A monk started to prepare his simple lunch of rice, vegetables, and broth. After meditating for hours, he grew hungry and wanted a delicious meal. He looked inside a wooden vat of fermenting miso made from soy beans and wheat that he had prepared the winter before. All that was left were dredges that had seeped through the bottom. Curious, the monk decided to reach with a wooden spoon. As he raised the utensil to his mouth, the aroma wafted into his nostrils — toasty, caramel, and acidic. He brought the dark liquid to his tongue.

The taste was exquisite.

According to legend, Shinichi Kakushin was a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk who has been credited with introducing soy sauce to Japan in 1254 AD. While both Chinese and Japanese monks had been exchanging recipes for soy sauce across the Sea of Japan since 772 AD, it wasn’t until Kakushin serendipitouslydiscovered a recipe for this particular shoyu soy sauce that the Japanese began their love affair with this universal condiment.

I sat down the day after ComSciCon-San Diego with ten pages of notes and my head buzzing with possibilities. There are so many directions to take a science communication career, and I just got a head start on whatever path I choose.

ComSciCon is a free science communication conference for graduate students. Since its inception in Boston five years ago, the event has expanded to include satellite conferences like last weekend’s San Diego meeting. Attendees from as far as Northern California and Arizona drove in to join some familiar faces. Shout out to the SANDSWA members among the organizers, attendees and panelists.

The morning starts like any other for the local environmental monitors in Fort Good Hope, N.W.T. — laid out across the storage room floor are boxes of clear glass bottles, GPS units, batteries, and an array of equipment that at first glance looks like something from a sci-fi movie.

Environmental monitors from Fort Good Hope are joined by an Environment and Climate Change Canada researcher to do water sampling from local wetlands in the Ts'ude niline Tu'eyeta (Ramparts River and Wetland) area.

Most of the graduate students I work with are spending the bulk of their time in lab, teaching or preparing for required departmental examinations—ultimately, preparing for future careers. During our undergraduate training and even at the graduate level, most of us are led to believe our career options are limited to academia, industry, government or alternative careers. This narrows the areas of science we are exposed to—including science policy.

The cornerstones of science policy include, but are not limited to: science advocacy, scientific communication and science-based policymaking and legislating. As most of us matriculate through our graduate school careers, we begin to notice the need for increased funding in science, a disconnection between science and the public, and a host of other issues—issues we can fix.