Helen FieldsScience Writer

The big featured speaker this year at AAAS was Al Gore. He spoke Friday night. Don’t tell my mom – ok, she reads this blog – but I didn’t make it to his talk. I didn’t even try. I was at another event until a little after six - his talk started at 6:30 – and people who rushed straight over from my event to the talk barely made it into the overflow room. I said I’d make up for it by finally getting around to netflixing An Inconvenient Truth, but then someone pointed out that it’s totally out of date now. Oops. (Sorry, mom.)

The thing I was at before Gore’s talk was my orientation to be a mentor to a student who wants to go into science writing. It didn’t occur to me that I’m experienced enough to be a mentor, but they asked me to do it, so here I am: mentoring. I guess I have been doing this for almost seven years now. Yikes.