This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Jim Ruland. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Jim Ruland, Author
Produced & Hosted by Adam Greenfield
Executive Produced by Patrick Yurick, Instructional Designer – MIT OGE
Executive Produced by Heather Konar, Communication Director – MIT OGE
Special thanks to the following editors who provided us invaluable feedback that aided in the development of this show:
Christopher O’Keeffe, Co-Founder of Podcation
Kristy Bennet, Manager – MIT Women’s League
Jennifer Cherone, Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Laboratory
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
EPISODE SCRIPT

Print The Script Here

ADAM GREENFIELD
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.

Adam Greenfield: Alright, easy one. Name and occupation.
Jim Ruland: My name is Jim Ruland and I’m a writer.
A: What kind of things do you write?
J: I write a lot of different things. Professionally, I’m a copywriter, that’s my day job, I work in advertising, and I’ve been doing that for over 20 years. And I also do a number of other kinds of freelance types of writing, writing book reviews, columns, cultural columns. I also do some ghost writing, editing, I collaborate with people, help them get their stories out into the world. And, lastly, I do writing for myself, fiction and non-fiction.
A: Do you have a preference? If you could ideally write one thing what would it be?
J: That’s a great question. I think how it usually works, though, is when I’m working on a novel, working on a non-fiction project seems so much easier, where all I have to do is talk about what happened. But when I’m writing a non-fiction project and I’m in the weeds, I really miss the freedom of being able to make things up.
A: It’s nice to have that wide range of things to work on.
J: And then, also, the grass is always greener.
A: There’s a reason for that saying. There’s no reason to not search for it.