On Wednesday, I walked up the stairs to Street Sense again to find a handmade sign taped to the door reading, “Welcome Back, Mary!” I was so grateful for those words, the hugs and to be returning to my job, friends and colleagues here.
I was also anxious to see if I could use some of the insights gleaned over the past academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. The fellowship, funded chiefly by an endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, annually chooses 10 to 12 journalists from all over the world to spend a year on the campuses of Harvard and MIT. There, the fellows deepen their understanding of science, technology, medicine or the environment.
Among my wonderful class of fellows was Marcin from Poland, who studied ocean science, Rowan from South Africa, who took courses in astrophysics, and Daniela from Uruguay, who deepened her knowledge of psychology. I was there to study public health topics, such as epidemiology and medical and dental anthropology. As a reporter, I have covered many health-related stories, about everything from mental illness to dental decay. I’ve always struggled to understand the complexities of the science at the heart of them and explain it accurately. But I never had the luxury of pondering the larger and more profound connections.
I was filled with a sense of disbelief every time I crossed the Harvard campus to sit in a lecture hall listening to Paul Farmer, the Harvard physician and medical anthropologist who spoke about the great epidemiological divide between prosperous healthy places and poor diseased ones, or when I handled ancient jawbones in a class on evolutionary biology.
I kept expecting to get turned away as a fraud or impostor each time I held up my Harvard library card to enter the Countway or the Tozzer Library. However, the guards kept letting me in and I continued to bury myself in books and journals as I explored the bonds between histories and environments, health and illness.
I must admit that sometimes I envied the Harvard and MIT researchers who had written the words I was reading, who taught my classes or who came to offer the fellows bi-weekly seminars that focused on their fields of study, from robotics, to astrophysics, to genetics to environmental science. By comparison, journalism might seem a poor choice of careers – so rushed and improvisational compared to the elegant discipline of scientific inquiry. Currently, journalism is uncertain in more prosaic ways as well. A majority of the 11 fellows who enjoyed this fellowship alongside me are returning to freelance work, not to secure jobs with benefits and paid vacations.
We fellows all joked among ourselves that when May ended and the fellowship was over, we would simply refuse to leave and stay for another year. There were more than a few tears when we finally did say goodbye.
In my last weeks at the fellowship, I read a few books for my personal enjoyment. They were written by people who I hoped would help me find my way back up the stairs to our office here. Thank you to George Orwell, Robert Coles and Dorothy Day for your guidance. And thank you, Street Sense friends, for waiting for me.
