Academia is a Pyramid Scheme
When it comes to space, academia isn’t the only game in town.
Space has been my career goal since I was a child. As a teenager, I began looking in earnest into what exactly that would entail, reaching out to local space advocacy groups and folks working in aerospace for guidance. From this I formulated my 5-step plan:
1. Go to university to get a Ph.D.
2. Become a professor
3. Get to work on NASA missions
4. Publish papers
5. Become an expert in my chosen field so that folks like the Discovery Channel would want to interview me
(Obviously watching things like Discovery Channel documentaries had a big influence on me as a kid. That, and watching a LOT of Star Trek.)
Shockingly to me even to this day, I accomplished all of these things except becoming a professor – and did them completely out of order – all by the age of 30.
What enabled me to do this? Getting out of academia.
Since I loved Mars, I instinctively chose astronomy as my undergraduate major, thinking, “Planets are in space; therefore, I should be an astronomer!” It wasn’t until my end-of-junior-year counselling session where they make sure you’re set to graduate on time that I found out I really should…
