Wade Roush is the acting director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, which brings together a dozen experienced science and technology writers each year for nine months of course work, seminars, and immersion in the culture of the Institute. I asked Roush to give a few pointers to students who are willing to work hard to achieve their goals. Here are his answers.

Q: What’s been the hardest thing you’ve had to overcome with respect to your career?

A: I was lucky enough to have what you might call a mid-life crisis when I was really young, about 19 or 20. I fell in love with physics and biology and astronomy in high school, and when I got to college I thought I wanted to be a scientist – specifically, an astronomer or an astrophysicist. Around my sophomore year I realized that I wasn’t good enough at math to go very far as a scientist. Before college, I’d never thought of myself as a writer – my high school didn’t even have a school newspaper. But I was having fun reporting and editing for my college’s paper, and I liked having the chance to explain things to people through my articles. So I talked myself into giving up my dream, going with something new that felt right, and taking risk on a future that I hadn’t considered before. 

Q: What kind of education did you have? Did you always know you wanted to be in the field of journalism?

A: I went to a small-town high school in Michigan, then went very far away (to Cambridge, MA) for college and graduate school. I got a B.A. from Harvard in history and science and a PhD from MIT in the history and social study of science and technology. By the time I got to MIT I was sure I wanted to be a journalist and I designed my graduate work around that goal.

Q: What are you enjoying most this year?

A: I’m really excited about the opportunity to help MIT have a bigger impact in an important area of scholarship, and it’s fun to be back at an institution I love, and where I’ve spent so many fun and productive years.

Q: What would you tell the younger generation about starting out their own careers - not necessarily journalism, but anyone who wants to have an ambitious career?

A: I’d say, first, don’t skip college, even though there are successful people who say college is a waste of time. That might be accurate for a handful of young entrepreneurs, particularly if they have a business idea that’s so timely and urgent that it might be irrelevant four years from now. But for the vast majority of people, it’s just not true. You will land a better job with a higher income if you have a college degree.

And don’t forget that you have a community, and it’s okay to rely on family, friends, and teachers. They want you to succeed and they have experience in areas where you don’t. And the networks of connections you build now and in college will serve you throughout life. Of the six staff jobs I’ve had since finishing graduate school, I got three of them with the help of people in my network.

Q: Given your passion for technology and science, what made you want to write stories about them as opposed to going into the field of technology or science?

A: I started spending all my time at the weekly campus newspaper, the Harvard Independent, and fell in love with journalism. I had a work-study job as a computer system administrator at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which gave me an inside look at the lives of real astronomers; they do an awful lot of programming and data analysis, which didn’t fit with my romantic preconceptions of science. The Challenger space shuttle accident happened around this time, and that was traumatic for me. It woke me up to the fact that American technology wasn’t perfect and that space travel and science in general are risky enterprises – all of which got me thinking in a more critical way about science and technology. Finally, I started taking classes in Harvard’s History of Science department. I figured that the best way to stay close to all these things I loved – science, technology, journalism, and history – was to pick one (journalism) but get trained as a historian of science and technology first.

Q: Can you describe the differences or similarities between working at a university, a company, and a publication?

A: When I was at Xconomy (an online business publication), I always wanted to write great stories about innovation and organize compelling events that would keep people interested, but it was never far from my mind that we had real customers in the form of advertisers and underwriters and people who bought tickets to the events. At universities, or inside government, these kinds of pressures are a little more distant and you have more room to pursue work that might not have an immediate payoff. The advantage is that you can think a little more broadly. The downside is that there’s less pressure to be relevant and to create things that people will actually value.

The main similarity between universities, companies, and publications is that they’re all human organizations. The most important requirement for getting things done and growing in your career is understanding how to work with other people and figuring out how your skills and interests fit with the needs and hopes of the organization. If you don’t like working with people, or if there’s a mismatch between what you love to do and what the organization needs, it’s not going to work out in the long run.

Q: How did you start your career and what did you have to do in order to get where you wanted to be?

A: In journalism, it boils down to publishing lots of articles and building up a portfolio of clips. I started writing articles for MIT’s Technology Review magazine while I was still in graduate school, so by the time I finished I had enough clips to be able to apply for a job at Science magazine. After several years at Science, and a couple of years in Silicon Valley, I had enough experience to apply for a full-time job at Technology Review.

It’s also important to learn how to present yourself: you want to be seen by potential employers as innovative and full of ideas, but also as a team player who will put the organization first.

Q: Looking back, would you have wanted to do anything different with your education or your career?

A: Sometimes I worry that I haven’t been ambitious or adventurous enough. I’ve never published a book, for instance, though I’ve got enough material sitting around to write several of them.

Also, I’m a bit of an introvert, and it’s easy for me to fall into a routine and stay there for too long. So if I got a “do-over” I’d probably try to force myself to be a little more extroverted, to meet more people, and to travel more. If there’s one thing that’s always worth the time and the money, it’s treating yourself to new experiences.

As a successful journalist, Roush enjoys giving advice to young entrepreneurs. In reading Roush’s answers, students will hopefully have a better grasp of what they want to do career-wise.

You can learn more about Roush on his website: www.waderoush.com.