 Okay, cool. Okay. Now it's live, so let's give it 20 seconds. Okay, welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today on today's webinar. My name is Alejandro and I'm going to be your host. Today we're presenting Choose Your Own Adventure, the Love and Value Rented Framework for Your Career by Lucianne Volkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. Lucianne holds a bachelor in physics and astronomy from Johns Hopkins University and a master's and PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington. Then Lucianne did a couple of postdocs at UC Berkeley and Princeton prior to joining the Adler Planetarium. Dr. Volkowicz is the founding director of the LSSTC, Data Science Fellowship Program, an initiative to provide astronomy, graduate students with training in advanced computing. Lucianne studies the ethics of Mars exploration, stellar magnetic activity, how it starts to influence our planet sustainability, as a host for alien life, and how to use advanced computing to discover unusual events in large astronomical data sets. Please remember that you can ask questions over email through our YouTube channel and Twitter and the questions will be read at the end of the talk. Now, without further ado, we will turn time to over to Lucianne. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me and good morning everyone or good afternoon depending on where you are. Let me get my screen shared here. All right. All right, everyone seeing my slides. Yes. Okay, wonderful. Let me for some reason, there we go. Great. So it's my pleasure to talk to you today. This talk was originally developed back for the NSF astronomy and astrophysics postdoc seminar and has since been turned into an essay. So if you don't feel like taking notes today, there is an essay that essentially recaps a lot of this that's available in the archive that you can look up. But I'm going to talk to you everything today. I, and generally speaking, I, the way I like to introduce this talk is to say that it is really a talk about fulfillment. So what is fulfillment? Well, I like talking about fulfillment rather than, for example, the word success, because to me, success sort of applies fixed destination. It's something that has already happened that you can measure and, you know, by some metric and decide that it's a success. I would say that careers are not very well described by the word success or failure. You know, I think we all experienced both of those things. But a far more relevant thing to me is whether a career is fulfilling. And the argument that I will make in the course of this talk is that essentially fulfillment in your work comes from when you are able to align your career path and the things that you do on a daily basis. With your value system and a cause of a great deal of happiness is often when the way that you are valued doesn't align well with the values that you bring. So you create something, whether you know it's a work of research or work of art, no matter what your work is. And you feel like you've created something of value. If people are evaluating you in ways that aren't captured by the same way that you evaluate yourself, it leads to a mismatch in a lack of fulfillment. You know, having said that, and this was noted on the previous slide, a lot of this talk is about the things that you personally can control. I fully acknowledge that, you know, no one's life is fully within their control. And so, you know, this is about not, you know, a surefire path to fulfillment, but about affecting the parts of your career that you are able to actually influence. So we're going to talk first about sort of background and a little bit about developing that framework. And then I'm going to move on to practical strategies in the second part of the talk. So the background for this is colloquium that I attended when I was a postdoc. I was in my first postdoc, it was around 2011 or so. And the colloquium in question was Matthew Bales, who's pictured here. Matthew is an astronomer, radio astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. And he got up and he, you know, was about to give this, you know, UC Berkeley colloquium, very fancy talk, right. And he said that he'd had a great time in our department, and that we all seem very smart. And then he basically like talked about how all of us graduate students in postdocs were mostly not going to be an astronomy for the duration of our careers. And he kind of gave us this very real rundown of the numbers. And, you know, he's, he did it in, in good humor, he has a very good sense of humor so it was like not news that you ever want to hear, but at least it was delivered with kindness. But then he did something that I've never seen anyone do in a colloquium, which was to talk about what happened when his career wasn't going the way he planned. And for me, at that time in my early career, I was this was very affecting because you rarely ever hear about people talking about things not going according to plan and how they recovered or even they struggled right. You would think that most people who give colloquia sort of walk into that colloquium having like sprung fully grown into like a magnificent researcher from the age of two. And then they and the next day they give UC Berkeley colloquium or wherever. So this was very affecting to me because of the vulnerability it displayed, and also the sort of creativity that he displayed in crafting what was going to be his career which is very successful now. And I would say for Matthew probably very fulfilling. I will also say that this talk owes debt to this woman at lower left gen sellers. So right after I saw Matthew's colloquium I applied for and received a Ted fellowship. And one of the primary benefits of that is that you are teamed up with a coach who is sort of like, you know, a therapist for your career, and helps, or at least in my case has helped me talk through a lot of the things that I was going through as an early career researcher and so in many ways this talk owes a debt to Jen's work and the things that I learned from her. So I'm going to talk a little bit about starting points, because I think it's very helpful to have an idea of where a speaker is coming from. You know, I will say in the context of this particular seminar that I am speaking as an American. You know, I'm born and raised in the United States and I work in the United States. And so, as a US person, my viewpoint is very much informed by that. I'm also coming from a place of what I call so far so good, meaning that the things that I am going to describe have worked really well for me. It doesn't mean that they will work, you know, fantastically for you and I am not like a self help guru, just telling you what's worked for me. And also they've worked so far. So, you know, the, the thing that will, I'll touch on a little bit later in the talk is that, you know, circumstances change your goals change over the course of your career and that's totally natural and fine. And so what I hope that this framework will give you to take away is sort of a way of thinking about what you're doing so that you can be flexible and adapt when maybe you've discovered something isn't working so well. And also be remiss to not acknowledge that I'm speaking from a position of privilege in that I have a job in astronomy, I have a job that pays me to do astronomy. And so in some, in some ways, you know, the early part of your career can sort of feel like a very long tunnel that you're passing through. And I am speaking from beyond the light at the end of that tunnel. I think, you