From Federal Employee to School Teacher: Lessons in Resilience and Reinvention - Voices #22
A former NIH science communicator reflects on finding purpose after choosing to leave federal service during a period of widespread layoffs, discovering that resilience might mean beginning again.
In this reflective essay, science communicator turned educator Yasmin Kloth shares how an unexpected career shift—from federal science communicator to high school teaching—became an exercise in resilience and reinvention. Through her story, Yasmin reminds us that the heart of public health can live on in new places, carried forward by those who continue to teach, nurture, and care.
If you’d like to follow Yasmin’s lead and share your own perspective on public health in these times, I’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch!
From Federal Employee to School Teacher: Lessons in Resilience and Reinvention
By Yasmin Kloth, MS
A Familiar Road, A New Beginning
It’s 7:30 a.m., and the sun hasn’t yet risen. I’m driving the eight-minute commute to a local Cincinnati independent high school where, in August, I accepted a two-year teaching fellowship. This road feels both familiar and foreign: the school is my alma mater and yet, in many ways, I never thought I’d be here again.
My previous career had taken me down another path. For the past fifteen years I had carved out a space as a science communicator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and into that carved hollow, I poured my love for both English and Science: two academic disciplines that I never knew could coexist in such a special way.
After post-collegiate floundering between journalism and pre-med, I came to NIH as an intern during my master’s in biophysiology. That first day on the NIH campus was a warm May morning in 2010. I walked from the Medical Center metro station in front of the welcome center and up the low-grade hill to Building 31, a large,1960s era office building. I was shown a gray, open cube with a desk and plenty of light in the communications office at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). That summer would become my introduction to the world of health communications—a world I didn’t know existed but would very easily start to fit like a second skin. The cube would become my long-term desk for the next seven years and it was at NCCIH—a Center committed to researching integrative health approaches (think yoga and meditation for stress or interactions between certain herbs and drugs)—where I learned the importance of communicating those research findings clearly to the public.
The communications team members at NCCIH were some of my first and greatest teachers.They taught me that the work of our small office was central to developing high-quality, clear, and transparent public health messages. On paper, I was a Federal employee; in practice, I was a translator of important scientific advancements so that our audiences could understand why a particular study or paper was relevant to their everyday lives.
Other opportunities followed across NIH and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), including the HHS IDEA Lab, the All of Us Research Program, the NIH Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Each of these projects built upon the experience that came before it, and were instrumental in shaping how I approached the development of health communications strategies. I remain proud of these projects and grateful for the colleagues who blossomed into friends, mentors, and teachers along the way.
Then, in April and May of this year, a series of reductions in force (RIFs) decimated NIH’s communications community. Most of my team was fired; my position somehow survived - likely due to clerical error. Suddenly, I was faced with fragments of what had been a vibrant network and workplace; I felt as if there was nothing left around me but empty space. I had to decide: was I more effective working within a broken system, or exploring a new path?
Like a Whisper in the Background
I have always wanted to teach. No matter what job or project I took on in my career, teaching was something I always wanted to do. It was a quiet calling, one that never entirely went away. Every few years, I’d ask the universe for guidance: “Show me a path toward education.” For years, the universe stayed silent and I continued along the only road I knew–the rewarding, challenging road at NIH.
The turning point came when I found a posting for a teaching fellowship on the website of my high school alma mater. The fellowship sought professionals from non-teaching backgrounds to provide experiential learning opportunities to their students, and in turn, through mentorship, learn how to teach. It felt as though the post had been written for me.
Maybe the universe had been listening after all.
Curiosity is a Bridge
When I accepted the teaching fellowship, I was asked whether I preferred teaching English or science. Having built a career at the intersection of these disciplines—how could I choose just one? So instead, I was placed with two mentors–one in English and one in science. In the way I connected these disciplines in my communications career, I would do the same in education. The questions that guided my science communications work - questions that remind me that communication is, above all, about connection - now guide my teaching: How can I make this scientific topic relevant? How can first-person narrative help people to understand complex ideas?
My favorite moments are when these disciplines collide. Carting my laptop from the science lab to the English classroom, the remnants of a past lesson remain as ninth graders filter into class, spot a diagram of sheep brain anatomy on the screen from the senior-level psychology course just before, and ask: What is that?
Their curiosity is also a bridge.
Resilience in a Changing Workforce
Since starting the fellowship, I’ve reflected a lot about resilience—a word often used to describe Federal employees now navigating turbulent careers. Is resilience our capacity to withstand hardship, to approach change with curiosity instead of fear? Or is it the willingness to begin again?
I’ve wondered whether leaving my Federal position was a resilient choice. Some days, it feels brave. Other days, I worry that I quit on the people and the challenges in front of me. But then I see my students. One recent assignment asked them to write narrative essays—personal, honest and vulnerable. Their work was full of courage, care, and risk—the hardest lessons to teach, and the ones that in themselves risk letting their teachers see a little more deeply into their everyday lives. That honesty, I’ve realized, is resilience in its purest form.
Looking back, I know this is what I was always meant to do. My years as a science communicator at NIH serve as a foundation for my teaching. Would I love teaching just as deeply without that experience? It’s hard to know.
But if a fellow Federal employee asked about making a similar leap, I’d tell them this: the rewards of working with students are every bit as rich as those of public service. My work at the NIH is never far away: its lessons travel with me into every classroom, pressed between the essays I’m grading and the AP Psychology book I’m reading - lessons about clarity, curiosity, and the power of asking hard questions. Lessons for my students just as much as for myself.
The truth is my heart never left public health.
It just built a bridge to a new place: one that shares the same purpose, the same curiosity, and the same hope for what learning can do.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of any organization, employer, or institution with which they are affiliated.
Yasmin Kloth spent 15 years as a science communicator at the National Institutes of Health–five years were spent as an onsite contractor and 10 most recently as a federal employee. In addition to her love of science, Yasmin is a published poet. She is currently a teaching fellow at Cincinnati Country Day School in Cincinnati, OH.
If you would like to follow Yasmin’s example by sharing your perspective on public health right now in our series Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health, please get in touch!
Action steps - a note from Katie
Thank you for reading this newsletter for and about the public health workforce. At this tumultuous time, I’m still really not sure where we go from here. But each time that I publish this newsletter and receive positive feedback from readers, my list of ideas for action steps continues to grow. I will start to compile these suggestions here. As we learn more, let’s keep adding to this list:
Do Yasmin’s words above inspire you? Would you also like to share your perspective on public health right now? Or write a love letter to public health? Got something to say to or about the public health workforce? Got big feelings about the RIFs or the RTO or the EOs or the BS? I would love to publish your words here as a step towards advocacy and support. Get in touch.
🆕☀️Thank a public health hero today! It could be a mentor, a colleague who had your back, or just appreciation for the protections we all rely on, like vaccines, clean water, and safe food. The more voices, the more powerful it becomes. Let’s fill this board with thanks and encouragement for our public health heroes. https://thankyoucdc.kudoboard.com/boards/VcgUPZZL
Let’s communicate what public health is and why it matters that so many of us have been forced to leave our jobs. What is your proudest moment in public health? Complete this form to submit your public health story to be used for advocacy.
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I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
“At this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, let’s remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Let’s recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. We’re going to need that now more than ever.”
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