Fish Out of Water: Stories about feeling out of one's element

The Story Collider

When life throws you into unusual or unfamiliar situations, it’s hard to feel comfortable or confident in your skills. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers grapple with feeling like a fish out of water.

Part 1: When Neeti Jain dissects her first fish in the lab, she feels like she’s not cut out to be a scientist in marine ecology.

Part 2: As the new chief public health officer, Harold Cox feels out of his depth when their office receives a package with what appears to be anthrax.

Neeti Jain is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the Yale School of the Environment. Her research focuses on justice-centered storytelling in environmental education spaces, and she works with natural history museums to evaluate object labels and gallery content to make them more diverse, inclusive, and accessible for audiences of all backgrounds. A Los Angeles native, Neeti has been making her way across the three coasts and now spends her weekends lurking around the underwater dioramas at the American Museum.

Harold Cox likes to tell stories about tiny, goofy things that have happened to him. It seems that his whole life is filled with many tiny, goofy things. He has told stories on many stages, Including Moth, Risk, Riot and Massmouth. Harold is a professor of public health at Boston University school of public health.

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