Dare I post it?

The Communication Lab episode 1: Imposter syndrome, vulnerability hangovers, and just getting started

Welcome to the first episode of The Communication Lab — my series teaching tips and tricks for science communication (scicomm) on social media!

Later in the series we’ll dive into the how to’s of scicomm (topic list here), but first I want to address the real reason many people struggle with talking about science on social media:

Imposter syndrome.

Should I really be doing this?

This graph was the first scicomm post I ever created.

It was early March 2020, and I was in grad school sitting in my office, looking at COVID data instead of working on my PhD thesis. That was the week everything started shutting down in the US, and many were wondering if we were overreacting. I plotted this data and knew we weren’t.

I thought about sharing it on Facebook, but sat, frozen.

Dare I post it? I’m just a grad student after all – and infectious disease isn’t my specialty. Is this the right comparison to make? Should I normalize by population? Shouldn’t someone with more credentials or experience be doing this? Actually, shouldn’t the government be doing this?

One thing we’re taught as academics is to be VERY careful not to speak outside our expertise. My PhD thesis was focused on the human microbiome – I was not a virologist, and definitely not an expert in emerging pandemics.

But there was one thing I was quite good at: clearly communicating data to the public. And it turns out, that’s what a lot of people needed.

I ended up posting it. Contrary to the doubts in my head, people appreciated it and wanted more. So I kept posting…