Kepler was about to launch.

A few weeks before, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory had gone into the drink, done in by a failed fairing on the same kind of launch vehicle that now held Kepler. We’d been told it would be fine, and we’d been cleared for launch, but I was still nervous. I wasn’t the only one– I remember Jonathan Fortney literally hopping up and down next to me in anticipation in those last few moments before the countdown. I had only joined the Kepler team a few months before, after finishing grad school and going to work with Gibor Basri at Berkeley. I was new enough that I’d missed the order for an official Kepler launch day hat, so Kepler’s wonderful Deputy PI Dave Koch gave me one of his.

A few minutes before the Kepler launch, May 6th, 2009.

My nervousness wasn’t helped by the fact that the day before, a number of us had gone on a tour of Kennedy Space Flight Center that featured a reel full of terrifying footage of early failed launches (I guess before you see the Saturn V control room, they want to impress the risks of exploring space upon you). Soren Meibom and I exchanged nauseated looks at we watched grainy footage of one rocket after the other exploding on the screens of the Saturn V anteroom, grumbling and reassuring one another that it would probably be fine.

The night of the Kepler launch, I stood out in the spectator area feeling like I could almost see the gears of my life turning. Six years before then, in 2002, I had been out in similar chill and dark at Kennedy, shivering in a previous emergency-purchase hoodie* to watch the launch of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. In that case, the launch was the culmination of a project for me– close to the last thing I would do before graduating from college and heading off to grad school. It was later that summer that I would meet Kepler’s PI Bill Borucki for the first time, at a meeting of the SPIE. I’d never been to a professional conference before, and so I stood anxiously next to my poster** half-hoping and half-terrified that someone would come talk to me. The person who came by to talk to me about my poster was Bill. Though I didn’t know who he was at the time, and certainly had no idea I’d ever be working with him, I clearly recall our interaction. I was left with an impression of bulldog tenacity, which I only later came to appreciate was the driving force behind the successful launch of Kepler.

It would be an understatement to say that a great deal of planning went into Kepler, in the sense that space missions are designed to finely-tuned specifics upon which their teams live and breathe. But I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that Kepler’s data took everyone’s breath away, even those who’d been living the mission details for years. When the first ten days of commissioning data came down, a small group of us sat in a conference room at NASA Ames to see the early returns. Someone put up a lightcurve from Kepler, an eclipsing binary***. Then came the question:

“I’m sorry– I missed it, what is that a model of?”

A pause.

“That’s the data.”

Though you might think that, after four years, we’d have become inured to the Kepler data and the constant onslaught of associated discoveries (“yeesh, another Earth-size planet in the habitable zone? Snoozers!”) the truth is, it really doesn’t get old. The incredible success of the mission is not just because of how much these data have told us, but because of how much more they have left to tell.

It remains to be seen whether Kepler will stage an incredible comeback– and though we’d all like to see that happen, the chances are very, very slim. Kepler resides in so-called “Earth-trailing” orbit, meaning that it orbits the Sun, tagging along after Earth while falling further and further behind. It’s far out of range for repair. If the reaction wheel revives, Kepler’s mission of searching for small exoplanets may continue– but without that wheel (and therefore the ability to point with precision), it’s unlikely to be possible. Kepler may go on to another life as a telescope with a different goal, but it won’t be the same.

However, I take heart in Kepler’s breath-taking data, in knowing that the richness of information that’s there has far more to teach us that what we’ve managed to learn thus far. I’m sad that Kepler’s main mission has likely ended, and I’m sad that there are things Kepler will not now be able to do– but as with so many things in science, every question that remains unanswered now is an opportunity for the future.

*As it happens, Florida is also cold in March.

** “Poster” = printed-out PowerPoint slides pinned to a piece of fabric. Yeah.

***two stars that orbit one another, where each star periodically passes in front of the other and blocks some of its light

Added bonus: after the advice parts are examples of titles and abstracts from influential (read: well-cited) work done at his institution, as examples of the importance of a clear title and abstract for drawing people to your results.

Here is the PDF of Oswald’s advice; his main website can be found here.

