Elias Monastersky Green GroupMentor/sage monologue

A special thanks to my dad, Richard Monastersky, for letting me interview him.

Hi I assume you came to hear my story. Well it all started when I was born. I was born in the age of Apollo. As you might know, astronauts were regarded as heroes and celebrities. Everyone big or small wanted to be one. I of course was right along with them worshiping astronauts as well as others explorers, like the deep-sea diver, Jacques Cousteau. Then when I was in fourth grade, I had a school project, and chose to go to the Hartford Courant to see how newspapers were made. I found it quite interesting but little did I know that journalistic writing would become my career. That year, the Watergate scandal broke and made a big impression on the entire country and me. People started to regard journalists as heroes. I was the perfect age for these famed journalists to become my heroes, and I wasnt alone. Many TV shows and movies began to come out that cast a journalist as the hero. In high school, I joined the school newspaper and worked my way up from being reporter to an editor. During college I followed other interests in physics and film and temporarily put journalism aside. But when I had finished college and I couldnt find a job in the film industry, I returned to scientific journalism. You know, journalism is a weird thing; it really changed how I viewed the world. Over my career, I have seen journalism change. We were once regarded as heroes but now we are now part of a contracting industry with fewer jobs by the day. It is different from when I started back in high school. But I have done many great and memorable things; I have visited all seven continents, stuck hammers in flowing lava, rafted the Grand Canyon with geologists, and worked with one of the largest atom colliders in the planet all for journalism. I have had a front row seat in watching science change through these last thirty years.