A year...A Recap

It's surprising that in a whole year of grad school, I only managed to write 2 entries. Shame on me. But I guess I shouldn't force entries because then they'll just be boring.

Anyway, the summer after my first year of grad school is coming to a close and I realize how much I've grown in the past year. I'm writing a personal essay for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship and am to write about what personal and academic reasons have led me to pursue astronomy. I applied for this fellowship my senior year and remember not having any idea about why I liked astronomy and how to even begin writing this essay. This time around, this task is much easier due to a combination of my experience in grad school and this past summer, working in Berkeley and New Mexico.

When I entered grad school, just like every other astronomy student, I wanted to do extragalactic astronomy (studying galaxies outside of our own). I thought that this was a big decision, and that I was ahead of the game--I knew I didn't like planetary or stellar astronomy. Little did I know that...well...little did I know. Being thrown in an environment where I attended classes, talks, and read numerous papers on various subjects, I realized how much there was within not only astronomy, but within extragalactic astronomy. Saying that I wanted to study extragalactic astronomy all of a sudden became so vague. There were so many directions I could take to study other galaxies. It all has been so interesting to me that I've started worrying that my thesis topic is to be decided by next year. My dad says that "this is a nice problem to have" in that many people can't find anything interesting and I'm finding too many things interesting. I agree. It also gives me hope that whatever decision I do make, will not be a wrong one.

If anyone has ever talked to me, they know that I have this irrational fondness (for lack of better words) for my first boss from Berkeley -- David Schlegel. So, when he asked me if I wanted to work for him this summer, I, of course, said yes. I had no idea what I'd be working on but it didn't matter because I knew it would be a great experience and David was the type of boss to expect a lot out of you but also make you feel great about your small accomplishments. Without too much gory detail, I've been working on getting a telescope up and running. Because of the time constrains, I've been forced to work in a lot of different fields, learning so much on the way. But if there's something I can take back from this summer other than science, it's a new level of confidence. I started the summer begging David not to force me to send one of my figures to the mailing list because I was scared I would sound dumb or that my figure would be wrong somehow. 2 months later, I'm not only sending emails out to the mailing list without thinking twice, but I'm delegating work to other people! Fine, probably most of you who are reading this are like, 'um, that's what it is to have a job', but I've always been really intimidated by astronomers. But I guess telling a badass astronomer that he looks like Austin Powers and getting him to say "Yeah baby, yeah" may have changed my perspective :-).