I have a tendency to be honest on Twitter.

This isn’t a bad thing – I strongly believe in speaking truth – but, online, it’s sometimes easy to forget who’s reading what I’m writing.

I wear many hats. I am a community organizer. I am a student researcher. I am a budding scientist. I am a policy wonk. Reconciling these different world views is very, very hard – sometimes, it feels downright impossible.

I was excited to spend my senior year at Dartmouth pursuing a yearlong research project. The Senior Fellowship has provided me with the resources and mentorship to pursue graduate-level work as an undergraduate, and I am very grateful. It also goes without saying, though, that embarking on your first ‘real’ research project is challenging: hurdles will come, and part of the process is learning to be resilient in the face of them (endless praise to both my faculty advisors and the Undergraduate Advising and Research office for guiding me through my inevitable research crises).

At the same time, this project is challenging in more personal ways. I’m an advocate – I strongly believe in science communication, and science diplomacy. I believe in advocating for the outcomes of your research – not for advocating a certain cause based on values. As a young person, I know it is my duty to hold elected officials – government representatives who have a responsibility to uphold citizens’ concerns – to account when it comes to climate change. The movement for climate justice is a beautiful one, filled with young people who have the audacity to dream of a safer and more stable world.

I also hold another identity, though. I am a researcher who is in love with science and the ways in which it allows us to further our collective knowledge of the world. I see so much beauty in the natural and social sciences. I am always in awe of ecosystems and how humans fit within these systems. My big-picture systems thinking is what sparked the curiosity that made me apply for a Senior Fellowship in the first place.

As a person, I don’t see these two parts of my identity – an organizer and a researcher – as conflicting. At the same time, though, we live in a society that has created a siloed structure. We encourage each other – organizers and academics alike – to pick a path, to be specific in our goals. (This is a leverage point, by the way!) We tell ourselves that we don’t need any more climate science – indeed, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming – and we proclaim that research must be objective. I don’t personally believe that research can be fully unbiased – I think that we must strive to eliminate our biases, but that we must acknowledge the inherent biases everywhere – but that’s another blog post..

My point is that I have been walking a delicate balance juggling these two roles as I progress through the year. I have become much more self-aware of my language, and how it can alienate certain groups of people, even if my intention is never to do so. I am learning about how our world views and values affect the decisions we make, which means that it is really important that I frame things in certain ways depending on who I am talking to. I am learning that bridging the gap between researchers, advocates, and policymakers is much harder than I expected – it involves being able to simultaneously translate between three very distinct languages.

I am working on striking the right balance between research and advocacy as an engaged scholar. I recognize that it’s a crucial part of my learning process and methodology.

But, I’m still learning – and I would love your feedback.

Do you have thoughts about how to balance these two goals? Do you think scientists have no business pushing to communicate their research findings?

Drop me a line via email (leehi [at] dartmouth [dot] edu) or on Twitter (I promise to be honest!)