know, the, the benefit of that at least is having a bit of hindsight on what worked well for me and I'm also in somewhat of a non traditional astronomy career in that the other planetarium is a museum so we don't have like a 10 year system or anything like that. And it's fairly unusual to have the balance of like research and public communication that I do. So take that as you go. I'll give you a little bit of personal background that also informs this and I know this is a lot of background but I think it's actually really necessary for understanding the viewpoint of the talk. This is a picture of my father Teddy walk which, and you know up until a couple of years ago, I really did not understand how much my father and specifically my father passing away had influenced my philosophy towards the things that I do and don't do with my career and with my life. So, when I was very young, about four and a half, my father went to work. And while he was at work. He suffered neortic aneurysm and died. So really the the last thing I remember is seeing my my father go off to work. And this is always impressed upon me that your work work should be fulfilling, it should be something that you enjoy and that is is adding value to your life, because it literally might be what you're doing on the last day of your life. You know very few of us get to choose like where we are our days. And you know knowing astronomers and physicists, we very well might be at work. So you better like it. I will also say that a caveat to all of this sort of career oriented vice that I'm going to give you is that your health is very important. You know, one of the things you should value is maintaining your health. So this is an MRI of my brain and my second year of undergraduate. While I was an undergraduate I discovered I had a brain tumor, and I had to leave school and have surgery. It took me a year longer to graduate I actually had a very easy time about as easy a time as you can have, having a brain tumor. But this left me with the lesson and I will impart to you which is that circumstances can change very fast. And that your your health is absolutely the most important thing that you have. And that no amount of work no amount of you know whether your work is fulfilling or not. You can't do any of it if you don't have your health so always think about that first and foremost. All right, all of that preamble aside. Let's talk about how to actually figure out where your values are to use them to make your choices. So a little bit of caveats so and this is I've used astronomy here but I think some people might be coming from more the physics side. So and you know who knows who's viewing this on YouTube so I will say that I'm using astronomy for whatever field you're in. And the framework that I'm going to provide for you I making your decisions this way might not result in a career in that that field astronomy or otherwise. What you also might discover if you dig into what your values are is that aligning your career path in your values may also not be compatible with a career in your chosen field. You in being honest with yourself it is also possible to discover that your values do not align with what you thought you wanted to do. And that's okay. Again, once you know what your values are you can be flexible about how you actually implement them. And I will also point out that even if they do result in a career in astronomy. It may not bring the fulfillment that you hope fulfillment is not something that is guaranteed it is only something that you can make some choices towards that will hopefully bring you into an alignment that will be more conducive to actually feeling fulfilled. One of the things that I think is important to take time away you know like I think we all have such busy lives and always like an overly full plate of like research and other activities. But I really encourage you to make time to think about this in that there are very few formal opportunities to think about what your path is at a kind of high level. You know, many of us, myself included for sure, spend most of our time sort of barreling through what, you know, whatever our to do list looks like right. And that can be sort of a long term to do list of like well I'm going to college and now I graduated from college and I'm going to graduate school and now I've got to go on to a postdoc. I think it's worth taking some time to think about your path at this sort of very like high level, because you won't find that there are many opportunities in which that sort of naturally comes to pass. So make time for it. I will also say that some of the activities as we like move on into the talk and think about how you evaluate your success. The reality is also that some activities are more valued in the sort of culture of physics and astronomy than others. I don't think anyone like myself, perhaps who I house a very big interest in science communication and outreach, often discover that, you know, things like publication are more valued in terms of getting your next job then sometimes your outreach is which can be very frustrating. And we'll talk a little bit about how to sort of fold in these things that are maybe not externally valued but internally value to you. And the last sort of thing to remember is also that. And this is a corollary and corollary really to the previous comment about some things being more valued is that you really can't prevent other people from measuring you according to their values, it like, not just an astronomy and physics in life, like you might, but the thing that you have control over is making sure that the activities that you do are aligned with your own. And again, work might be doing what you're doing on the last day of your life. So this is, I think, pretty important. All right, I'm going to move on to some practical strategies. The very first thing that you really need to do is to think about what your values are. This sounds pretty straightforward, right. And I think that many of us have sort of like a vague idea of like what our values are, but it's, it's very difficult sometimes to sit down and actually articulate them. I think when we think about values, sometimes what we do is roll off like a list of, you know, like adjectives or nouns, you know, just a list of words. So it's like, Oh, well, you know, one of my values is like collaboration. This is very vague. I mean, it's good to have that like, you know, toolkit of words to describe the things that you like, but it's very vague and it's not a great way of talking about this talk. I was also in residence. Sorry, Luciana, like, we miss one part. Okay, 20 seconds. Can you, can you go back? Yeah, sure. Which part do you miss? What slide was I on? Yeah, like starting this one, I think. This one? Okay. Yes. Okay. Sorry about that. No problem. Yeah, this is a pretty important one. So I'll definitely repeat it. So your zero with order step down this path is going to be to create a mission statement. And it might sound sort of strange to have a mission statement for you personally, usually when we encounter mission statements, they are something that just that is describing what an institution does. So I'll give you two examples. At the, the time when I first wrote the essay, this, this talk is based on in this talk. I was in residence at the Library of Congress. And usually I'm working at the other planetarium. So I'll give you two examples. So the mission of the other planetarium is to inspire exploration and understanding of our universe. So I'll give you a short suite to the point. The Library of Congress's mission is to