Featured Astrobites

Our latest posts

Putting climate change on the syllabus

The history of the Earth and its climate are integral to our cosmic perspective, yet climate change is rarely taught in astronomy courses. Today’s bite discusses why and how it should be on the syllabus.

Beyond astro-ph

Astronomy beyond the research

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Navigating careers in astronomy

Career advice

Careers 101 Workshop

The Monday morning workshop “Careers 101” at the AAS Austin meeting provided a room full of graduate students with several important aspects to ponder when considering our potential career paths, as well as some action advice to follow to develop our careers in the direction that we choose. I blogged a summary of the workshop here, and promised to follow up with some more specific details. I invite comments on this post, if you have any suggestions or advice you would like to contribute related to astronomy career paths. The workshop was organized around a panel, introduced and moderated by Alaina Levine (founder of Quantum Success Solutions). Panelists: Dawn Gelino (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute) Adam Kraus (Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow) Edward Ajhar (NSF Program Officer) Anita Cochran (Assistant Director of McDonald Observatory) Joe Bernstein (Argonne National Lab) Advice (in no particular order): 1. Network. Establish your brand, realizing that at every stage of your career you can be the world’s expert on a niche subject at some level. Find confidence in this. 2. Make yourself stand out. If you are in a collaboration (especially if it is a large collaboration), take ownership of some aspect of the science. 3. Prove yourself by earning your own grants and fellowships. Writing proposals is good experience, even as a grad student or postdoc. 4. Think about what will make you happy. Is an R1 research career, tenure track, what you would enjoy doing? Ask others, do some soul searching. Keep in mind that only 1 in 4 of us will get a tenure track position. Whatever you decide, you CAN change your mind…

More posts by category