What are the courses to focus on in graduate work that prepare you to successfully market science?  The answers may surprise you.  The ‘coursework’ that I found to most adequately prepare a doctoral candidate to become successful as a scientific marketer in writing, speaking, and presentation, are the following: Journal Clubs, Seminars, and Lab Meetings.  Why?  These three course types lay the foundation for critical thinking, analysis, and successful presentation of scientific results.

If you are going to pursue a successful career in any field of science, from academia to biotech start-up, to sales to scientific marketing, a big part of your success will hinge on your ability to communicate successfully with your peers and to a broader, more general audience.  You may have the best idea, the most compelling results, an innovative product, or a more efficient process.  However, unless you also possess the ability to convince others that it is the best, you will not receive grant money, investment, or that job. 

What prepares you to communicate in such a way that ensures your success?  There is no secret to this, just as there is no secret to science.  Science communication is a craft that you groom through practice and repetition.  Graduate school programs provide each scientist in training for a PhD or Masters with the potential to hone your marketing talents through coursework, writing and presentation requirements. 

How do you take advantage of these requirements and opportunities?  Learn to love journal club, seminars and lab meetings.  Each of these settings provides opportunities for you to refine your own understanding of science, particularly that outside of your specialty, and enhance your presentation, persuasive public speaking, and writing skills.  In addition, you can glean alternative styles that work in effectively and persuasively presenting science.

Join voluntary Journal Clubs or start your own.  Read each article, even if you are not presenting, and then re-read.  This may be hard to do, given the research and course workload you are already carrying, but it will benefit you in both the short and long term.  You will learn to think critically about all types of research.  You will apply this critical thinking to your own research and talks you attend.  Outline questions you have about the presented research.  Be prepared to discuss these in the journal club.  Analyze the paper.  Is there something the scientists could have done better?  What is unexplained?  Detail what you think the next steps are, based on this research.  Do your next steps dovetail with the writer’s next steps?  Be prepared to discuss why the direction of the researcher’s is the correct one (or why not?). 

These simple acts will make you an informed participant in every journal club, open your mind to analyzing all types of science, and develop your understanding of all types of basic research that lead to scientific publication and discovery.  This is a most important basic tenet to master if you want to accurately market science in a grant, to investors, to buyers, or in a press release. 

For current graduate students, this process trains your thinking for settings like graduate seminar or routine lab meetings.  Once you start proper analysis and inquiry on paper (in journal club), you will be better prepared to do the same on your feet in seminar and lab meetings.  When you do not present, you will serve as an avid peer reviewer.  From these initial steps, you will then start properly questioning and writing about your own science.  Responding as an actively involved scientist prepares you better for marketing science (which all scientists must do).  It will also aid you in your Comprehensive Exams, Orals, thesis committee meetings, Doctoral Dissertation, and, finally, in securing your postdoctoral position, private industry position, faculty position or scientific marketing writing position.

Learning to love journal club, seminar and lab meetings means learning to discern the treasures from the trash.  Learn what works and what does not, and apply that to yourself, and your field of science.  What type of presentation is most effective?  What types are best received?  Does attire matter?  What writing and presentation styles grab you?  Can you write and present similarly?  These are critical questions for successful scientists.   

Employers look for a PhD to communicate their findings clearly and effectively for publication.  The expectation is for each scientist to communicate the science or scientific products they support in a manner that is publishable and discernible by a broad audience.  The best place to practice for this career component is in the 4pm Journal Club that meets every Tuesday, the weekly seminar series that you must attend and present in, and the lab meetings that drag on forever with you rotating in the spot light.  These opportunities teach you to successfully communicate and market your science, your story, to your audience.  What a better place to learn than the conference room visited by your friends with a pizza box, older and younger graduate students that will become your friends, and the crusty old professor you are going to remember fondly?