support Congress and fulfilling its constitutional duties, and to further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people. A little bit longer, but still to the point and quite specific, right. So what you're going to do is to first write a mission statement for yourself. It's very daunting. You know, I would suggest that you do not just substitute your name into like the adlers. The adlers, you know, my, my goal is to inspire people into scientific thinking and do research right. I think that's not quite specific enough. And so I would like to encourage you to engage in some questions for reflection. I would say that one of the most thing, the most useful questions to think about when you're sort of trying to get into the details of what you would like to be when you grow up academically or however else is to think about who you admire and why you admire them. Now, this isn't to say that, you know, there has to be like a perfect astronomer that you want to be exactly like. You're going to have to be a perfect person, right. So, for example, you could pick out someone in astronomy who writes papers that are really readable to people outside of their field. You could pick a, you know, a dancer or an activist who does like some sort of work in your community that you really enjoy. It's not to be something that is in the sciences, but what I want you to think about is really why you admire that person. Is it that they are doing a good job of spreading what they do to others? Is it that they are building tools that are useful to others? Is it that they, you know, like have the most publications? Is it that, you know, they are good at speaking whatever it happens to be. I want you to really think about the things that you like about them because I think when we admire people a lot of times it's not that we think that they're perfect people or anything like that or that we admire any, every aspect of what they do. It's usually giving us some insight into something that we would like to emulate ourselves. And so that's what I want you to think about first. I would also like you to think about what you feel your purpose is. You know, like what are you doing here on this earth? And that's really what this exercise also kind of gets into. But another way of thinking about this is what's important to you. So is it just making scientific discoveries? Is it also having the ability to have time to like go outside and hike? That could be something. You know, really what is important to you and how does that manifest? Like what does your life look like if that is included in it? I will say that another thing to think about is what you're good at. And this is something that we are definitely not asked to think about very often in academia. We spend a lot of time sort of striving to be better at a lot of things. But we don't often sit down and really think about like what our skills are. You know, maybe you do a lot of like teaching your friends, skills that you're using in your own personal like analysis. You know, maybe you're really great at teaching peers, maybe you're great at teaching a class, maybe you're really good at writing, maybe you have a really good visual sense. These are all things that could be in astronomy or physics. It could be in your work, and it could be just in general. And the reason that I ask you to think about this is not because you should limit, you know, what you do, but because it will inform your path. So, you know, if you decide that like your mission is to become the world's greatest modern dancer, and you currently have never studied dance and, you know, I have lots of years of study and something else, then your career path will change a lot, right? If that's what your mission is. And I think that's probably not the case for many people on the call. But having said that, you know, what you're good at and what you might like to be better at also inform what your mission should be. And the last of these questions is sort of like, you know, I feel like I start this talk always with like a lot of conversation about like death and illness. And so this is a little bit of a morbid question, but also what do you want to be known for? And this, you know, this could be like in the future, but it also could be like what, if you could imagine your friends and colleagues and family talking about you while you are not there and can't hear them. What do you hope that they're saying about you? So this kind of gets in again to the things that you value and the things that you are hoping to emulate. So just to recap, this is who do you admire and why? What do you feel is your purpose and what's important to you? What are you good at? And what do you want to be known for? So kind of sit down and reflect on those. And really what you want to do is write something that is about one to three sentences. So, like I said up here, it's a mission statement, not a mission book. You have lots of times to be wordy, but I think really holding yourself to sort of an economy of words to be very thrifty with how many words you spend on your mission statement can be helpful. And I would also encourage you to get a friend to read it. So maybe if you're watching this with someone else in your department or, you know, I don't know, you can probably connect via comments below, but maybe find somebody who will read your mission statement. And then I give you some feedback on it because if you can't explain something, you don't really understand it. So this is sort of a last statement about this mission, mission statement crafting exercise. Remember that a mission statement can be something that describes where you are at now, and that, you know, the mission statement can change too. So your, your personal mission in your career might change. And the reason that there's this, this lighthouse here is that what you really want your mission statement to do is to be that lighthouse right it's sort of that like guiding light that gives you a sense of direction. What you do not want is for your mission statement to become some sort of anchor that ties you into something that isn't serving you anymore. So think about your mission statement not as something that you're committing to for the rest of your life, but that describes where you are now. And it's really, really good to go back and look at it every once in a while. Just to make sure that you're still kind of in sync with what you had originally identified and then if you're not, that's okay. I want to dig into like why that might be, and whether something whether you're off course or whether something about the mission is no longer working for you. So I want to talk a little bit also about making conscious choices. So, when I was first on the job market. I really like I think that sometimes when we look at sort of our job prospects as astronomers and a junior astronomers in particular. Panic inducing to say the least. You know, we, we sort of know the statistics about jobs and it can be very tempting to like apply for everything and that is like very much what I did when I was first on the job market for I think the first couple of rounds I just applied to anything and everything that I thought was even possibly a good fit. So, as you to not do this, you, you will need to choose consciously where you are going to apply in part because it generates a tremendous amount of work for you and for everybody else who's evolved in the job search to just scatter shots and your application everywhere. I don't apply to everything, but I'm going to give you some tips for choosing where to apply, because the