 Three years has gone by so fast. It has been a big week. On Wednesday I had my very last day as a postdoc at Western Washington University. I started to shoot a video and then my day just got completely consumed by meeting with people, having lunch with people, meeting with my students. I gave a practice talk for this upcoming conference I'm going to. The day just got completely packed. So on Sunday I'm getting on a plane and I'm heading to Cool Stars 20. I'm planning to bring the camera, shoot some videos. I'm even planning to livestream one of the sessions that I'm helping to organize. I'm not speaking in it, but there should be a ton of great talks. I'm also giving one of the first talks in the conference. I think I'm the fourth talk on Monday. And I'm hoping to get my camera set up and videotape that and hopefully get that cut and put up online. So I'm really excited to post that talk and share with you, Tube, some of the signs I've been working on. A fun fact, Cool Stars was the very first conference that I went to as an astronomer. This was Cool Stars 14. Now this meeting happens every other year. So this is Cool Stars 20. So that was six Cool Stars ago. So that was 12 years ago. A habit I got into, especially in graduate school, was keeping the name tag to every conference or workshop that I went to. Just as like a cool souvenir. So these are all the name tags. Some badges are big. Some of them come with lanyards. This is almost all of them. I've started a new pile. This is all of them up until last year. Cool Stars 14. This is my very first conference, November 6th through 11th, 2000 November. That's weird. Usually it's in the summer. This has become sort of like my point of pride. Like I've been to a ton of meetings. This also represents an incredible amount of privilege and luck and generosity. As I've been ending my NSF fellowship as a postdoc and getting ready to transition into a new job at the University of Washington, I've been reflecting a lot about how lucky I've been. Oh, coffee's so good. I've made a lot of videos for this channel about me traveling because I imagined that that's one of the more interesting things that I do that makes for more compelling videos or TV. Of course, the truth is I don't spend the majority of my time on the road or in airports. I work at an office, which you've seen in these videos. When you have kids, when you've got a partner, when you've got a dog who needs to be fed, you know, it's hard to go out of town. I'm in my 30s now and I spent all my 20s in grad school getting to travel the world, getting to travel the U.S., getting to see cool places, getting to go to just like a ton of conferences and workshops and meeting people and networking. This is one of the best things that I've been able to do as a scientist. But it's expensive. There's 20 or 30 of those badges there that each represent a plane ticket, two to five nights in a hotel, all the costs associated with travel, right? One thing you hear about academics a lot is reimbursement. A lot of times you travel, put it on your credit card or if you don't have a good credit card, just out of your bank account. And then you wait six weeks, two months to get reimbursed. That's not easy for a grad student who's making basically minimum wage. So as I'm getting ready to transition into a new job, I've been reflecting on my favorite and least favorite parts of this career. I thought I'd share with you my top five favorite and least favorite things about astronomy. Let's start with the bad things about academia. Number five, the pay. Truth is in grad school, you're making way less money than you would have made if you just left college and went and got a real job. And after grad school, you're making two to three times less as an academic than you would in like a tech industry job. Number four related to number five is funding. In astronomy in the U.S., funding is not guaranteed and research funding, grant funding from the federal government can be really hard to get. Most major grants from the NSF or NASA have an acceptance rate of something like between one in nine and one in 11. That's really competitive. So if your grant only pays you for a couple of years and it had a one in ten chance of getting selected, you have to write a lot of grants. All right. Number three, work-life balance. Now the last video I put up was kind of about work-life balance. At least I talked about it. Flexible time schedules. This means that a lot of people emotionally and literally take their work home with them. And the expectation in a lot of places is that you're working on weekends, working in evenings. Now, as I said in my last video, I've gotten away from that and I really strongly desperately encourage people to not let work come home with them like that. Sure. Put in some extra hours when it's crunch time. Sure. If you have an observing night and you're lucky enough to remotely observe like I remotely observed and put in one of my videos a couple months ago. Astronomy as a culture we really need to get better at helping people set boundaries. All right. Number two in the worst parts about astronomy is job security. This is related to funding, but it's also related to just the transient nature of jobs. My postdoc was very good. It was a three-year gig. This next job I have, right now I've got funding for about four years. That's super duper good. A lot of my friends move around the US, around the world, and their jobs only last a year or two. It's incredibly uncommon to find an unemployed astronomer, but it's very common to find an underemployed astronomer. All right. And the number one worst thing about astronomy is it's not specifically an astronomy problem. It's more of an academia problem, but astronomy certainly has been struggling with this. And that's the culture. We have lingering problems with racism, sexism, ableism, overworking, abusive advisors, universe, I mean like the list goes on. It's not specific to astronomy, but in the last few years we've had a bunch of high-profile, news-worthy cases of sexual harassment, bullying, bias, you name it. These are problems we have got to solve. Slightly less immediate, but still important, is we need to work on our culture of overworking people, of this ever-rising bar of expectations about how many papers you write and what's important, and these are cultural problems we have to address too. And it's something that I hope I am part of the change. Okay. Number five best things about being an astronomer. Number five, maybe the most obvious, is learning, discovery. My job is to discover cool things about the universe. I have made discoveries. I have published results. That's really cool. Forget what you may have heard. Science is actually really, really cool. All right. My number four top best thing about being an astronomer is the travel. That giant array of name tags I have is a set of mementos that I hold really dear. It represents so many trips and places and experiences that I've had. All right. The number three best thing about being an astronomer, in my opinion, is the flexible schedule. Yes, this tends to overwork people and cause them to have bad work-life balance, but it does mean that I can kind of work when and where I want. My days are my own. Yesterday, I spent the whole day just networking and talking to people. I didn't make a single graph yesterday, and it was really rewarding. All right. Number two, and my favorite things about being an astronomer is the subject matter. I think astronomy is the most romantic of the sciences. It belongs to everyone. All you have to do to appreciate astronomy is just be alive. The sun brings warmth. It drives weather. The tilt of the earth drives the seasons. The moon comes around, and you can see it rise. With all of your senses, on some level, astronomy plays a part. If you're lucky enough to be able to go outside and see the stars, you don't need any equipment to appreciate and to wonder about why is the night sky dark? Why can't we see every single star in the sky? That's a fun paradox that we'll talk about at some other time. The wonder and the mystery of the cosmos belongs to anybody who's gone out and crammed their neck upwards or who has appreciated a sunny day. And the number one best thing about being an astronomer is the people. I have students who inspire me, who are excited and who work hard. I've made lifelong friends with people, people who move far away. Next week at this conference, I get to see friends who I haven't seen in a couple of years, who have moved to Europe or moved across the world. This has become my community. I am surrounded every day by people who are hardworking, earnest, excited, brilliant. This year, I've had my first student who I've taken from a sophomore in college and who is now going off to grad school. Riley, I'm so proud of you, man. Those kinds of people successes, that's the best thing about this job. So there you go. My top five best and worst things about astronomy. Stay tuned to this channel next week. We'll be in Boston at the Coolest Stars 20 meeting. See you there.