"You have a Ph.D.? And you're doing journalism? How did that happen?"

Those questions are the inevitable reaction of people who find out that I'm a journalist with a Ph.D. in genetics. When other journalists ask me the questions, they imbue them with a sense of disbelief: how could anyone choose the life of a journalist over the glamorous life of a scientist? But scientists react with excitement. They want to know what path I followed to get where I am and how they can make a similar journey.

My path is well-trodden, but by no means the only road that leads to a career in science writing. I made the journey from scientist to science journalist via a detour through a science journalism program.

But perhaps I should back up a bit. I've had a life-long love of science. By my sophomore year in high school, I'd decided that I wanted to be a research scientist. So I did the usual things to achieve that goal: majored in biology as an undergraduate and applied to graduate school.

I got a job as a work-study student in a biology lab at the University of Nebraska. For three years, I did research, which cumulated in an undergraduate honors thesis and research papers. I went to Germany for a year to study microbiology as Fulbright scholar. The next stepping stone was Washington University in St. Louis, where I earned a Ph.D. in molecular genetics.

My original plan called for me to do a postdoc and then start my own lab, but a funny thing happened. I realized about three years into graduate school that I didn't want to continue on an academic track.

I was bored in the lab. I wanted to learn about all kinds of things and felt constrained by the necessity to focus on only one aspect of science. But what else could I do?

I'd always loved to write and had often dreamed of being a contributing editor to Discover magazine. I repeatedly tried to foist that dream onto a friend who was an English and biology double major. It worked. She eventually became a science writer.

That just didn't seem possible for me, though. After all, the most writing I'd done was in freshman composition courses and my undergraduate thesis and a few papers and grant proposals. I liked writing, but doubted that my experience could translate into a career.

Then, a graduate student in a lab across the hall from mine did something that amazed me. She defended her Ph.D. and announced that she wasn't going to do a postdoc. Instead, she was going to journalism school.

The student, Sue Goetinck Ambrose, went to a science writing program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The program is famous for requiring research experience and advanced degrees in science.

Sue's move was a revelation for me. For the first time I saw a way that someone like me could break into a writing career.

I applied to the four schools I knew at the time had science journalism programs: UC Santa Cruz, Boston University, New York University and Johns Hopkins University. Now, other schools, including Texas A&M, MIT, and the University of California Berkeley, are adding science writing programs. I eventually chose Boston University's program.

Shortly before I defended my Ph.D. thesis, one of the faculty members in my department approached me and asked if I was making a wise decision to go to school for another couple of years and amass more student loan debt. Couldn't I just start writing? he asked.

The suggestion nearly made me hyperventilate and made my head spin with questions I couldn't answer. Write for whom? Could I get a staff job without a degree? If I freelanced how would I get my stories in the magazines and how would I get paid? Where would I even begin?

Certainly, I have friends who leapt directly from the bench to the typewriter, but I had no clue how the journalism business worked. I felt I needed a guide and contacts that could help me get a job in my new career. For me, and many other science writers, journalism or writing programs are good starting points for breaking into the business. One friend summed it up this way: You go to school so you can get internships. You do internships so you can get clips. Clips get you jobs.

"Clips" are the newspaper, magazine, TV or radio pieces that form a writer's portfolio.

My tenure at Boston University gave me access to an internship at the Dallas Morning News. My performance at the paper and the contacts I made in Dallas helped earn me a second internship at Science News.

The way I got my job was partially luck. I happened to be on the job market at precisely the time the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was looking for a reporter to cover genetics and agricultural biotechnology. I eagerly applied and then heard nothing for a month.

I didn't have the three years of experience the paper set as its minimum requirement and my application likely went into a trash can in the human resources department.

At the AAAS meeting, one of the scientific meetings that draw hordes of journalists, my former editor at the Dallas Morning News, Tom Siegfried, insisted upon setting up a meeting with a Post-Dispatch editor. Tom sang my praises and the editor granted me an interview. I also interviewed with two other reporters from the paper at that meeting. Then I waited. A month later, I had a telephone interview. A few weeks later, I traveled to St. Louis for two days of in-person interviews. My lack of journalism experience was a serious deficit, but my references and my clips overcame the paper's reluctance to hire an unproven reporter.

I've been at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for six years now. I became the medical science reporter about two years after the joining the staff.

My job has many rewards and challenges. I certainly get published much faster these days: a day versus a year or more. But that means I have very tight deadlines. That doesn't bother me and I feel a rush sometimes when I"m turning around a story quickly.

I'm still immersed in scientific literature. I read papers in all areas of the life sciences and I get to call the authors and discuss thrilling ideas. But I also have to slog through research articles in fields in which I have only rudimentary knowledge: geology, physics, astronomy, etc. And that means I have to call up researchers and ask what are probably incredibly elementary questions.

I try not to be self-conscious about my ignorance. It's my responsibility to learn as much as I can as quickly as possible and then explain it to the lay public in a clear and entertaining manner. As a result, I learn something new every single day and I'm rarely bored, even if some scientists think I'm not terribly bright.

The climb was sometimes uphill, and I took a fork in the road that wasn't on my original career map, but, ultimately, my path lead me right where I want to be.