From blogs to videos, digital media offer powerful new ways to boost your academic career along with public understanding and support for engineering.
By Pierre Home-Douglas
As the graduate program director at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s College of Engineering and Information Technology, Woodrow Winchester III is used to discussing bold ideas with faculty and industry professionals. Last year, however, the pandemic prompted him to seek a broader audience for his insights on how engineering could help transform the US public health system. On one level, Winchester, a design futurist, thought the topic would resonate since health care affects everyone. But he also wanted “to be a bit of a provocateur” and inspire students who might be drawn to engineering if made aware of its many medical applications. The Conversation, an online news organization that publishes general-interest articles written by academic experts, offered the perfect platform. Winchester’s piece garnered readers worldwide and was picked up by Business Insider, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a dozen other media outlets.
For a field that has long labored to raise its “brand” recognition, such amplified reach represents a mass communications milestone. It also marks a shift in approach to public engagement launched by the National Academy of Engineering two decades ago. The profession still operates at a significant media disadvantage. Unlike doctors, scientists, and lawyers, for example, engineers cannot leverage TV dramas or other popular culture outlets to showcase their work and its society-wide impact. Nor do their complex, technical research topics typically generate viral views. The difference today: the engineering community swapped expensive, ineffective efforts to improve public understanding for evidence-based, field-tested slogans and other messaging developed and disseminated by the National Academies’ 2008 Changing the Conversation study.
That landmark report went beyond recommending a set of easily applied catch phrases. (“Engineers make a world of difference” had the highest appeal across all populations of adults and students, while “engineers connect science to the real world” ranked lowest.) It stressed the vital role of communications in building widespread political and financial support for engineering as an engine of innovation and national well-being. And it underscored the need for the entire engineering community—particularly academics—to serve as messengers.
Fueling this transformation is the proliferation of digital outlets like The Conversation. While radio interviews, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces in the local newspaper remain powerful vehicles for getting the word out about what engineers do, podcasts, blogs, vlogs (video blogs), YouTube channels, and specialized websites offer direct conduits to diverse new audiences. There’s even a self-publishing option for articles on LinkedIn.
Such nontraditional outreach vehicles can enhance faculty CVs, increase visibility and impact, and open opportunities for novel research collaborations and funding. Bill Hammack, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has won numerous accolades—including the National Science Board’s 2021 Public Service Award—for his novel contributions to engineering outreach. Standouts include his Engineer Guy YouTube channel, with 1.25 million subscribers, and Hammack’s 200 public radio broadcasts.
1. Know Your Audience
Communications experts stress the need, before wading into the digital water, to first determine such fundamentals as who you are trying to reach—and why. “Often engineers and scientists are too into their research and findings” to sense what might interest a layperson, says Beth Daley, editor of The Conversation. “They need to step back and say: ‘Why should my mother or my aunt care?’” Dan Pomeroy, executive director of the Scientific Citizenship Initiative at Harvard Medical School, suggests first picking a goal, which should help “narrow down the subset of the public you want to reach, and work backwards.” He also recommends trying to connect with that audience “in more than a superficial way by understanding how they think about the issue you’re addressing,” then figuring out the best avenues to reach them. “What are they reading? In what formats do they engage?” asks Pomeroy.
Despite the multitude of online options, communication still transpires in just three forms: written, audio, and video, according to John Timmer, science editor at Ars Technica, a website that covers news and opinions on a variety of subjects, including science and engineering. “Once you choose the media, you can start looking around and figure out which outlets offer the opportunity to get your message across,” he suggests. Sometimes, text with embedded diagrams can best convey your message. In other cases, video might be more effective. Then it’s a matter of choosing which sites have the audience you want to reach. When mechanical engineer Tom Schuler wanted to attract investors and educate the public about the groundbreaking work his company, Solidia Technologies, was doing to reduce the carbon footprint of making cement, he turned to TED talks. His five-minute presentation has drawn 1.5 million viewers since October 2020. The site also makes transcripts of the talk available in 18 languages.
