Two colleagues met in a 2024 writing workshop and recognized shared histories of dramatic career shifts and impulses to rethink professional paths as experiments. One individual quit a digital-health role at Google's Mountain View campus in 2017 without a plan, experienced loss of work identity and financial strain, and regretted the impulsive move. In 2019, while in a neuroscience master's programme at King's College London, she launched a deliberate career experiment: writing 100 articles in 100 days. That experiment produced reader feedback, unexpected skills like visual storytelling, community building, and a realization that research and communication roles can coexist and strengthen one another.
For A.-L.L.C., this began in 2017, when she left her job in digital health at Google's campus in Mountain View, California. She simply quit - no plan, no safety net, just the conviction that this career wasn't right for her. The loss of her work identity and the financial stress that followed were anxiety-inducing, and she regretted taking the jump without fully considering what to explore next.
Because English wasn't her first language, A.-L.L.C. had significant doubts about whether she could translate complex research into engaging content. But over those 100 days, she discovered unexpected benefits: the joy of feedback from readers and developing skills she hadn't anticipated, such as visual storytelling and building a dedicated following and community. Most importantly, the experiment shifted her perspective. She realized that her career path didn't have to be an either-or choice between researcher and science communicator.
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