A fun way for scientists to reach out—as a pen pal

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I’m a huge fan of scientific outreach. I feel like part of my duty as a scientist is to interact with the public as much as possible to help demystify and humanize science, especially in a time when science needs all the help it can get.

So, when I learned about Letters to a Pre-Scientist (LPS), I knew right away it was something I wanted to try. The program pairs each scientist with a middle school pen pal. Scientists are encouraged to write something fun and interesting, and according to the LPS website, the students have a blast opening their letters together.

I hadn’t had a physical-letter pen pal since I was 9 years old and some kind of service matched me up with a boy in Melbourne, Australia. He and I exchanged letters for about a year. The only parts of that correspondence I remember are his use of the word “lollies” and my probably confusing hand-drawn map of Delaware. But this time, I was sure, would be more impactful.

I begin with the mandatory online training sessions. For example, the students will get to see a one-sentence description of your work before sending their first letter. The training helps you write that sentence—and then learn why what you wrote would baffle and dismay the students, then walk you through the editing process. At the end, my sentence reads, “I help keep people healthy by making sure the blood and urine tests they might get at the doctor’s office work well.” I give myself full marks for keeping it comprehensible, but a failing grade at being the kind of scientists who can truthfully write something more exciting, such as, “I study the effects of radiation on chimps in flight simulators!” (Note that this is not what another scientist wrote. This is the plot of the 1987 film Project X starring Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt.)

There’s a lot more guidance, too, which one might imagine is a good idea when matching children with adult strangers. Most of it is straightforward and expected: Do not ask for their home address, do not contact them outside of this program, never feed them after midnight. Other recommendations come from the LPS team’s years of experience supporting these interactions. Your letter should be understandable; photos, doodles, and little freebies such as stickers are encouraged. Avoid sending lab data or a manuscript preprint. Each of your four letters has its own deadline and theme, such as writing about your career path or how you overcame challenges. This lets the kids compare similar responses from their scientists, with the side benefit of giving you some direction when you’re staring at a blank page and thinking, “Uh … what do I even say to a middle schooler? Something with the word ‘rizz’? Is ‘six seven’ still funny?”

After all of this preparation, it’s disappointing when LPS fails to assign me a pen pal. Apparently this year the number of interested scientists exceeded the number of available students—both a bad problem and a good problem for the program to have—and we didn’t all make the cut.

But then, in January, it happens. A seventh grade teacher in Santa Ana, California, who has participated in the program in the past returns from maternity leave and wants her students to join, giving some of us an opportunity for an abbreviated correspondence: two letters instead of four, but we’ll get our pen pals after all.

During an introductory Zoom call, the teacher explains that her students generally come from disadvantaged backgrounds, with many living in multifamily units and some without homes. They love receiving letters from their scientists, she says. We should be role models, we should help them feel confident, and one time a scientist included glitter in their letter, and that was cool. No pressure. And, she begs, if you handwrite your letter, “please never cursive.”

I feel excited when my pen pal’s first letter arrives. She sounds fun. She wants to be a nurse, and she likes soccer and escape rooms! She asks whether I ever get disgusted doing my job, and I admit that I do, but I think everyone does. She asks whether I went to college, and I say yes, though I deliberately gloss over “and also 7 years of grad school,” because why scare her off now?

I work on my letter for a long time, going back and forth about a photo to include. After considering what kind of picture might fulfill all of the criteria—interesting, something she’d like to see, no personal info, no graphs—I say screw it and go with a classic cat pic. “I also have two cats,” I write. “Their names are Coconut (on the right) and Muesli (on the left). They’re brothers.”

Am I writing this insultingly simplistically? Or am I overthinking it, because cute cats are cute cats?

After I describe my science work and close with a few questions for her about pets, siblings, and the weather in Santa Ana, I print the letter, then toss in a few animal stickers that my son received on Valentine’s Day and that he probably won’t miss. Why not?

Her next letter arrives a few weeks later. I learn that she likes disc golf, and that she has two pets, though one of them lives in her house but the other is in heaven. I decide not to ask any more about pets.

I tell her how I became a scientist, how I failed an important exam once in college, and how I learned to dissect mosquitoes. I really don’t know what to say. But just in case, I add one more cat photo, of Coconut wearing a hat my daughter crocheted. Science!

I finish with three more questions for her, though after I mail the letter I realize this was my last one—LPS is over for the year, and I don’t think we’re exchanging another round of letters. I will never know her favorite ice cream flavor.

I’ll also never know whether my letters make any difference to her career path, or whether she ends up becoming a nurse. But the whole process reminded me how easily we can influence the next generation of scientists through something as simple as a few letters. There’s something deeply intentional about a physical letter that just can’t be replicated any other way. I realized as I was writing this that the Melbournian wasn’t my only pen pal—in sixth grade, our teacher arranged for us to exchange letters with active-duty soldiers in the Gulf War. The letter I received didn’t make me pursue a career in the military, but I remember the special feeling that an adult, busy doing Important Adult Things halfway across the world, took the time to write to me. Thirty-five years later, I still have the letter in my desk.

As the LPS website explains the point of the organization, “Talent and potential are equally distributed in society, but opportunity is not.” That’s why I sent a Letter to a Pre-Scientist, and that’s why I’m looking forward to hopefully doing it again next year. If there’s a middle schooler I can reach with a bit of writing, one more positive association with science I can cast out into the world, I want to do that.

And just like the internet, I have no shortage of cat photos.

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