ATISSA BANUAZIZI: So I think it's somewhat of a misconception that communication can be separated from the work that scientists do. Because so much of what scientists do in their daily lives is communication. If you are a scientist, and you are doing really, really exciting work, that work is not going to have any kind of impact if you can't tell people about it. And a lot of the actual work that scientists do is writing up their results, is talking about their results in all kinds of settings and to all kinds of people.
And MIT students, they're very proud of their work. And they want their work to have impact. And I think there is an understanding that the way to have impact is to make sure that other people understand it. And if other people don't, then the work languishes.
And there are all sorts of reasons why people want to communicate their work. They may want to communicate their work in classes, sure, to get a good grade. But they also eventually will be asking for funding.
They will be communicating their work to change the direction of research in their field. They want to change the world. That's going to happen if and only if they can talk about it and write about it effectively.
