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attoliarhiannonhero asks what we wanted to be when we grew up and how it worked out. This prompted me to give it a little thought and a lot of words:
When I was three, four, five I was going to be an artist like my Mom. She had a studio in the basement and was going back to college to get her MFA. She took me with her one day to the ceramics studio and I got to make a pot. We left it to be fired in the kiln but I never got it back. Mom said someone had taken it, but she probably didn't want to tell me that it had burst in the kiln from air pockets I hadn't kneaded out. Later that year when I heard our old milk man had been fired I was very concerned, until someone explained that that just meant he had been told to leave his job.
When I was seven I wanted to be an actress. My sister had played an orphan in a local production of Oliver and we both played royal children in The King and I. I was the Red Mountain in a summer camp play when I was nine and had the chance to act my way out of a paper bag (my costume), or not, as the case may be.
At thirteen I was horribly jealous of Andrea McArdle, the first Broadway Annie. She was just my age and had red hair like me and parents who could take her around to auditions where her talent could be discovered.
At fifteen I took an acting class in school and discovered I had no talent. It was very traumatic but I also learned that acting wasn't at all like I expected it to be. I had always had very vivid daydreams through which I would forget everything around me. But on stage I was always aware that it was fake. I also realized that when I imagined myself acting it was always in some science fiction show. What really interested me was space.
At sixteen I wanted to be an astronaut. When our high school chorus toured the South over Spring break, I was the only one more excited about visiting Cape Canaveral than going to Disney World. I cut school to watch the first (aborted) launch of Columbia and got excused from class to watch the actual launch in the library.
Since I excelled in math and science, my mother suggested I should be an engineer. It was the new hot field and engineers were making very good salaries right out of college. I checked the astronaut bios and verified that engineers could become astronauts. When I applied to college, I only considered schools with good engineering programs and chose MIT because they were the only one on my list with aero-astro engineering.
During my freshman year, a badly managed research job in the Space Systems Lab and a SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) meeting, in which thirty people suggested the creation of nearly twenty committees, severely daunted my enthusiasm. I had to declare a major and, based on which freshman classes I enjoyed most, chose physics. The sophomore astronomy lab lead me to an undergraduate research job in astronomy which more or less sealed my fate. To practice astronomy one really must go to grad school. Thus I started down the academic path.
Due to the two-body problem (my husband is also an academic) and my own inherent laziness I did not stay on the typical academic track. After my first postdoctoral position, I was unable to find another anywhere close to where DH had his much more promising job. This coincided with the birth of our first child so a job related separation was no longer an option. For the next two years I did some consulting on my previous job, taught physics at a local college and spent a lot of time unemployed. I found it very refreshing to be able to concentrate on the day to day life in our family without any job anxiety.
However a week before my second child was born I got a call from someone in the physics department at the local university who was looking for someone with exactly my skills to work part time on a project of his. I am still working there four years later, albeit on a different project, and hope to continue indefinitely. This job is ideal for me because it is in my field but allows the flexibility that I need. Being an astronomy professor in a research university requires much more time and devotion than I would be willing to put in. Part time jobs in astronomy are not easy to come by. I was very lucky.
I often wonder how things might have happened differently. I am terribly glad I am not an actress. Even if I were successful I would not want to have to deal with all the body issues and appearance related nonsense that are unavoidable in the field.
I am glad I'm not an astronaut. Danger aside, I find I can't really support the manned space program in its current incarnation. There isn't any science in it.
That freshmen physics class that decided my major conflicted with an introductory computer science class I had thought of taking. Given that my job now primarily consists of scientific programming, might I have loved that class enough to major in computer science? It's possible. But given my interest in astronomy, I might still have ended up doing similar work to what I'm doing now.
I was on the short list for a full time postdoc near to where my husband worked when my first child was born. Had I gotten that job, I would have stayed on the academic track and would have been applying for faculty jobs by now. But the two-body issue would have remained a problem and I doubt my husband and I could have both found good jobs in the same place. And I'm very glad I didn't have to work full time right after my first was born. She would have gone into full time daycare at six weeks. I could have done it, but it would have been exhausting and stressful for all of us.