Another popular site, Veritasium, has 11.6 million subscribers. It was created by Australian-Canadian science communicator Derek Muller, who has a bachelor’s of applied science in engineering physics and a PhD in physics education research. Veritasium producer Emily Zhang says that while she and her colleagues sometimes come up with their own topics, “we also receive many great suggestions from our viewers or engineers doing outreach.” But there is a trade-off. Whereas TED allows speakers to do their own writing and presenting, Veritasium’s staff interviews experts and creates the finished product, so idea pitchers have less control over how their message gets delivered.
2. Pick Your Platform
Choosing the optimum medium involves many factors. Producing a polished podcast or YouTube video demands a certain level of equipment and training. “If you find that video software, for example, is something that you just don’t have time to learn to use effectively, then you need to think, okay, how much can I convey in, say, a blog?” says Timmer. Weigh the pros and cons. “Starting a blog means building your own audience, but it also gives you flexibility,” he explains. “It also demands a long-term commitment of continually updating.” By contrast, Timmer notes, Ars Technica already has an audience—“but it’s a one-off, and you’ll have to convince me that your freelance story is worth running.”
3. Invest in Training
Communication “is a skill, not a talent, that requires time and practice,” advises Nicole Leavey, associate director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook, which offers workshops of various lengths to improve clients’ communication skills. “But the beautiful thing about it is that you have the power to choose how you engage, to put yourself out there and see what works for you.”
Leavey suggests taking advantage of your university’s public affairs or media departments, which are staffed by specialists who keep abreast of the ever-changing social media and digital communications domains. Ellen Yui, who has spent 30 years as a communications expert working with engineers, universities, and governments, suggests a collaborative approach. Saying “I want to be of service helping to get the word out about this great research I am doing, how can I be of help?” is “completely different” from asking “What can you do for me?” she notes. The latter, Yui cautions, “will probably make them roll their eyes and think ‘this is one more person putting pressure on me.’”
4. Tap Traditional Media
Shari Graydon, a Canada-based consultant who teaches workshops on editorial writing, says that the tried-and-true outlet “is not on most people’s radar, including engineers. They’re often surprised that anyone with an informed opinion can submit an op-ed to a newspaper.” One advantage of publishing in an established news source is the underlying public recognition that an article meets certain standards of fact-checking, impartiality, and general quality that often are lacking on the internet.
Writing effective op-eds is a teachable skill. Participants in Graydon’s half-day workshop, for example, are asked to come in with a concrete idea and a simple, clear thesis statement they want to argue. She then walks them “through a process of translating what they know into a 700-word, accessible, engaging commentary.” Mary Wells, the University of Waterloo engineering dean, organized a Graydon-led workshop for fellow engineering deans in Canada and called it “a real eye-opener.” She “had never thought of doing anything like that before” but derived enough know-how and inspiration to pen an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun extolling the overlooked yet remarkable role of engineering in mass-producing and distributing the COVID-19 vaccines. She also cowrote an editorial for the Canadian Broadcasting Center’s New Opinion site on the need for more women in engineering.
5. Be Yourself
Authenticity is critical, says Leavey. “As individuals we have certain abilities, but some people are going to be comfortable doing video, [and] others won’t want anything to do with it. That’s okay. It’s finding what we’re comfortable with.”
6. Glean Digital Pointers
No time to attend a writing workshop? MIT’s Communication Lab created a site (https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/cheme/commkit/op-ed) that breaks down all the steps in writing an op-ed, replete with a structure diagram and list of practical tips, such as using short paragraphs (two to five sentences) that make one point and framing a conclusion in which you “reiterate your main point and offer a final epiphany, solution, or call to action.”
7. Understand (and Wield) Your Impact
Is it worth expending so much energy just to add one more voice to the cacophony of public discourse on a subject? Research suggests yes. According to a 2018 Yale University study of 3,557 readers, op-eds “have a lasting effect on people’s views regardless of their political affiliation or their initial stance on an issue,” Alexander Coppock, a professor of political science and the study’s leader, told ScienceDaily. “People read an argument and were persuaded by it. It’s that simple.” Research also indicates that academics can boost their “scholarly impact”—and thus their professional profile—by tweeting or posting their findings on social media rather than waiting for journals or university news offices to “push” information out to the public.
