Why am I doing this?

Introduction for "Not Being Green"

“Lost art” is a modern cliché because in a time when you have access to any information at any moment in the palm of your hands, things are not lost; you are not seeking it. In our current internet-attention-centric reality, popular modes for communicating thoughts have ebbed and flowed. Personally, I’ve enjoyed the ability to hear from people while I spend most of my working hours behind a screen thinking about study design, data wrangling, data analysis, and solving healthcare inequities. Impactful scientists are often skilled communicators, or at least the ones I admire. In 2025, most people’s first thought for communicating to a large audience in long form is starting a podcast. There are far too many podcasts out there, and to have a successful one, you need to either be a dynamic interviewer who consistently has interesting guests, be two people who have great on-microphone chemistry, or both. Since one of my favorite forums for learning new things (podcasts) is not something I feel capable of doing well right now, the medium of a blog felt like a fair alternative for me to do on my own. One day I hope to have a lasting impact on population health, hopefully by being a great communicator solving pressing healthcare issues. This blog will be a space where I work on my voice. It will also be a channel where I have more control over its dissemination, compared to the algorithmically driven mediums we rely on today.

I have a short history in blogging and have always had an interest in reaching people through the internet. People who know me well know I had a brief stint making YouTube videos (shoe reviews), I wrote for my high school newspaper, and blogged for my undergraduate admissions office. I have been skeptical of coming back to blogging mainly because of imposter syndrome (alongside fear of embarrassment). My biggest hangup was grappling with our current state where everyone tries to sell you something. In my view, one of the biggest goals of marketing oneself, ideas, and expertise seems to be so that eventually you hit a point where you can monetize that platform. From Day 1, I’d like to say that I do not view the point of this blog as a future monetization scheme. When you rely on your platform to eventually cash out, your sponsor becomes your editor, and I already have that dynamic in my life. I choose to start this blog with the thought that it would be great to have a place where I can muse a bit and not deal with the constraints of the main place I write, peer-reviewed journals.

I am starting this blog in the end of my 4th year of my PhD program in Population Health Sciences. I currently am on track to complete my degree by the end of the next academic year and think that this space is a great opportunity to collect some of my thoughts at the end of a journey where I am supposed to emerge as an “expert”. There is currently an attack on expertise, which in healthcare is scary but not the first time it’s happened. The ramifications of this attack on expertise are especially pronounced in the current technology and social media age. We are also in an age where controlling the dissemination of work is harder than ever before. The internet is a place where the sharing of ideas and information is supposed to be open. Discovery of new people and places happens through algorithms, and these will emphasize controversy and sensationalism in lieu of expertise. If you are an expert in a hot topic, you might be able to grab onto an audience, but then you are also forced to cater to that audience.

By no means do I consider myself an expert yet, but I do feel like I am at a point where I am more assured in what I do and do not know about my experiences and my research areas. There are quite a few conversations that I have had upward of 20 times with prospective and current graduate students asking me for my advice on things like applying to grad schools, grants, and other aspects of early career academic healthcare research. I will for sure cover those things here, making this blog a resource for people who ask me about those topics. I can also grapple with some of the experiences I had in a long format here, eventually guiding some future choices. Another thing that I want to cover are some behind-the-paper/project blogs where I can discuss the administrative and day-to-day aspects of research that never make it into a peer-reviewed journal article. This is not with the goal of being a how-to guide; rather a way to shine some light on the process of research that does not make it to the headlines.

One of the definitions for “Green” is “(of a person) inexperienced, naive, or gullible.” I am naïve about a lot, so I often seek out and surround myself with people who know more than me. Hopefully people can learn from my mistakes just like I have learned from others, because as many of us know its Not Easy Being Green. With this blog, I have no commitment to frequency, but if a community builds here, I might lean on it a bit for future writing topics. In a lot of spaces, people become beholden to their funders and specific platforms; hopefully, this blog will allow me to take a little bit of agency back. If you made it this far, you probably have a shared desire to consume more long-form content, and I appreciate feedback on this in the future.

-Michael D. Green