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| Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1999 |
by Kevin Coughlin
There is only one thing wrong with MIT's Knight Science Journalism Fellowship.
It ends.
For me, the countdown got so bad I finally ripped the clock off the wall of my overpriced studio apartment. The pounding TICK, TICK, TICK was a painful reminder of the moments slipping away.
It's not like my regular gig as a tech reporter for the Star-Ledger is so awful; this one is just too sweet.
First, there is the freedom. To think. To learn. To play. Away from clanging phones and cranky editors and crunching deadlines. Oh yeah, and they pay you $35K for this.
You can attend as many courses as you like, or none at all.
If MIT's too easy, try Harvard. You don't have to take the tests
or write any papers, either.
Basically, you get out what you put in. Want to polish your physics?
Great. Brush up on your DNA? No problem.
Toss in gung ho director Boyce Rensberger and his all-knowing aide-de-camp, Martha Henry; mix together eight fellow travelers; add Fenway Park . . . and you have all the ingredients for an unforgettable nine months.
One Fellow parked himself in a neuroscience lab. Another morphed from a technology reporter into a science writer. Yet another launched a crusade against "information poverty."
Maybe you just need a break. Me, I was a man in motion. Every second counted.
We toured Wood's Hole. I fell in love. There were courses on cyber-ethics and the Microsoft case-as well as music, art, and architecture. I poked around the Media Lab, the Lab for Computer Science, the Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Twice a week, Rensberger trotted the best and the brightest into our conference room for two-hour Q & A sessions. Steven Pinker talked about language, E.O. Wilson held forth on vanishing species. Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould lamented the late, great Yankee Clipper over lunch Upstairs at the Pudding. Quantum computing, well, even the experts had trouble with that one.
I wore out my Palm Pilot entering contacts from all the conferences I went to. I wore out my knees, I played so much hockey. Don't tell my editors, but I also passed a sunny hour or two tacking and jibbing on the muddy Charles.
The fellowship is a once-in-a-lifetime license to dabble. I helped write the pilot episode for a TV drama, and rediscovered passions for cartooning and fiction. You might say I rediscovered passion.
If any of this sounds appealing, let me just offer one somber note of caution.
It's mighty hard to leave.
Kevin Coughlin covers technology for the Star-Ledger of New Jersey.