idea right is that planting seeds is good. It's, it's not necessarily that it's not good to like throw your hat in the ring for things and I think, particularly I encounter a lot of students who count themselves out before they actually apply for things. So, you know that this is not to say that you should count yourself out, but you want to make sure that the things that you go after are focused, right. You don't need to go into a bunch of unfocused pursuit you have a ton of other stuff to do, I am sure. So remember to kind of strike that balance between planting seeds and just going overboard with the applications. So, my, my questions for you to reflect on here in terms of making these conscious choices is, and this, I'll point out is can be for this can be for job applications or it can be for any opportunity that comes along right it could be that let's say you have a very busy summer how to view, and the opportunity that he has asked you to come and give a talk and you are not, it'll require some reorganization of your time or be a burden in some way. You're not really sure if you want to go do it. So, rather than reflexively saying, yes, so being totally on the side of like more irons in the fire more planting of seeds. Sit down and take a moment to think how well does this opportunity fit with my mission and my values. And then, by this time you have your mission statement right so you can kind of compare those two things. I will also say that the other thing to think about is what is new and different about this opportunity. So, for example, if you are being asked to give a lot of talks, which you know you might be in the in the course of your career. Then the question might become, well, you know, does this duplicate something that I'm already doing. You know, am I giving the same talk to kind of the same mix of people that I did at that last conference or is this workshop reaching a different audience. Does this give me a chance to talk about new research. Does this opportunity give me a chance to meet people that I wouldn't have met otherwise. So, thinking very specifically about like why you might want to pursue an opportunity. I think can be very helpful. I would also say that anytime you take on something additional, you should sit down and think about what the demand is going to be on your time. And this will be very much of an iterative process if you are anything like me or more many of the people that I have spoken to, and that all of us because we're not usually asked to think about quantitatively how much time something is going to take. We tend to underestimate how long it's going to take. And in my case, if I make an estimate of the time demand, I usually have to multiply it by two to three. I will, I will say I am only slightly better at this than I used to be. And it's something that you very much learn to learn from your own experiences right so if you are actually making estimates of how long something is going to take you can then compare with how long it actually took. And it turns you about your sense of time, and how much of a time commitment something really will be for you in the future something similar comes up like writing a new talk, going on a trip, going to a conference, etc, taking a new project on a new collaboration, whatever it happens to be. And the last one I think is the, the most difficult one, in that I having made that time estimate. There is only so much time in the world. Unfortunately, you know we only have so many hours in a day only so many days in a week. And so sometimes it's helpful to think about what you would be willing to give up for the opportunity. So if something is going to make an extra 10% demand on your time, it has to come from somewhere. And that could be, you know, it could be your sleep. It could be your exercise, it could be your time with your family, it could be another project. Without thinking about where that time is going to come from in my experience and what I have observed at others. It usually comes from somewhere that you didn't plan. And that's where your health suffers your relationships might suffer your other collaborations might suffer. And so it's really, really helpful thinking about if there's a trade off that you're going to have to make to take on that new opportunity. So just to recap, how well does this opportunity fit with my mission and values, what's new and different about it, what's the time demand and maybe multiply by two to three. So I'm very willing to give up. So I'm going to give you a couple of really brief personal examples of how those questions informed some choices that I made. And then I think we'll have some time for this. I'll still be speaking for a little while but we'll have some time for questions towards the end to. So, two examples of what jobs do I apply for. The first of these is that, you know, I spoke about like being first on the job market and just applying for everything. I much later in the various amounts of job cycles that I went through. I was informed, I think, also by the fact that in my last postdoc before I got my job at the Adler, I applied in my second of three years so I had an opportunity on the job market where I was I didn't feel completely desperate and under the gun to try and get something right. So, rather than just applying, you know, willy-nilly for everything. What I did was I wrote a short explanation for every job that looked interesting to me of why I was a good fit for the job and also why the job was a good fit for me. And, you know, in my experience, in prior years, I probably could have done that with other opportunities that I applied for, but I probably would have taken me some sort of mental gymnastics or a lot of thought. If you are a good fit for the job, you should be able to write it down. You know, like why the job is a good fit for you and why you're a good fit for the job in pretty short order, like after reading the job description and maybe doing a little research on what the if you're not familiar with the institution, it helps to go look and see what their their department is like, but you should be able to write down what the fit is. And if you can't do that, it might be worth passing on applying for that job. That is your evaluation to make, but I would argue that your energies are much better spent focusing your applications on jobs that you think you're a good fit for and that you really have a fighting chance for. And that at some point, you know, I am sure everybody watching is, well, I hope everybody watching is doing great, and that you will have the opportunity to evaluate a job offer in the future I'm sure that you will. So, let's say that everything goes great, and that you, you then have an offer and you would like to evaluate it. So I was on the job market the last time, the time that I selected to work on the Adler, I had used this, this framework of writing down kind of why I was a good fit for these various places that I applied. And I, what I realized in the process was that I'd actually probably be happy at a variety of different institutions. That's not the case for everybody right some people really want to be at like a research university, very focused on like graduate education right. I would be at primarily undergraduate focused or undergraduate only institutions. And when I was on the market, I applied for kind of a sampler of all of those things, and ended up interviewing for, for several different ones. And ultimately, the offers that I got were from the two most different institutions that I applied to one which was a very traditional physics