Science is a game of exploration, but it’s also a game of communication. If you make a groundbreaking discovery but you lack the skills to communicate it, your discovery won’t amount to much. I suspect most scientists will agree with this sentiment. Communication is important if we want our results to diffuse into the broader community. We also need to communicate when applying for grants and scholarships, or otherwise selling the value of our work. Each time we answer the question “Why does this matter?”, we’re communicating our values.

And yet, we don’t teach the art of scientific communication. Instead, we rely on students figuring things out as they go. We expect graduate students to just “level up” from writing laboratory reports and essays as undergraduates to writing papers for the scientific community. Not only is this a tall expectation, I think we miss out on communicating we should value when writing.

I’m thinking about this within the context of my own PhD. I’m done my first project, and I’m in the stages of writing. Despite my love for writing, there’s no doubt this process has been the most tedious and exhausting part of the project. Through multiple drafts, rewrites, and so much editing, I want to discuss the topic of finding your story.

After spending a long time on my PhD projects during the past year, I wanted to break away from them and work on something new. That’s why I applied to the Los Alamos Quantum Computer Summer School (I’ll call it QCSS now). The summer school was in its fourth edition, and was virtual like the one last year.

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the following equation.

As a writer, I’ve spent a lot of time crafting sentences and paragraphs. Writing a sentence is easy. Writing a sentence that communicates the idea in your mind to another is much more challenging. The translation from mind to words to mind again is lossy.