Beloit College Magazine
Beloit College Magazine
Spring 2001 Contents
Departments
Features
- Do You Do What You Say You Do?
- Renewed Spirit Marks Inauguration Day
- On the Trail of Roy Chapman Andrews
- A Hands-on Approach to History
- Chalk One Up for Student-Faculty Research
- The Writing is On the Wall
- A Touch of Gold
- A Beloit and the Peace Corps: Adventures in Service
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Beloit College Magazine
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belmag@beloit.edu
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Philosophy
= Regular Paychecks, Cool Jobs
- By David Tenenbaum’71 |
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It’s the classic liberal-arts conundrum. What do you do with a B.A. in philosophy? No matter how good you are at absorbing, evaluating, and conveying ideas and information, you’ll never see want ads that say “Work experience helpful, B.A. philosophy, required.”
But the world is a complicated place, a life has many phases, and a career may meander and lurch toward creative, meaningful work. When it’s done, a degree as “useless” as philosophy may seem useful indeed.
I’ve now spent five years as staff writer at The Why Files, an electronic explanation of the science behind the headlines. We’re a non-profit publication of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, more than 1 million non-scientists read our sometimes humorous approach to science, available only on the World Wide Web. When Dolly the sheep was cloned, we described the science and ethics of cloning. Headlined “Scottish Sheep Shocker!” and visually mirroring the London tabloids, this story was nonetheless checked for accuracy by a world-renowned embryologist.
When Princess Diana died, we covered the science of grief. When the space station got tenants, we explored the medical hazards of space travel. In December, we showed how snowflakes form—and likened the jet stream to collisions on a football field.
My work requires a broad education, an ability to converse with scientists, and a sense of humor. And even though the Internet did not exist back when I sat in Scott Crom’s philosophy classes, in infallible retrospect, liberal arts was the perfect preparation for my present job.
Still, the route from Beloit to the science-writing biz was indirect. My field semester (in the lost-and-lamented Beloit Plan), was spent on John Peterson’s dairy farm. Before long, I’d raised trees and shrubs, recycled barn wood, and run a small-time masonry business. That checkered “resume” became ideal for—well, another micro business, this one designing and making canvas and leather bags.
My swerve into science writing in 1985 may reflect genetics—my father was an engineer and my mother is still a book editor. Or my fascination with science. At any rate, after 10 years of freelancing, I was hired to help shape The Why Files and serve as its sole writer. Curiously, my odd resume proved ideal preparation for the eclectic, irreverent, electronic science magazine we invented.
The role of liberal arts in all of this resurfaced last summer when we hired Jennifer Pearson’96 as a project assistant. An art history grad, Jen’s interests have transmogrified into a thoroughly modern passion for the elusive process of indexing and organizing electronic images and visual information, the focus of her master’s study in the School of Library and Information Studies at the UW-Madison.
We get our money’s worth from Jen, who may be required to find, RIGHT NOW! photos of a snowbound football game or a ’57 Chevy, or a diagram of polymerase chain reaction or the Vibrio cholera bacterium.
While Jen and I have both followed circuitous paths to our cybergigs, you can surf directly to http://whyfiles.org.
Learning, Jen and I both realized at Beloit, need not be boring, particularly when it concerns the science of earthworms or tornadoes, fear or love, climate or electric cars.
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