It was meant to be a funny status update–I mentioned on Facebook yesterday that I was spending my Saturday brushing up on neuroscience. As most people do, right? Then one of my fellow medical writers said something like, “Well, that’s part of our line of work, right?” It got me thinking that not only is freelance writing, of any sort, something that is done at all hours of the day and night, but medical/science writing is also a career that asks you to learn something new every day. At the moment, between my day job at the healthcare comm agency and my freelance business, I am writing about cardiovascular imaging, bronchoconstrictive disease, chronic kidney disease, oncofertility, neurobiology of memory, network and Web science, personalized medicine, primary care delivery, and health care policy. And writing about these things isn’t cursory. I need to understand the science, the medicine, the hypotheses, the theories, the applications, the implications, and the connections with other areas. It’s almost inevitable that each topic area ends up being seen not as independent but as interconnected: how will personalized medicine be applied to oncofertility? How can the Web inform health care policy? I am asked to apply all the segments of Bloom’s Taxonomy to each one and in combination.
And I think that’s why I continue to work all hours as a freelance writer. I absolutely love how it challenges me to learn something new, make new connections (and synapses), work in a truly multidisciplinary way, and then write coherently so that I can share that knowledge with various audiences. I don’t think I would be able to keep up my crazy schedule–brushing up on neuroscience while the kids are eating cereal and watching Caillou, or editing grants at 3AM–if I didn’t love it.
I also think this is why I am so entranced with maps of science because they illustrate just how interconnected all areas of research are. It’s nice to think that my synapses may one day be connected in the same way…