My name is Jerry Yan. I’m a rising senior here at UC Santa Barbara. I’m pursuing a double-major in Physics and Math, while both the subjects are my favorite, double-majoring can be hard for me because there are a lot of classes to take. I grew up in China and came to U.S. for college in 2017. I really love Santa Barbara – it’s a very nice place. I hope I can be a true scientist in the future, which had been my dream in childhood for many years. Another fact is I also like to write computer codes (like Python, Swift, etc.), but I didn’t choose to pursue a double major in C.S. because it just sounds too hard.
As a major in physics, most of the researches and writings that I’ve done in the university are scientific-related. I’ve written a couple of experimental reports and scientific papers. For example, the first paper that I wrote at the university is an experimental report on a physics lab class. It was not like the writing I did (especially the “naive” experimental reports) in high school because 1) there was a lot of formatting requirements and 2) the wording needed to be more professional as the audience were the university professors. I also needed to be super careful about citations – every idea that was not my original and inspired by others needed to be precisely cited. That made me kind of headache for a while.
But luckily I found myself confortable in writing experimental details and analysis. I could write details about my experiment really fast and give an analysis with professional wording. I think my experience in reading many scientific articles have helped a lot on this. While everything seems to be good now, I’m kind of struggling to expand my audience from only professional readers to general readers. In physics academia, it seems that people don’t really care about how well is your writing (as long as it is understandable and accurate). But if I want to promote my articles to more general readers, I need to make my language more interesting and, at the same time, providing a precise representation of the scientific facts that I intend to say. It’s a kind of hard task for me, but I’ll try my best doing that in this class. It seems that the first prompt is on a topic about climate change (which is scientific), so I believe it’s a pretty good opportunity to learn and practice the skills of presenting scientific facts and arguments to general readers.