“Time… is on my side.” - Norman Meade

Today marks the beginning of another orbit around the Sun for me, so what better day to reflect on the passage of time? I think a lot about time management, as I’m sure many others do right around now– this being the time of year when everyone’s New Year’s resolutions are still have that champagne-bubble-sheen of possibility to them. A January’s worth of new goals quickly gives way to the terrible reality: given a finite number of hours in the day (and that pesky “sleep” thing I seem to require), there is actually no way to do all of the things I’d like to do in a lifetime, let alone a day.

Over at Mahalo.ne.Trash, John Johnson offers some thoughts and practical suggestions about work-life balance, and how to be happy under an ever-increasing deluge of things to do. For me, I find the challenge is not just that my responsibilities have increased with time, it’s also that I’m interested in a wide variety of things– so even in the absence of external pressures, I generate enough in the way of additional projects to fill a couple lifetimes. Since the biotech singularity isn’t here yet (and will probably not be covered by typical academic insurance plans anyway), it falls to each of us to decide how we want to spend our precious minutes. With so many wonderful and worthwhile things to do in a lifetime, how is anyone supposed to decide? What are the factors at play when we decide what our priorities are, and of those factors, how many are we even consciously aware of when we make decisions?

As a scientist, I love systematic, practical approaches. This past year, I enlisted the help of my coach* to identify a systematic way of making decisions about my priorities and what new things I want to take on. I ended up constructing the following list of questions, which serve as a kind of zeroth-order filter for new opportunities. Their main utility is in getting me to consciously articulate some of the major factors at play when I decide to take on a new responsibility. They may not be exactly what you’d choose for yourself, but I offer them here as a starting point– and I would love to hear what you’d put on your list in the comments!

1. What is the purpose of taking on this project?

Simple, yet deceptively so. Think about this question not in terms of the details of the work that is involved, but in terms of your motivation for doing that work. What are you hoping to gain/achieve/learn? If you completed this project with absolute success, what would that mean?

2. Do I already do something like this?

If you have limited time, you want whatever you do to have impact, and part of that is not spreading yourself too thin. Answering “yes” to this question isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker as far as taking on whatever the new project is, but you should be aware of whether taking on that project represents exponential or incremental gains.

3. What rewards does this project offer?

Once you’ve figured out the purpose of taking on a project, you should be able to identify what benefits that project has to offer. These can be tangible (e.g. taking on a paying graphic design project, or publishing an exciting new paper), or intangible (e.g. making new connections, or learning a new skill). The nature of the reward depends a lot on the nature of the project, but there should be a net gain from anything you take on.

4. How does this project contribute to who I want to be, or what I want to be known for?

Self-definition is a big part of your early career– you are not only crafting expertise by gaining knowledge, you are taking ownership over how people think of you and what you do. What I like about this question is that it conceals a larger question of your own personal metrics for a successful life. Sure, you want to be the person (or one of a few) that other people think of when they think of your field. However, that’s only one way of measuring success, and it only addresses your career. Do you also want to be known for your teaching? Your writing? Volunteering in your community? Being a great parent? Thinking about things in these terms can help you reflect on what’s important to you, and help direct your energy and time towards those things.

5. Do I have time, or am I willing to cut something else to do this? If I have to cut something, what am I willing to sacrifice? 

Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly making this decision. If you take on too many responsibilities, even if you love them all and they all fit your other criterion for being worthwhile, you are making an unconscious decision to sacrifice bits and pieces of other projects (not to mention other aspects of your life).   It’s a little like the truth about multitasking, which is that there is no such thing as multitasking. Although everybody loves the idea of multitasking, and many people think they are great at it, all the data support that the brain is actually serial tasking with an increasingly short duty cycle. So rather than unconsciously doing a worse job at many things, choose wisely by articulating the sacrifices you will have to make to do a good job on the things you’ve chosen to do.