and astronomy department and a research university. The Adler planetarium. So very opposite ends of the spectrum. And it can be very difficult right to compare things that are super different. And so I sort of sat down and thought about, you know, like what do these jobs offer me. So, at the research university, I feel like in in astronomy this is particularly true in the US, but I don't know that it is true in other countries but I have the research university tenure track position as a as a professor is considered like the pinnacle of existence like where it's what we're supposed to all want. At the time when I visited the department. I asked them, you know, like how do you evaluate like what does success look like for an assistant professor. What do you need to do in this department and the chair and this is actually a quote said, do a lot of research public a lot of papers, don't mess up teaching and you can do outreach when you have tenure. And I was like, that was very honest. Remember that like tenure in most places is like a six year plus long process. For me, I heard that and I was like, well, you know, a lot of what I do is public communication and outreach, and that that would be a significant downside to me to, you know, like, have this job that's the supposedly the pinnacle of existence but for six years in the beginning of it. None of the things that I really enjoy doing on a daily basis will be valued, except for writing papers, right. And that was not super appealing to me. And, you know, like again, my, my entire worldview is formed by what happens if I like drop dead tomorrow. So like what happens if I, you know, don't do any kind of public communication for five years and then, you know, because I'm working towards tenure and then I get hit by a bus, then I will have spent the last five years of my life, not doing something that is really important to me. So that was one, one aspect of it. And the other on the other hand, gave me the opportunity to do lots of public communication. Because it's not a research university, it's what I like to call a normal people job where where you just like have a job and you know like if you're doing well you don't get fired. So but you know a lot of people tenure was very important to them. I do not happen to be one of them. It also comes with lower pay it's a nonprofit educational institution a museum and so they don't have like the endowment that something like a research university has. It also doesn't come with things like graduate students or undergraduate students so you know when you become a faculty member some of your output is actually because you are coaching students and mentoring students through their research. And it has turned out in the past couple of years that I do actually work with students from time to time, but it's not a guaranteed part of my work and so I would be passing up essentially the sort of culture that I grew up in academically speaking of having like a research group with a PI and a bunch of students, which I enjoyed but I decided was essentially not. Not something that was going to be a barrier to me taking this job. And, you know, ultimately, so these two pictures on the right under the Adler are pictures of an event that I created there called galaxy ride where we like took all of these science demonstrations like out into rural areas in the state of Illinois. And it's an example of the kind of program that like really speaks to my heart and as you know something that I really enjoy creating like look at all those faces. You know, it is not something that I feel great about. Like I don't get the same feeling from like just writing research papers, although I do write research papers as well. It's just not something that is aligned with my values in the way that creating an event like this is which meant that the Adler was a place that I was more likely to experience actual fulfillment. So, in these last couple of minutes, I want to make sure and leave time for questions. I'll give you some example of evaluation metrics. So, you know, in the abstract for this talk. I talked a lot about how I, you know, papers are something that are is so so emphasized that your publication rate is about your publication rate is kind of like the coin of the land when it comes to academic jobs that this is not to discount that that is a reality of our field. I will point out that there are other ways to evaluate yourself. So like I said at the beginning of this talk you can't prevent people from evaluating you with their own metrics. And it is important to be aware of those things. But ultimately you have to be evaluating yourself as well. And I will point out that, you know, the fact that research papers are so valued that your publication rate and your age index or whatever is so valued is something that is like culturally imposed by the value system that we astronomers as a whole have kind of agreed on. And the fact that that that is the case, you know, it doesn't it's not like a rule that came from anywhere else. But the fact that that's the case means that you also have the ability to influence that right cultures can change. And so, you know, if you if you don't feel that like publications are are exactly the thing that should only be used to evaluate how well people are doing. So you also have the ability as a person who is in the field to push back on that as well. But really the heart of this, rather than any kind of cultural change, right, is to say that you're making these decisions right hopefully they are in line with your values but how do you know if you're doing well and what you're doing. So, you know, when we think about like metrics, you can think about like your metrics in terms of your progress as being the outward evidence of your value system so if you get rid of any of the like traditional metrics like publication rate, it just help is helpful sometimes to have ideas about what your personal metrics for whether you are doing well is in addition to those. So for example, and these are some of the things that I work with. So referrals of people in need. I get sent a lot of students who are, you know, maybe struggling with issues in their in their work. I view the fact that I get referred these students as an expression of trust and respect by the rest of the community, usually their advisors or peers that send them to me. I also do a lot of student mentoring. I'll say for spaces and created for enfranchisement. What I mean by that is spaces in which a wider range of humanity can participate in whatever it is usually in my case science. The output of science research right so one aspect of that is creating more opportunities for inclusion within the sciences itself and then also making sure that the work that we're doing is actually getting out into the public that can appreciate what we're doing even if they're not scientists themselves. One of the more straightforward metrics is also just audience numbers, you know, like, if I give a public talk how many people are there. How many people am I able to reach, whether it's like social media or in person or through an event that I like co organized the other, the number of people that I'm actually getting out to, I think is a pretty straightforward metric. And some of these like squishy things of like, you know, like, well how many people I'm reaching. You know, or how was my message getting out a sort of a squishy way to say something like that, but things like audience numbers, you can ask yourself some, some, you know, very quantitative questions of like, how many talks like how often to who. And