’s necessary to communicate with people who may know nothing about your research but need to have some understanding in order to do their job. Additionally, a big part of biomedical research is requesting grants and funding from educational and/or government institutions (e.g., universities, NIH/NIMH), so I’ll need to provide a concise project proposal and why they should give me funding.
In all, it’s important to develop skills in interdisciplinary communication early on in your research journey so that you’re adequately prepared for a life in research.