6. How long is this going to take? Multiply that by 2… or even 3.

If you’ve ever written a grant proposal, you’ve probably had to state outright the percentage of time you plan to commit to a project. Usually, these percentages are some alchemical mixture of how many hours you will actually spend and what “looks reasonable” in the context of your expected contribution to that grant. So, while you’re considering question 5 (above), put a meaningful number on the commitment you’re making. It can also help to consider the duty cycle of the effort– are you going to need to work a little every day on this project, or will it require a few weeks of straight of intensive work? Will the effort ramp up or down with time, be sporadic, or consistent? The multiplicative factor is for you to decide– unless you are very good at planning for contingencies, almost all projects take longer than you intend. To figure out how good (or not!) you are at estimating your time input, try keeping track of your activities for a week. Pick a task, guess how long it will take you to accomplish it, and then see how long it actually takes you.

Final thoughts

I often think of a particularly funny turn of phrase I once came across in a student’s homework answers. It was an essay response that read roughly “On the one hand, [X]; but on the other hand, [Y]. On the third hand…”

You have only two hands. There are only 24 hours in a day. You need to sleep some of those hours. Plan accordingly.

While I certainly think the original email was problematic, with an eau d’ “we walked uphill both ways in the snow” about it, I also think there were seeds of good advice buried in it– both for students and those further along.

In the following, I’ve tried to cultivate those seeds into some advice for being an astronomer, largely based on my own philosophy of course. I’m sure not everyone will agree with these points, and it should be noted that as I don’t have a permanent job yet, I don’t know whether these are “successful” strategies in the long term. Perhaps one day we will share a laugh over this post, just before I ask you if you want fries with that.

If you are counting how many hours a week you are working, you probably don’t like your job very much. 

The thing you spend your life on shouldn’t feel like a transaction to you. I have no idea how many hours a week I worked in grad school, because I wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I could probably go back and estimate, but why? It varied week to week, just like the hours I work now. Some weeks are efficient and productive and require less time, and some are slow, arduous, and irritating. Just like now.

I know we’d all like to think that the only thing standing between us and awesomeness is a single number– a magical tipping point beyond which success is certain (I’m looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell). Unfortunately, that’s not true. You can spend a lot of time trying to do something better and only see incremental gains, even when other things come naturally and require little investment of time. That’s not to dismiss hard work, which I think often takes a back seat to the idea of “talent” in our common lore– talent is usually just hard work that went well. But ultimately, success is not a product that can be yours for a set purchase price.

The way you feel about your work is like the weather on a long hike– changing, fickle, with days you will always remember and days you will try to forget. The calculus of whether it’s worth it to go hiking at all is up to the individual.

Work-life balance will be an ongoing challenge throughout your life. 

Being an astronomer shares a good deal in common with being an artist. It is demanding, and on dark days there seems to be no return for your blood and sweat. Exceptional dedication is required, it’s true, but dedication is also not sufficient to ensure some sort of easily quantifiable success. We do what we do, at least in many cases, because our desire to know the natural world is a deep hunger, immensely rewarding when slaked, but never gone for long. If your work matters to you, it is easy to let it take over your life, because it will reach without bounds anywhere you let it. And you will let it, at least part of the time.

Your challenge is to figure out what your priorities are, and allot your time accordingly. Keep in mind that you only get to decide your priorities, and you have to acknowledge that these priorities may not be shared by everyone else. In practice, that means that some places you work will value your decisions, and others not.

You’re not looking for employment, you’re looking for a home.

Applying for faculty jobs is a little like trying to decide if you want to marry someone on the first date: you don’t know if it’s going to work out, and it’s weird and a bit scary to think about spending the rest of your life in one place (and that’s if you get past the fear of rejection!). But it’s not like you have a totally flat prior on what places will be a good fit for you. Before you apply for jobs, postdoc, faculty or otherwise, think about the kind of place you want to be. Acting like success only comes in one flavor is like assuming that everyone grows up to marry a hot model. Some hot models have difficult personalities.

We need to embrace a broader definition of success amongst our peers and our students. We are doing a better job of vocalizing “not everyone will become research faculty”, but it still sounds like a threat. Not everyone should be research faculty– first and foremost because it’s not right for everyone, and only secondly because there are a finite number of jobs. If you’ve thought about what your priorities are and what aspects of being an astronomer you like, it will be pretty clear whether or not those are compatible with a traditional tenure-track research job. If they are not, you have other options– everything from teaching, to working in a science museum, to being a data scientist, to being a quant at a financial firm. These are not consolation prizes, they are good careers.

