Kerri Wachter
Multimedia Reporter : Medicine & Science
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
- Mark Twain, 1868
a foot in both worlds
When I say that I'm well-rounded, I mean it. I graduated from the University of Maryland's College of Journalism in 1991 with a broad understanding of government, economics, psychology, history and most of the liberal arts. I earned my stripes in news reporting as a stringer for a small community newspaper, covering two towns and a village in Wisconsin. I've endured tedious town council meetings and written about tax incentive financing, railroad crossings and a local quarry. I've waited until the early hours of morning to race an election results story to my editor.
Thanks to my chemistry degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I also know what it's like to spend hours in a laboratory waiting for a polymer coating to harden on a wire-thin capillary, in order to continue research into the use of on-column liquid chromatography to identify proteins. I know the feeling of the eureka moment when the solution to a differential equation finally flashes like a light bulb.
Journalism and chemistry seem fairly incongruous to many people. I find that these two different ways of thinking complement each other very well. Chemistry taught me critical thinking, logic and persistence. Journalism taught me how to organize information, how to tell a story and how to translate big ideas into simple clean text.
It's a great advantage and a great adventure having a foot in both worlds.
Thanks to my chemistry degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I also know what it's like to spend hours in a laboratory waiting for a polymer coating to harden on a wire-thin capillary, in order to continue research into the use of on-column liquid chromatography to identify proteins. I know the feeling of the eureka moment when the solution to a differential equation finally flashes like a light bulb.
Journalism and chemistry seem fairly incongruous to many people. I find that these two different ways of thinking complement each other very well. Chemistry taught me critical thinking, logic and persistence. Journalism taught me how to organize information, how to tell a story and how to translate big ideas into simple clean text.
It's a great advantage and a great adventure having a foot in both worlds.