Editorial Experience and Leadership with the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal



Serving as an editor for the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal (SURJ) and teaching fellow student editors as a SURJ Editor-in-Chief taught me to think critically about my own science communication. Helping other individuals to translate technical information into language or imagery more accessible and engaging to non-specialist audiences requires considerations and skills beyond those needed to translate the information oneself because the role of editor encompasses both science communication and mentorship. I began working with SURJ my freshman year at Stanford, eager to support and celebrate students pursuing extracurricular academic work across all disciplines. I served for two years as an Associate Editor before taking the helm as a Co-Editor-in-Chief for the journal during both my junior and senior years. While an Associate Editor, I learned how to help authors convey their ideas and research findings to a broad audience through their own voices and style by asking careful guiding questions, a substantially more difficult endeavor than supplying those authors with verbatim corrections. While an Editor-in-Chief, I guided the journal development process from paper selection and review through editing and production, while managing a team of over 30 undergraduate student staff. I had opportunities to teach my editing teams the strategies I had discovered for helping authors to retain personal voice while improving their papers for publication. Through my work with SURJ, I was able to coach others in the improvement of their science communication abilities while continuing to develop my own. As I learned how best to serve as an editor for my peers, I also improved in my ability to self-critique, which has proved invaluable for my own science communication endeavors. The following documents are the 2014 and 2015 volumes of SURJ, the two publications I directed as a Co-Editor-in-Chief.