Preferred Name
Mercy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7699-1709
Date of Graduation
5-11-2023
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
School of Communication Studies
Second Advisor
Timothy C. Ball
Third Advisor
Muhammad Ittefaq
Abstract
Communication is a central bridge for societal applications of scientific discoveries. As such it is important to explore of how nascent scientists adopt attitudes toward communication and learn how to effectively communicate their science with non-scientific and scientific audiences. This qualitative thesis seeks to understand student scientists’ experiences of communication both among scientists and with external audiences, specifically focusing on how they understand communication as central to their work as scientists and explores their talk about communication as important to their disciplinary identities and belonging in their lives and work as student scientists. The study is centered on the socialization experiences of undergraduate scientists who participated in an elite summer intensive research institute in the northeastern United States, titled “Atlantic Laboratory” for the purposes of this project. Six of these ten undergraduate scientists from Atlantic Laboratory participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews via Zoom and varied in both age and area of scientific study. Themes that emerged from interviews with participants suggest that a significant portion of nascent scientists’’ ideas and conversations around communication come from mentor-figures and others via socialization. Nascent scientists’ communication also indicates that they understand the centrality of communication skills and look up to scientists who have mastered the skill of communicating their science. Implications for practice include the recommendation to leverage identified sites of socialization for communication training in collaboration with resource centers like university communication centers.