that can help you narrow down what those metrics are and how you think you're actually performing in accordance with your own values and your mission. So just a few takeaways here. And these are the sort of final caveats is that playing by somebody else's rules. So being the most like publication productive astronomer in the entire world will not necessarily result in you getting a job. That can be very daunting but it also means that you may as well play by your own because then you are hopefully closer to being fulfilled throughout your process and not focus solely on whether you've gotten like a permanent job and astronomy or not. And also is very helpful as you're doing these, these reflections to know your relationship to risk. So, you know, one of the things that informed my final more my last job decision was that I didn't feel like I wanted tenure. But that's not a great choice for everybody some people really do want that job security, both of those choices are totally valid and totally fine. But it really helps to dig into how much you like to be at risk versus not because people have different levels of comfort with that. Having said all of the stuff you can you know be living as close to your values as possible and you can still fail. I said fulfillment is not the same as success and failure success and failure are things that happen in the course of a career no matter how fulfilling. It is just part of being alive and so that's, that's okay. And, you know, hopefully you will have the flexibility. If all if everything you know like goes in down and burning flames. Hopefully you will have the flexibility to be able to pivot and to make some other choices that will serve you well. The last thing I want to leave you with is that I think when we have academic career paths. It can be very tempting to think because you spent all of this time right, creating very specialized skills. It's very tempting to think that you only have skills that are very specialized, but I really don't think that that's true. And education in the sciences really does give you the ability to do things like construct logical pathways towards answering very complicated questions it gives you, you know, sort of the practical technical skills, you know if you learn one programming language if you learn one piece of clunky software you can learn another piece of clunky software you might even be able to learn some non clunky software. So you're much more flexible and adaptable than our academic training would lead you to believe. And so I think that can be very empowering in that I hope this allows you to see how you can be effective not only in your career but in more places in the world. So having said that, thank you to all of the friends who worked on this talk with me in giving me feedback and also being inspiring examples throughout throughout my own career. And I really hope that this is helpful to you who are listening online. And yeah, now I'll take some time for questions. Thank you Luciane. It's, it's a wonderful colloquium and talk, and I think it's very important. And I think it's very important for for the community, because these types of things are not typically discussed like when I when I go when I went to academia for the first time nobody told me like things. So thank you for your time. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Let's see for the invitation. It's been fun. Our coordinators have some questions. I was wondering if I could ask something. Sure, sure. Luciane, thank you so much for that talk, I think that was the most valuable one hour spent in a long time. So I just wanted to ask you I think this is something that a lot of early scientists, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers included feel, because in our particular field of research, we may end up spending a lot of time and putting a lot of efforts into projects, without really having something tangible or, you know, something to show for it you may not end up with a paper always. So that's one aspect of research. And, you know, the other aspect could be if you're not a researcher you may be applying to a lot of places without any success so how do you what are your tips to like keeping yourself motivated in the face of rejection whatever that rejection may look like to you it could be like oh I spent two years working on a project I don't have anything to show for it, or I've been applying to so and so for so and so jobs without much success so what are your tips to, you know, keep yourself motivated to keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, I think rejection is really hard, obviously. And it is something that I think it's helpful to keep in mind first and foremost that rejection happens to everybody, all the time. I think that rejection is not a personal referendum on you and your, your value as a person I think something that happens in astronomy a lot is that we tie up our job, our careers with our identity. You know that that's sort of like I am an astronomer I am a physicist, but you know your work is actually not who you are, and you have value outside of your work and what you do. And when somebody said that to me I was like, What. But you know it bears remembering that first and foremost. I would also say that I you know sort of that idea that so to use your example of a research project that doesn't result in a paper right that like I have nothing to show for it. What I would say is a manifestation of this sort of singular focus that our field has on publications right. If you spent two years doing something chances are you developed some skills, whether it was you know familiarity with a particular data set a particular analysis tool. You just learned about like why it didn't, it didn't result in a publication. So you actually probably did get something out of it. You just didn't get that one thing that is sort of considered the coin of the land. And that that aspect of it is going to be hard no matter what. And realizing that the process of the process of leading to something even if it doesn't lead to the thing that you want actually does give you skill development that you might not have gotten otherwise and trying to understand like what it is you can take away so like what is your, you know, like, you didn't publish but like what is the other prize that you can take from this experience. I think applying for jobs like being unsuccessful in the job market is really really hard. And, you know, it in some senses, you know, it is helpful sometimes to not have the to not anticipate that you won't feel disappointed or unmotivated. The idea that you should feel motivated all the time, I think is not very realistic. And I think there are plenty of times in my life when I've gone through like periods of rejection where I did not feel particularly motivated. In those moments, it was, you know, helpful for me to return to things that I did like doing so, you know, whether that's like turning more into my research or, you know, whether it means like taking more time to just do things that are not my work. I think allowing yourself a little bit of time for that sort of grieving process so that you can refresh and try again, because that's ultimately the thing is that you will have to try again. You know, if you are at the point where like, you went through a job cycle, you didn't get anything and you are like out of funding. You know, one of the things that those job applications can give you for example is I think job applications are a huge time sink for anyone who hasn't like done this process at any point, like writing