Learning with enjoyment

Alisa Mayor, W’91, believes there is a Sesame Street or Muppet Show sketch to fit nearly every situation she’s encountered. In a training module she developed for colleagues, she uses an episode about an acorn that grows into an oak tree. She compares this transformation to a conference abstract becoming a medical poster or journal article. For Mayor, the process of learning should be both informative and joyful.

As a scientific content editor at the Lockwood Group, Mayor fact-checks materials, develops biographies of key opinion leaders, and writes summaries of conference papers — always with an eye for enlivening the copy. The English major’s audience might be physicians, pharmacists, nurses, or patients. For example, she may edit a summary of an article about a new treatment using language ordinary patients can easily understand.

“It’s more than a question of [technical] vocabulary. It’s also a question of what information is most helpful for the audience,” Mayor said. “Patients should be able to have something written in a way that they can understand when they’re trying to decide what sort of treatment they should have.”

When Mayor began her editorial career, she didn’t plan on working in the medical and pharmaceutical field. She hoped to become a professor of Russian literature. But a lack of positions caused her to change course, first to proofreading for one pharmaceutical company, then to developing medical article summaries for another. Her summaries emphasized the safety of a drug or product, and they required her to do substantial background studying — a task that grew her scientific knowledge over time. Now, later in her career, she still finds joy in the unexpected education.

“I get to learn something every day,” she said. “I’ve gotten to feel a lot better about the science. Maybe I didn’t specialize in that when I was in college, but I can still keep learning.”