"When I Grow Up" -- Making Toast and Breaking Ice

Professional Development is an important aspect of the AAAS Fellowship program. We are scientists who are trying to expand our skill sets and improve ourselves! Therefore, one of the things I *really* wanted to work on as a Fellow is my communication skills. For this reason, I have joined the NSF Chapter of "ToastMasters International" -- a group which meets every week to work on our public speaking. Every week, there are opportunities to give a prepared speech, or to stand up and give a 1-2 minute off-the-cuff speech on various topics to work on speaking on the fly. I've done a number of those short speeches, but last week I gave my very first prepared speech, my "Ice Breaker". 

When you join Toastmasters, you get a booklet with a number of different types of speeches that you can work through. The first one is just to get used to speaking in front of an audience, so you talk about the subject you know the most about -- yourself. It can be on pretty much anything related to you, and is supposed to last 4-6 minutes (keeping your speech within the allotted time is one of the goals). I took one of the suggested prompts, "how did you get to your current position", and wrote a practice script to help me prepare. While I did NOT memorize this speech verbatim, I had the outline of it in front of me, and had memorized some of the lines so that I could fall back on those words if I started blanking. I was pretty happy with my talk at the end of it, and I received some very nice comments from my speech evaluate (as well as advice -- I apparently overuse the word "so" when I speak, for example).  This is not the exact speech I gave, but I thought I would share it with all of you, and give you an idea of how I got to where I am now!

"When I Grow Up" 

When I was in kindergarten – I KNEW, with 100% certainty, what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be an artist. World famous, rich, and producing the most amazing work you’ve ever seen! I mean, when you really got down to it, the only reason I couldn’t do it right away was I didn’t have the right supplies. My only medium was crayon and paper! Just hand me a set of oils and a canvas, and I’d be able to paint with the best of them. My parents eventually convinced me to start with watercolors, instead of canvases taller than me. But I had a ready answer for that question that we ALWAYS ask children: So, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Isn’t it kind of amazing that the question people most often ask children is one of the most complicated ones in existence? Hi, small child – if you had to commit your life RIGHT NOW to one path for the rest of your life, what would that be? Life doesn’t actually work that way. Some of the best things I’ve done where spur of the moment, or things I had no inkling of where they would take me.

At other times in my early life, I remember wanting to be a pianist, an astronaut, a cowgirl, and an animal handler. Let me tell you, my first-grade teacher did NOT appreciate the garden snake I brought her at recess. Then, in 3^rd grade, I discovered math. I liked it, I was good at it, and my impression of what mathematicians did was derived entirely from the old TV show, Square One, and their recurrent “MathNet” segment, where a pair of mathematicians solved crime.  I still remember learning all about the Fibonacci sequence: A parrot squawked out the numbers “One! One! Two! Three!” repeatedly, leading to secret panels hidden behind the wall! That was the year I told everyone that I was going to be a mathematician when I grew up. 

Life soon introduced me to other interests, though. I joined the Girl Scouts, and suddenly “wilderness explorer” was the coolest thing I could be. My dad got me a chemistry set, and I could set things on fire and watch them burn in amazing colors.  In biology lab, we dissected a live oyster – that’s the year I was convinced I was going to be a marine biologist.

So, when it came time to apply to college, I wasn’t as sure anymore. But I knew the time had come: I had to settle down and decide on one subject and chose my future. What did I want to be when I grew up? I went back to what was still my favorite subject: math. I made sure that every school I applied to had a good math program. By now I knew that I wouldn’t be solving crimes with my skills, but learning about abstract concepts. I went into college pretty sure that what I wanted to be was a mathematician.

But again, you can’t plan for everything -- it turned out that my college had an excellent physics program, too. And physics is like applied math. And astronomy? Is physics in SPACE. So that’s how I ended up applying to grad school in astronomy, finally answering the question, for good this time. Astronomer. THAT’S what I want to be when I grow up.

Not right away, though – a PhD program takes a long time, so I wanted a break first: a gap year. Girl Scouts and my old plans to be a wilderness explorer had evolved into a love of travel. I planned it out carefully: work as usual as a Girl Scout camp counselor over the summer, find a job tutoring for the fall, then 3 months hiking the Appalachian trail in the spring, a trip to Japan and Hong Kong in the summer, then back to school, ready to learn and follow my newest dream.

Unfortunately, my tutoring job fell through and I found myself a bit at loose ends --  but it happened to be an election year: 2008. And there was this Senator from Illinois who I felt I could really get behind. Which is how I ended up spending a month and a half as a full-time volunteer in Pennsylvania, going door to door, calling voters, and helping organize events for the Obama campaign. That experience really solidified my interest in politics, policy, the workings of government, and that interest has stayed with me. Eventually, after I finished my PhD and started a postdoc, it inspired me to apply to the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program, which is where I am today.

I love astronomy – but I’m no longer sure that it is the ‘end game’ for my career. Or that my career even has to have an end game. I know now that whatever I do next doesn’t have to be forever, it can just be the next step in my life. Though my childhood dream of being an artist never happened, I still love art and try to visit galleries regularly -- one of the benefits of living in DC! All the things that have inspired me are still interesting! I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be, but I’m happy where I am. So, what AM I going to be when I grow up? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out.