That being said, telling early career astronomers that they will definitely be employed is a bit of a bait-and-switch. It does happen to be true that there are many things one can do with the degrees and skills we acquire as astronomers. If you are open to doing something a little different, and if you work to acquire translatable skills, you are likely to be employed. However, those statistics are cold comfort for people who are astronomers because they can’t imagine doing something else, for whom exceptional dedication has not resulted in the employment necessary to go on doing astronomy. If your work really matters to you, it can be heart-breaking to leave it behind. Like other heartbreaks, there is no easy solution beyond picking yourself up, figuring out what’s next, and moving on.

As scientists, we are good at figuring out practical solutions to abstract problems, working within the resources available, and thinking about how to apply the skills we have to what we want to solve. The abstract problem here is what you want to be when you grow up.

Curricula should reflect the practice of the field.

Reading papers, writing proposals/papers and giving talks should be integrated with class work. As astronomers, we spend a lot of time doing these things, but it’s rare we learn them in a classroom setting that is designed for feedback and improvement. I am grateful to University of Washington for providing these in spades– we wrote HST proposals, we wrote literature reviews, and we gave talks constantly. We did regular class work as well– problem sets and exams– but I think the practical assignments prepared me far better for what I do on a regular basis.

Specialize, but don’t leave your head in the sand.

As a grad student, your top priority has to be gaining the depth in your field that will allow you to write your thesis. You need to come out of grad school as an expert in something– ideally, something that you can be known for to potential collaborators or employers. Grad school is a time of great focus, so it’s understandable if you haven’t read everything you weren’t actually forced to by a class or having signed up for Journal Club.

Having said that, try to make some time in your life to learn about fields outside your own. One of the things I love about being part of LSST is that it has broadened my scientific horizons and allowed me to learn about a lot of different subfields. I have no desire to actually become an expert in many of these subfields, but I find that they are often sources of inspiration as I think about my own work. Eventually, you will be visiting departments where most people don’t work on what you work on, and you will enjoy it a lot more if you can talk to people about their work. If you don’t have time to read astro-ph, at least ask your friends what they are working on.

You cannot control how people interact with you, only how you interact with them.

Being a jerk and being smart do not share a causal relationship. It is fine to challenge a speaker with a question, but keep it respectful– learning stops as soon as arrogance steps in.

It’s also important to realize that we work in a field where various of our colleagues have difficulty picking up on social cues. Not everyone who seems like they are being a jerk is actually doing so on purpose.

Dealing with aggressive questioning can be very challenging for students, as the ability to weather the storm relies on having enough confidence in the material to not become rattled. This is difficult, because the nature of being a student is for that information to be still fresh and malleable in one’s mind. For mentors, the challenge is to have a supportive enough environment in general such that the occasional difficult Q&A doesn’t seem like a personal attack.

A simple step towards making these situations less charged is just to talk with students about strategies for dealing with questions, which will depend on the individual and their strengths. Although taking the learn-to-swim-via-a-swift-kick-into-the-deep-end approach seems it would teach students what to do in these situations, it doesn’t. It just models poor behavior that they then perpetrate on others.

Your health is the most important thing you have.

When I was 19, I had brain surgery. I was minding my own business being a college student, when a routine visit to the doctor resulted in finding out I had a pituitary tumor. I will spare you the details of how you actually get a thing removed from smack in the middle of your head, but suffice it to say that the experience hits the pause button on everything and provides some lasting perspective on the brevity of life.

All the things you have to do, your deadlines, your assignments, your code– all of it crumbles like ash in the face of losing your well being, whether it be physical or mental. We humans are fragile, with short lives that grow even shorter when we don’t care for ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, we are capable of overcoming great hardship, and we can withstand a lot– but no one ever overcame anything while simultaneously pretending it wasn’t there. Care for yourself, and exercise patience even as you test your limits. Above all, if you are in need of help, or even think you might be, reach out to someone.