job applications is like a job in and of itself. Having said that, by the time you've written a job application or two or five, however many you've written. It also can be turned into grant applications. So if you're your real intent is to stay in the sciences it might be worth looking into and you're like out of your, your job which is so like worst case scenario for many people. You know you can look into soft money institutions and try and go for a grant. At the same time, I think if you've gone through this process and you have at least like a sense of your value system and what you'd like to be doing. One of the, one of the ways this has worked, at least for me is that it's been, it's made it easier for me to identify opportunities that are within the scope of what I find valuable to do that aren't necessarily in academia. So, you know, if you end up where you are turning to like looking for like a job outside of astronomy, or physics or whatever it happens to be. You might have a better way to. You might have a better way to evaluate what opportunities will be good for you, but you know there's nothing about rejection that will not be hard rejection sucks. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have more questions from the coordinators. Yes, I have a question for Lucian. Okay. First of all, very nice. I like a lot your, your colloquium, especially because I, most of the thought that you, you were talking about. Also, I could, I passed by this as well. In the sense of all this, the, the different step, the questioning, the, the, where I'm going and all this stuff. I feel that your words were reflecting on, on my own choices that I did in my career. So, but I wanted to ask you about how it is expected also to behave the other side of the, of the equation, let's say, in, in, in my case, like, okay, we are trying to open some positive position and then how the, the other side of the university side of the research institute should try to behave in the best way to, to, to take this new guy or girl that is coming to the, to the institute and make it feel motivated and not lose it because of because there are some places in which just, you go like postdoc and it's okay you have to do your work alone and if you're not produced you are out of the, of the, of the institute, kind of to call behaving mind for the institute. I don't know if you, I don't know your personal experience or in the, how they do in the Yeah, so I think that's a, it's a hard question, right, because institutions are so different. And, you know, fundamentally what you're getting at right is, is a variety of different things. One is, you know, how does the institution value somebody that is coming in is, you know, is it solely on papers. And then like research output. Do they look at things that the person might do in addition to that whether it's like, say they play a sport or they do something outside of the department. Do they view that. There are many institutions that view that as a distraction to like time that could be spent doing research, which personally I find to be a very like unrealistic way of thinking about how human beings work. But in my experience, find that time that I'm spending not doing research. Actually, you know, like somewhere in the back of my mind, things are brewing. But I don't have to be like sitting in front of my computer all day and in fact I don't do research very efficiently. If I sit in front of my computer all day it's just more time spent but not necessarily doesn't correlate with increased output. In part it's a resetting of the values of our community. You know, and I think being intentional about for what something that all institutions can do I think is to be intentional about what a successful career might look like. And, and making that a much wider definition than it currently is. And I think that that is that's really hard to say like, make a blanket statement about whatever institution should do. I will say that one of the things that I've really enjoyed about being at the Adler is that there is a much wider variety of skill sets that are considered valuable. And, you know, anytime like for example that that we do like a public event so you know like let's say we just had this big like event called Adler after dark which is like a sort of 21 and up nighttime event party atmosphere but people learn science right. Anytime we do an event like that. The team that works on it usually only has one astronomer on it of like 10 to 15 people. They trust the people do things like build the exhibits, they do things like manage the project, you know manage the budget of the project, they might interface with like outside partners. And so the, the vast majority of people that I work with now on a regular basis don't have any formal training in science whatsoever. They work in a scientific institution and it's okay for them to do that because there are people that have formal training like myself or another astronomer on that team. But like I don't have any like formal project management training and that's I think true of almost everybody in astronomy who manages a project. We do not have formal training in like 99% of the things we do. We don't have formal training in writing. We don't have training in communication. I think part of part of the issue right is that in most institutions, the value is placed in this very hierarchical sense where like you're either a tenure track professor, or you're nobody. And there isn't a value placed even on like the people who clean and maintain the building right like the fact that you go into an office every day and like the, you know the garbage goes somewhere like some a person did that. That's part of the enterprise of science as well. Thank you. Thank you. We have a couple of questions on the YouTube channel. I think we have time for the first one. So this person said that in 2010. I was just pointing out an archive that young people don't take risk and only work on set of research on set research agendas, or on fat topics. They don't stay spend any time working on a risky slash non mainstream idea. Do you concur with this. Any comments. This person is Shannon. Yeah. So I think I'll agree with Avi on that. I think that's definitely a correct observation is that there's a very low tolerance for risk in in research. I will say that it is extremely easy for Avi to say that because Avi is a tenured professor at Harvard. So, you know, like Avi has a lot of sort of social privilege I would say, in that he can write whatever article he wants to write he can write up some, you know, like totally like outlandish idea. And put it on the archive and, you know, like, or he could submit it to get published because of who he is he has a higher higher chance of it being published because of who he is he can drop something on the archive and people will say like oh this is Avi being Avi, not oh this person has published a totally outlandish idea right. So I would say that part of that is the social capital that Avi has to be able to write on riskier topics is is a major part of like why he has that opinion. Avi is right that people do tend to be fairly risk averse in in astronomy because of how tight the job market is. And, again, because our, our focus is so narrow on this sort of like idea of research output. You know, running out what you said at the beginning of like, oh I worked for two years on something and it didn't result in anything. Having a having a an enterprise of science that only values that I think works against any kind of like riskier or more exploratory idea that we might want