WTL Issue 008 | September 24, 2025

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The Practice of Connection

Lessons from the Long Haul

The landline sat there like a challenge. Black receiver, coiled cord, the weight of expectation heavy in my palm each time I lifted it only to set it down again. Around me, the Alaska State Capitol hummed with the particular energy of late-session urgency—staffers ducking in and out of offices clutching overflowing manilla folders and coffee cups, the chime of floor session bells breaking through the murmur of voices in the carpeted hallways.

I had carved out exactly eighteen inches of counter space between two other staffers' desks. Enough room for a legal pad, that intimidating phone, and my growing collection of unnecessary notes—the kind you scribble when your brain needs something to do while it works up courage.

Just 10 weeks into Alaska’s 90-day legislative session, I had already traveled further than geography could measure. At the beginning of January, I’d been hunched over a microscope in a windowless nook of a Salk Institute lab, tracing the delicate architecture of brain cells, measuring the components that make up our fight-or-flight responses across species. The work was solitary, methodical, quietly satisfying. I understood the rhythm of research—the careful preparation, the patient observation, the slow accumulation of knowledge.

Now I needed to call strangers. Experts I'd never met, whose voices would carry decades of experience I desperately needed to understand in minutes, not months. When the fellowship opportunity arrived with barely a week’s notice to relocate, I’d traded the familiar weight of a glass laboratory beaker for the unfamiliar responsibility of crafting policy that would affect real communities, real lives.

Hand hovering. Fingers tapping. Another deep breath.

The phone felt heavier than any piece of lab equipment I'd ever handled, because on the other end wasn't data—it was relationship. Connection. The kind of collaboration that would require me to show up differently than I ever had before.

When I finally dialed that first number, something shifted. Not just in my comfort with cold calls, but in my understanding of what expertise really means. That conversation—and the hundreds that followed—taught me that knowledge isn't just what you discover in isolation. It's what emerges when you're brave enough to reach across the space between what you know and what you need to learn.

That temporary legislative session became the beginning of everything that followed. The pivot toward Arctic policy. The career built on the understanding that climate solutions require not just scientific rigor, but the courage to pick up the phone and build bridges between worlds.

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Field-Tested: The Three-Touch Rule for Policy Pivots

This question arrives in my inbox regularly, usually from someone perched at their own version of that eighteen-inch desk space: How do I prepare for a career in policy? How do I make the leap?

If you're considering this shift—whether from academia, private sector, or anywhere else—here's what I've learned about building a foundation that will hold:

Touch the Ground

Get involved in your broader community and connect your work to real-world problems. Policy that matters emerges from understanding how decisions ripple through actual lives. Volunteer with local environmental groups. Attend town halls. Show up to community meetings where climate impacts are being discussed at the kitchen-table level. Don't theorize about impact. Draw from your own experience and witness what others share with you.

Touch Different Languages

Practice translating complex ideas into accessible language. Policy work is fundamentally about communication across worlds—scientific, legal, community, political. Start with your close circle: explain your current work to your neighbor, your parent, or a teenager. Notice where you lose them. Notice where their eyes light up. That's where your policy voice lives.

Touch Other Perspectives

Seek to understand worldviews that differ from your own. Effective policymaking requires holding multiple truths simultaneously. Practice listening not just to gather information, but to genuinely shift your own understanding. The most transformative policies emerge from this kind of deep listening.

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Building a policy career takes dedication and curiosity, yes. But mostly it takes willingness—to be uncomfortable, to learn publicly, to discover that your expertise is just one thread in a much larger weaving.

Your fresh perspective isn't a liability you need to overcome. It's exactly what these conversations need.

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Signals & Shifts

Sue Biniaz earned the nickname "the closer" during her three decades as lead climate attorney at the U.S. State Department. Her superpower? Crafting language that could bridge seemingly impossible divides in international climate negotiations. In this New York Times profile, watch how someone builds a career on the patient work of finding words that hold.

ProFellow has compiled 31 science policy fellowships (updated May 2025) for those ready to make the leap. Worth adding to your list: the intensive crash courses from PLEN Seminars and AAAS Science & Technology Policy Leadership Seminars.

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Question for reflection: How has your relationship with not-knowing evolved as you’ve built understanding and moved between different worlds of work?

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Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.

Nikoosh

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Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.

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