Four years ago, Shankar Vedantam had mapped out a career in management. He was about to take his final examinations in electronic engineering at Bangalore University, in India, and then enter an MBA program. But at that moment the country's prime minister was assassinated, his examinations were postponed, and he was prevented from entering the management school for another year. To pass the time, he accepted a job as a newspaper reporter with The Times of India —a decision that changed his life. He was quickly hooked on the realism of his new job, and he relished the responsibility of helping people to understand current events. A year later, he earned a master's in journalism at Stanford University and soon moved to a big-city job at the Philadelphia Inquirer . He is now a medicine-science reporter for Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau. "There is pleasure in straddling two fields," he says, "of bringing information from one area to another. I moved into science journalism because it seemed like a very neat way to capitalize on knowledge that I already had. In modern culture there is a huge knowledge base, but we haven't spread that knowledge very well. I feel that spreading it may be as important as generating it or acquiring it. "It's hard to find good jobs in journalism. As with science and research, the market is competitive and may even be shrinking. Still, there will always be a demand for people who have technical skills and who can write about science clearly. Many people feel intimidated by science; they will always welcome someone who can explain it to them. "My training in engineering is an excellent background for science writing. By that I don't mean so much the specific information I learned in school; that's changing all the time. What counts more is familiarity with the language of science. People who are not familiar with that language tend to pull away from something they don't understand. When I find something I don't understand, I just go out there and ask some questions. The same pattern of questions and answers tends to repeat, whether the subject is computers or medicine. Mr. Vedantam advises that the best way to get into science writing is "just to do it. Write stories for a university newspaper, take a course in writing. Like most skills, it's learned by practice. Even if you don't become a science writer, you'll always benefit from having stronger writing skills."