to to look into. It's certainly something that like I have grappled with so I, I work on unsupervised machine while one of the things I work on is applying unsupervised machine learning as a method of doing SETI or the search for extra terrestrial intelligence which is about as out there as you can still get and be still an astronomer right. So, you know, for me what I am doing is a lot of exploratory data mining, and it absolutely slows down my publication rate. You know, but on the other hand, part of the reason I can do that is that I'm at an institution that values the the greater portfolio of what I do. I actually wrote an article for the Washington Post, for example, on that that talks about Avi and talking about like why scientists sometimes make outlandish claims. And, you know, like that for me like in my position, writing an article for a major national newspaper is as valuable to the Adler as if I had written a researcher article in some ways it's actually more so because I'm reaching a wider range of people. So, you know, I think the, the risk that I've been able to embrace, in part comes from the way that I am valued by sort of my immediate scientific community. And, you know, I wish that we would be more risk tolerant than we are because I think people could be more creative and, and not and also work on a wider variety of topics right because the, the thing that every everybody gets kind of touched into is that you develop expertise in like one area, and then you can like never study anything else because you'll have to learn a bunch of stuff and then your publication rate will slow down. So it would be really nice if we, it not even like, so that we could work on like risky or non mainstream ideas, just so that we could have a wider variety of topics that we might embrace and not be so driven to be hyper specialized. So, there's always a 20 second delay on the YouTube channel so maybe that person has a reply or something. But I have another last quick question, maybe I was wondering if you can comment on, on your experience with the Adler Planetarium or maybe your colleagues outside academia. How do normally contracts work because I know more from the academia one like you will go start as an assistant professor let's say, then eventually you might or might not get tenure track, but then you can stay there forever. So this type of contracts you mentioned in your slides are not tenure track per se, but they might be also stable without being tenure track right could you please comment like on the basis of those types of contracts. Yeah, sure. You know, and again this is informed by like what jobs are like in the United States, because that's where I'm coming from but you know what I have realized in having friends like outside of academia is that, and in particularly working in a nonprofit atmosphere is that gone are the days where people like went to work for a company and then work there until they die. You know, generally speaking, one of the things that I have found most surprising about working at the Adler is that there is turnover and that people leave not because like their, their money ran out or because like the job wasn't going well. They just leave because they decided they wanted to work on something else. Like, this is, I mean it sounds like totally like a normal thing if you think about friends you maybe have who have just sort of like regular people jobs, but people leave because they are like well, I spent four years in this job and now, you know, like I think I've learned everything I can learn from this job and, you know, like maybe I could go up in the hierarchy of the job but maybe those positions above me aren't appealing like the actual like things I would be doing on a daily but basis aren't what I want to do. So I'm going to go take the skills that I have and work somewhere else. And, you know, in many cases, you know, I've seen formal former Adler colleagues like go on to work at other museums. I've seen former Adler colleagues like go on to work on political campaigns, you know, to go and like start their own business like doing some kind of art. And it's been really eye opening to me as a person who was so steeped in academia for so long that like, you can just, you can just do that. Turns out, you can go like get another job at any time that you want. And, you know, there are people that have worked at the Adler for like decades and decades, despite it not being tenure track. But the only people in the, the culture that most of the astronomers in the Adler come from of being academics is like totally alien to most of the people in the institution. They all come from like regular jobs, nonprofit world jobs, museum jobs, etc. And I think this is going to be the last question. Justin Bell experienced imposter syndrome when she started got school at Cambridge. How do you tackle this problem if you face it as a young scientist. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the one of the best articles I've ever read on imposter syndrome was I think I think it was written by the former president of MIT. So, you know, like MIT being this like very, you know, prestigious scientific institution, right. It was interesting to to read because like she talked about how imposter syndrome has manifested for her over the course of her career, right. So like when she first was sort of out of her parents house and on her own and in college, she had imposter syndrome about eating in a restaurant. Because eating in a restaurant was something that she didn't grow up doing. And she felt like she didn't belong in a restaurant. And, you know, like now that she is the president of MIT, it's sort of like hosting a dignitary from another country gives her, you know, imposter syndrome, but she can eat in a restaurant just fine. So I think the the thing about imposter syndrome is that it is, it's tremendously common. I think it affects people. It affects people throughout their lives in different contexts and it affects I think the vast majority of people. The reason you hear about it with, you know, women or people of color in the sciences. Is that the more the more the field doesn't look like you. So, you know, the, the less represented you are the easier it is for what you see around you to to provide a seeming kind of evidence to your feelings of imposterism right like for a white man in an astronomy who is very well represented. You can look around and be like well everybody here looks like me so maybe I'm in the right place. You know, if you are a black woman in astronomy. That may not be the case. And in many cases isn't and so, you know, imposter syndrome, I think is a universal feeling. I think it it predominantly affects people who are being marginalized by the field. But you know it it's important to realize that it doesn't. It's a lot like fear right like being afraid of something doesn't mean you shouldn't do something. It can be something that exists alongside whatever it is you're doing, you know, as long as the thing you're doing is not like literally going to kill you. It's sometimes okay to do things while this sort of seemingly negative emotion is also happening. Thank you very much again for on behalf of the low physics and the broader community for attending and for these wonderful webinar slash colloquium. My pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you everybody online who joined. Yeah, if you have more questions you can follow Lucian on Twitter or her social media or find her own on her own web page. And thanks. Let us meet in the following webinar. Thank you. Thank you Alhanto.