8. Leave the Echo Chamber
“Seek out media outlets that may not share your world view,” advises Kenneth Lutchen, Boston University’s engineering dean and a prolific op-ed writer who has garnered positive feedback from a wide variety of his opinion-piece readers. Otherwise, he says, “people only end up hearing what they want to hear. That’s become an increasingly dangerous norm in society. Engineers need to do their part to change that.” Lutchen also believes that engineers have an obligation to make their voices heard more clearly and resoundingly. It’s all part of being a better “societal engineer,” a trait Boston University values so highly in its graduates it copyrighted the term. Future engineers, he says, should be “comfortable and even passionate about communicating the role that technology will play in improving people’s lives.”
9. Forge New Connections—and Opportunities
For many engineering educators, that passion may not propel career advancement. “Professors get tenure by publishing journal articles and texts,” laments UMBC’s Winchester. “Doing what I did doesn’t count for anything on that front. That’s the sad reality.” He adds that more people likely read what he wrote for The Conversation than would have read any journal article—and his piece probably had “more impact in terms of discourse and greater awareness of the issues I discussed.”
Still, that dynamic may also be changing. While scholarship still drives promotions, some institutions now encourage public engagement and accept outreach as evidence of service. There are bigger, even life-changing, career bonuses that communicating your work can bestow. Caroline Kamau-Mitchell, an organizational psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London, gave several examples in a 2019 Nature column on how media training helped expand the impact of her work. Among them: being asked by a game company that had read about her team’s research on stress among medical professionals to develop an occupational-health intervention for doctors, nurses, and other clinicians. “Media coverage of your research is not just a lark—it is a valuable way to conduct outreach, which in turn can help you to make a real, measurable difference in the world,” she concluded.
10. Think Waaay Outside the Box
Why limit yourself to conventional outlets? In February, four engineers dazzled the judges of America’s Got Talent: Extreme with a breathtaking, 160-drone light show. The Verge Aero team, three of whom met while studying engineering at Rowan University, snagged the coveted “golden buzzer” and leapfrogged into the finals—winning millions of fans in the process.
Pierre Home-Douglas is a freelance writer and frequent Prism contributor based in Montréal.
Design by Toni Rigolosi
Conversation Starter
“Academic rigor, journalistic flair,” promises The Conversation (theconversation.com). The professionally edited online nonprofit news organization, which publishes noteworthy articles and research from academe, offers a friendly on-ramp for engineering educators seeking to increase their audience and impact.
Experiencing the rigorous vetting process can help refine your writing skills, even if your proposal never sees print. US editor and manager Beth Daley, a Pulitzer Prize finalist when she covered the environment for the Boston Globe, holds regular story brainstorming sessions with the editorial staff. They then approach The Conversation’s 62 member universities and say “hey, we have this idea. Do you have someone on staff who can write on this?” Daley’s team also fields daily pitches from “academics all over the country and around the world” who want to write an article about their work on smart bridge sensors or another research project.
The most promising proposals get the nod. Prospective contributors receive 20 pages of guidelines covering topics from accuracy to diversity of views to ethics. (Writers also get a list of simple, practical writing tips. Among them: include a paragraph—known as a “nutgraf”—early on that conveys “the main point of the article and why it’s important now.”
Articles go through several stages. Typically, the academic will write a first draft and then the editorial team will “take a stab at it,” says Daley. The process is “very collaborative,” she adds, with three or four drafts the norm. “At the end, both the engineer or scientist and the editor have to say ‘yes, we’re good with this.’”
Published pieces typically reach 180,000 people a day—just in the United States. But The Conversation’s “real power,” contends Daley, is that “all our content goes out to AP, Yahoo News, MSN” and gets picked up by more than 700 news outlets worldwide every month. Authors’ work has appeared on the PBS NewsHour and in the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine, and hundreds of small papers worldwide—”something that makes us really happy,” says Daley, who calculates The Conversation’s material is read about 23 million times a month.
Engineers whose pitch and piece get accepted “can pretty well be guaranteed that it will appear in 60 to 80 news outlets,” observes Daley. Contributors also can consult a dashboard on the website that lists the number of reads, what outlets and countries republished the article, tweets, and comments. “As an academic it was really helpful to see who was reposting [my article] on LinkedIn or Facebook,” says Conversation contributor Woodrow Winchester III, engineering graduate program director at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The dashboard also gave him a sense of who his readers were. “I felt that it made sense to them, and they were buying into my message.” – Pierre Home-Douglas