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Why I walked away from research

A month ago, Mantle Magazine published another article of mine: The travels and trails of a marine biologist in the Philippines. AKA Why I gave up on being a researcher, it was originally titled “Wanted: Perfect Scientist” but yay for editors fixing it.

All in all, this was a very difficult article to write and something a long time coming. Writing was difficult because it forced me to organize my thoughts and put into words the jumbled mess of emotions that came with putting aside a childhood dream. How do you reconcile working so hard for so many years and then giving it up?
Me during happier times

Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you want them to. Sometimes due to things you can control, sometimes due to things you can’t.

Sometimes, you find another path. Sometimes the new path works, sometimes it doesn’t. Then you have to go find a new path.

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How to green up your condo

Becoming the Sustainability Manager of a property management company wasn’t something that I anticipated going into after doing coral reef ecology and fisheries-related research around the Philippines. But now that I’m here, I appreciate the opportunity (and challenge! huhu) to influence hundreds of property managers, and by extension, the hundreds of thousands of residents, office tenants, and mallgoers that they interact with on a daily basis.

Last month, I was approached by Speed to write an article on green condo living for their November issue. Speed describes itself as “the technology magazine for the fast-paced lifestyle, bringing together not only the most up-to-date tech news, interesting features, and informative columns”. November is typically their Green Technology issue, and I’d already written something on sustainable living for their 2016 issue (you can read it  here). This new article was my chance to promote sustainable property management practices to a wider audience, so OF COURSE I wrote it.

Read the full article here:

Here’s hoping a lot of condo residents read this and start supporting practices in their own buildings 🙂

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Touring Manhattan in 12 hours

Before I start, please note that allocating only one day to see Manhattan is absolutely ridiculous. There’s just so much to see and do that you can easily spend three days or more just in Manhattan, not to mention the rest of New York City. However, I was in NYC for work and had only one free day between meetings and had no way to extend my stay, so making the most of that one full day was imperative.

Part of what made this itinerary work was basing out of Manhattan already. I stayed in the Vanderbilt YMCA and had a mostly good experience, except for a major grievance that resulted from Front Desk not talking to Security. I started this itinerary at 9 am, but I would have had to start it much earlier if I weren’t in Manhattan already.

Stop 1: St. Patrick’s Cathedral

I passed St. Patrick’s at night on my 2nd day and took photos (of course), but it’s still something else to see it in the daytime. The architecture just amazed me. It felt weird to take photos inside the church but the staff said it was okay. Still only took a few though. Also managed to squeeze in some quiet time.

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Brewing my best food writing at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

Food writing is definitely NOT one of my strengths. I love to eat good food of course, but eating and casually recommending restaurants to anyone who asks is miles away from actually writing about it. So when The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf teamed up with Writer’s Block Philippines to offer a food writing workshop featuring, of course, the pretty impressive menu of the 26th St. Bistro by the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, I knew I had to go. I’d already attended WBP’s travel writing workshop and I was sure that I was going to have a lot of fun with the food writing workshop, even if it meant being in BGC at 9am on a Saturday.

brew your best food feature poster

CBTL offered ten free slots to to those who submitted the best new articles for the Brew Your Best Year website. The articles had to be about career and finance, fulfillment, health and wellness, and discovery. Because work meant that I didn’t have much time to write, I submitted a modified version of this blog post on the non-academic things I learned in grad school. So happy it still got chosen <3

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How reducing food waste means saving the world

World Environment Day 2013 is coming up and UNEP is again holding a contest to find the green blogger who will keep the rest of the world updated on the WED festivities in the host country. They started the contest in 2010 but this was the first time I’d heard of it. The challenge was to write an engaging 400-600 word blog post on the impact of food waste on the environment. Of course I joined!

WED Logo_EN_small

You can find my blog entry here on our work website. If you found it interesting and engaging, please share, Like, and tweet it! UNEP and Treehugger are judging the first round and while content matters, popularity matters too. The prize at stake: the chance to live-blog and tweet about the World Environment Day activities happening in Mongolia!

00 harvesting lettuce
Me working hard to harvest the lettuce in our greenhouses
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Ten lessons about writing that every scientist should learn (via Alternative Hypothesis)

I’m going to say something and it’s going to hurt: sometimes, scientists are not the greatest communicators. There, I said it. I’ve watched scientists I look up to give seminars on the importance of coral reef fish and throw around words like “pomacentrids”, “acanthurids”, and “scarids” (damselfishes, surgeonfishes, and parrotfishes to the non-science nerds) when their audience consisted of tourist guides, waiters, and cooks. This was a lost opportunity as their audience was genuinely interested in what they had to say. The goals of science (for me at least) are to 1) figure out how the world works, and 2) to share that information with everybody.

The post I’m reblogging is a list of 10 tips that scientists need to remember when writing. After all, our writing is a failure if no one can understand what we’re trying to say.

Ten lessons about writing that every scientist should learn... Yesterday, I spent the day at the horse races, taking in the pomp and pageantry of the biggest stakes card of the year. I find the racetrack fascinating, and not just in that girlish horse-crazy sense. For starters, it’s the only place I know where it is normal to see small men wearing outrageous colors and women wearing birds on their heads. Second, I love the wordplay of the racing form, with horse names like Two Horn Unicorn, Tiny Giant, We Ta … Read More

via Alternative Hypothesis