Unlike the CommKit which contains guides written by Comm Fellows, the following posts are a collection of voices from in and around NSE about communicating in academia. If you’d like to suggest topics or contribute your own post, please email the NSE Comm Lab Manager.
A Beginner’s Guide to Owning and Presenting your Research
September 27, 2023 Summer has officially come to an end, and with its departure a new semester dawns. And with a new semester come ripe opportunities, scholarly resolutions, and motivating little white lies. I myself have lain in bed the night before the start of classes committed to such delusions as “I will attend my 9:30 lectures” and… View Article
Message from the Manager: Congratulations, Rachel!
June 23, 2023 The NSE Communication Lab is full of wonderful resources, but its greatest asset is its people—from the clients who trust us with their ideas and questions, to the Fellows who lead coaching, workshops, and events. Along with discipline- and department-specific knowledge, every Fellow brings a broader perspective to their work, and those perspectives, in turn,… View Article
The Social Network(ing): Re-defining Networking in the Academic World
September 27, 2022 Networking. It’s a word we are constantly hearing in the scope of professional development. But how many times have you heard that word and immediately scoffed at the idea, picturing two people in business attire shaking hands with an over-emphasized smile, exchanging resumes before going their separate ways? There’s an air of superficiality that many… View Article
Weathering the Undergrad Thesis: Survival Tips from a Recent Graduate
August 31, 2022 So you have an undergraduate thesis to write? No stress, the semester hasn’t even started yet. When it does, you have an entire academic year to write it. And most of the work will be done Spring semester, so there’s no need to worry about it now! Oh, if only… As someone who recently went… View Article
Writer’s Jet Lag: Overcoming Cultural Barriers I Didn’t Know Existed
October 26, 2021 Imagine two people on the phone. One is in Boston and says it’s “9 am.” The other is in Paris and says it’s “3 pm” (or more likely, “15 h”). Who is right? Obviously, time zones are universally recognized and we accept that this discrepancy isn’t a matter of opinion but of location. Both people… View Article
What Is Your (Statement of) Purpose?
October 21, 2021 “When I was 8, my mother bought me a science encyclopedia, which opened my mind to the wonders of the universe. This fueled my passion for physics and engineering and has motivated me to apply to the Nuclear Science and Engineering department at MIT.” Grad school admissions committees have read countless stories like this in… View Article
Claim, Evidence, Reasoning: How to Get More Value Out of Your Research Presentations
August 27, 2021 One of the first things I learned after joining the Comm Lab was a framework known as Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER)—a pedagogical tool with interesting applications in technical communication. I was in the process of shadowing a coaching session as part of my Comm Lab orientation when this beautiful piece of communication wisdom was dropped… View Article
How Do We “Trigger” Effective Communication?
May 12, 2021 The concept of a threshold or trigger is common in engineering. Once a variable exceeds a particular value, another response variable changes rapidly. Signal strength as a function of applied voltage, semiconductor optical response as a function of photon energy… With experience, an experimentalist will know with confidence at which level of the independent variable,… View Article