Hi friends! You may remember that I applied for the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship and wrote about it in a post about failure and I even posted my application essay. Good news: the American Mathematical Society is sponsoring my fellowship and I get to spend the summer in a NEWSROOM writing for the Raleigh News & Observer, covering science topics!
I spent three years bouncing around the staff of our high school paper. I started as a feature writer because I have a “poet’s soul”, but turns out I can’t talk to people about their own poetic souls. So then I switched to news, and became an assistant news editor, and then somehow became the entertainment editor. I loved it! One of the great accomplishments of my journalism life was mildly getting fired from my post and then immediately reinstated for circulating a petition to keep our editor-in-chief. Let’s hope I don’t do that this summer.
I’m honored and excited to follow in the footsteps of many people I admire. My fairy blogmother, friend, and mentor Evelyn Lamb blogs for the AMS and Scientific American, co-hosts a great math podcast, and freelances on top of all of that. The other half of that excellent AMS blog is Anna Haensch, who is also a math professor at Duquesne. And Josh Batson started the Yale Undergraduate Math Society, which I was part of, and kindly talked to me on the phone about career guidance even though we have never actually met. Those are all AMS-sponsored past fellows. My old boss from college, Jenny Laaser, is now a professor in chemistry at Pittsburgh and read my application materials, and was sponsored by not-the-AMS.
I essentially only applied to the Raleigh site so I could drive home on the weekends to see my kids, take the baby to swim lessons, and make a few dinners for them to eat during the week. Obviously my spouse is capable of feeding them, but he’ll have a lot on his plate with two kids during the week so I might as well help however I can. It’ll be a long ten weeks for them.
You can follow along with what I’m writing here or on Twitter.
This is a photo of me right now.
Probably the N&O will have fewer distractions. Yay!
Baking and Math 
Congratulations on the well-deserved position!
Thank you! And thank you for all the support these years; it means a lot to me
Congratulations! It sounds like a great opportunity.
Exciting! You are awesome!