I'm hoping this will be a place where I can express my thoughts about whether or not I want to pursue astronomy anonymously. I think I'll start off with a rant..
So what are my existential crises? Well I've always wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I'm currently a junior in college and so far I'm not a fan of what I've seen of how research is done in the field. I got really interested in programming after coming to college and currently I'm trying to figure out a good intersecting point between the two. As far as I've heard of, almost everyone who goes to grad school for astrophysics ends up writing code for simulations etc but I think I want to be more involved with the coding side. I think I want to work more with astronomical data; how to store it, faster computational techniques etc, if that's even something people do. That's the thing, I can't figure out if what seems interesting to me is even something that people actually do for a living. So many people are doing so many different things that I'm not even sure how I would begin to do any of them. I don't think I want to go to grad school for computer science or get directly involved in the software development industry. Physics will always be my first love, I can't abandon it. But then again I'm happiest when I'm coding.
I'm one of those nerdy people that love their classes and genuinely enjoy doing their homework. Seriously, I love doing homework. Well, I used to. But this semester? Not so much. My classes this semester are kind of..blah. Boring. Uninteresting. I've never given less flux about anything in my life (the flux joke emerged in a class on vector calculus. Get it, not giving any flux?). I'm mad at my professors for making my classes boring, for taking away what I love from me. What gives them the right to make classes about physics and computer science, two subjects that I am so passionate about incredibly boring? Well hopefully this rant will let me blow off some steam and focus on things that I need to be doing.
Okay, I'm done with my rant now.
So what are my existential crises? Well I've always wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I'm currently a junior in college and so far I'm not a fan of what I've seen of how research is done in the field. I got really interested in programming after coming to college and currently I'm trying to figure out a good intersecting point between the two. As far as I've heard of, almost everyone who goes to grad school for astrophysics ends up writing code for simulations etc but I think I want to be more involved with the coding side. I think I want to work more with astronomical data; how to store it, faster computational techniques etc, if that's even something people do. That's the thing, I can't figure out if what seems interesting to me is even something that people actually do for a living. So many people are doing so many different things that I'm not even sure how I would begin to do any of them. I don't think I want to go to grad school for computer science or get directly involved in the software development industry. Physics will always be my first love, I can't abandon it. But then again I'm happiest when I'm coding.
Maybe I'll know what I want to do in a few more months after I've been to a few different types of conferences.
- Thoughts of a hopeful astronomer
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