I have recently finished my MSc in Science Communication at the Imperial College. It’s funny how I had never before heard it being called “the course” until some weeks ago, when I heard this expression three times in a row.

It’s easy to see why it is called that way. Everybody in the SciCom world seems to have done this course! I have the feeling that every time I approach a site, a magazine or any other place where people work with science communication, there is at least one person from Imperial College.

For me, the course was a great experience. Some people complained that it had too much academic content. I don’t think so, for 2 reasons:

1 – I’m a journalist with a bit of experience, so practising journalism was not exactly what I was after.

2 – I used to say this when I was doing my undergraduate degree: the most important thing is to understand Sociology, Anthropology, how science relates to society, what is a paradigm, what the positivism stands for, and things like that. These are the tools we have to think broadly and in a deep way, making connections and developing new ideas.

Of course practical experience is very important, but sometimes I think it’s overrated. Learning what button to push in a camera, or what recording software works best with skype, well, I can learn that “on the fly” and, more important, technologies change all the time. Everything I’ve learnt about editing videos at the journalism course, years ago, is useless now.

But what I’ve learnt about film narrative and language is still pretty much useful. And being well informed I can adapt this language to other medias that didn’t exist at that time (I’m not so old, but there was no mobile content at that time, for example).