How Being a Geophysicist Made Me a Better Communicator
I was working as a reporter for my hometown’s paper this past summer and a super 80’s Canadian rock band was coming to town, and I was tasked with interviewing the lead singer (when I say ‘super 80’s’ I mean I remember listening to them on cassette tape with my dad).
I set-up a phone interview with her, and prior to jumping on the call, did my journalistic due diligence- you know, conducting some background research and scribbling down a few questions like, “what kind of venue do you prefer to play in?” and “Who are your musical inspirations?” The fluffy and feel-good stuff.
The interview came and no amount of prep could prepare me for what happened. To say she was ruthless would be an understatement. I remember at one point she said something along the lines of, “I am used to reporters asking me more technical questions,” and, “you didn’t research me enough.” I don’t know if it was shear embarrassment or my shock at how bad this interview was going, but I blurted out, “I am sorry, I have never really done this before, I used to be a geophysicist…”
“A geophysicist?” she goes.
… and I begin explaining how I went from being a geophysicist to working within a communications role.
Yes, I went from a career that had all the math and science your heart could desire, to one that requires knowing adjectives upon adjectives and tapping into your creative side. While the two are very different, if it wasn’t for geophysics, I wouldn’t be half the communicator that I am.
See, when you are studying to become a “rock doctor”, you are immediately thrown into every calculus, physics, and computer science class that you could imagine. With seemingly endless labs and lectures, your jargon begins to change. While I was learning about seismic processing or Poisson’s Ratio, I was also learning a new language. Within our cohort, we all knew what we were talking about, but to everyone else we were speaking in hieroglyphics.
Just like any language barrier this becomes problematic when you are trying to achieve business goals, and my second summer internship project proved just this! It was my job that summer to map faults and identify “no drill zones” because we had to prove to the drilling engineers why what we did mattered. Before I started, they had already lost the company over $250 million because they thought they “didn’t need us.” While both of us worked on the same team, our engineers didn’t understand us.
Fascinated by this lack of understanding, in the years following that project, I took it upon myself to break that language barrier. If my team members knew what I was doing, then I could develop stronger working relationships and ensure our business goals were met. Eventually I became a liaison between our geophysics group and business development team and helped create marketing strategies for our company.
And that leads me to where I am now, particularly in the agency world. While us as individuals have our own set of vocabulary and definitions, it serves no good if no one outside of our team can’t understand us.
Oh, and for the lead singer; after their concert I went back stage to do a quick “post-show” interview. When I got there, she ran over, grabbed my arm and goes, “this is the geophysicist I was telling you guys about!”