Looking back at it all, I am very happy with where I ended up.
When I was three, four, five I was going to be an artist like my Mom. She had a studio in the basement and was going back to college to get her MFA. She took me with her one day to the ceramics studio and I got to make a pot. We left it to be fired in the kiln but I never got it back. Mom said someone had taken it, but she probably didn't want to tell me that it had burst in the kiln from air pockets I hadn't kneaded out. Later that year when I heard our old milk man had been fired I was very concerned, until someone explained that that just meant he had been told to leave his job.
When I was seven I wanted to be an actress. My sister had played an orphan in a local production of Oliver and we both played royal children in The King and I. I was the Red Mountain in a summer camp play when I was nine and had the chance to act my way out of a paper bag (my costume), or not, as the case may be.
At thirteen I was horribly jealous of Andrea McArdle, the first Broadway Annie. She was just my age and had red hair like me and parents who could take her around to auditions where her talent could be discovered.
At fifteen I took an acting class in school and discovered I had no talent. It was very traumatic but I also learned that acting wasn't at all like I expected it to be. I had always had very vivid daydreams through which I would forget everything around me. But on stage I was always aware that it was fake. I also realized that when I imagined myself acting it was always in some science fiction show. What really interested me was space.
At sixteen I wanted to be an astronaut. When our high school chorus toured the South over Spring break, I was the only one more excited about visiting Cape Canaveral than going to Disney World. I cut school to watch the first (aborted) launch of Columbia and got excused from class to watch the actual launch in the library.
Since I excelled in math and science, my mother suggested I should be an engineer. It was the new hot field and engineers were making very good salaries right out of college. I checked the astronaut bios and verified that engineers could become astronauts. When I applied to college, I only considered schools with good engineering programs and chose MIT because they were the only one on my list with aero-astro engineering.
During my freshman year, a badly managed research job in the Space Systems Lab and a SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) meeting, in which thirty people suggested the creation of nearly twenty committees, severely daunted my enthusiasm. I had to declare a major and, based on which freshman classes I enjoyed most, chose physics. The sophomore astronomy lab lead me to an undergraduate research job in astronomy which more or less sealed my fate. To practice astronomy one really must go to grad school. Thus I started down the academic path.
Due to the two-body problem (my husband is also an academic) and my own inherent laziness I did not stay on the typical academic track. After my first postdoctoral position, I was unable to find another anywhere close to where DH had his much more promising job. This coincided with the birth of our first child so a job related separation was no longer an option. For the next two years I did some consulting on my previous job, taught physics at a local college and spent a lot of time unemployed. I found it very refreshing to be able to concentrate on the day to day life in our family without any job anxiety.
However a week before my second child was born I got a call from someone in the physics department at the local university who was looking for someone with exactly my skills to work part time on a project of his. I am still working there four years later, albeit on a different project, and hope to continue indefinitely. This job is ideal for me because it is in my field but allows the flexibility that I need. Being an astronomy professor in a research university requires much more time and devotion than I would be willing to put in. Part time jobs in astronomy are not easy to come by. I was very lucky.
I often wonder how things might have happened differently. I am terribly glad I am not an actress. Even if I were successful I would not want to have to deal with all the body issues and appearance related nonsense that are unavoidable in the field.
I am glad I'm not an astronaut. Danger aside, I find I can't really support the manned space program in its current incarnation. There isn't any science in it.
That freshmen physics class that decided my major conflicted with an introductory computer science class I had thought of taking. Given that my job now primarily consists of scientific programming, might I have loved that class enough to major in computer science? It's possible. But given my interest in astronomy, I might still have ended up doing similar work to what I'm doing now.
I was on the short list for a full time postdoc near to where my husband worked when my first child was born. Had I gotten that job, I would have stayed on the academic track and would have been applying for faculty jobs by now. But the two-body issue would have remained a problem and I doubt my husband and I could have both found good jobs in the same place. And I'm very glad I didn't have to work full time right after my first was born. She would have gone into full time daycare at six weeks. I could have done it, but it would have been exhausting and stressful for all of us.
Looking back at it all, I am very happy with where I ended up.