Musings on career paths…

I look younger than I am.   I hear this a lot when people find out (or ask) my age.  People seem surprised to find out how old I am.  I’m never quite sure how to take this, though.  The vain part of me considers it a compliment that I look young.  The achiever part of me wonders if people think I either act young (and wonders if that’s “good or bad”, if so), figure I should know more than I do given my age, or are wondering what someone of my age is doing “only” in a position like this.  The latter thought has me thinking about career paths in general as well as my own journey that brought me to where I am now.

It seems there are two ways to “rise to the top” at an observatory (and probably elsewhere).  You either stay with the company for years and go through multiple positions as you climb that proverbial (and unfortunate, see an earlier post) organization ladder.  Or, you stay at some other company for years, then get hired in the next level up at a new company.

My career path doesn’t really lend itself well to either of those two scenarios.  Pretty much, at each new position I’ve had, I have tried to do something new, learn a new part of astronomy/the astronomy business that I hadn’t before.  These choices have given me a lot of experiences that I find very useful everywhere I go, but they haven’t made me a traditional expert in any particular area.

I guess it started with my first post-doc position.  In graduate school, I studied pulsating white dwarf stars.  My first post-graduate job, therefore, was as the only Ph.D. scientist on site at a solar observatory.  A natural progression, right?  Not really, but it was an interesting one.

From there, I went on to run operations for a global network of pulsating observers (OK, this position was directly related to my graduate work), then ran nighttime operations for an extragalactic sky survey, managed the Instrument Division at a major (foreign) observatory, then came to Gemini, my current place of employment, where to date, I’ve worked largely as a project manager for new instrument projects (with external procurements and internal work packages).

Each job I’ve held has pretty much led naturally to the next and it’s always interesting to review the chance circumstances and events which resulted in each new position, but it’s clear I’m not on a path to be an expert in any particular field.  I was trained as a scientists/research/instrumentalist.  All those skills are important for what I am doing now, but I’m not necessarily honing them in the process, either.

I do believe I am gaining breadth, though, and while I find myself envious of those that have stayed in one field and developed an incredible level of mastery, I am also pleased with my ability to speak at least somewhat intelligently, and from some direct personal experience, about software development, international project management, telescope proposal writing, observatory/project operations, instrumentation, multi-cultural work environments, machining, team management, contracting, and etc.  I’ve done a bit of each of these as part of my previous set of jobs.  And while I would love to be a detector expert, a certified project manager, or a builder of 8m-class instruments, I chose a career path (or perhaps, a career path chose me) that favors breadth of experience over individual mastery.

I’m not sure where I’m headed next, but I can see that my management tasks benefit from my broad experiences. Whether or not they’d benefit more from a more specialized expertise, I can’t say.

I’m not saying that my career path is what’s best for what I’m doing, or that there even is a best career path.  I’m just sort of thinking out loud and realizing that we all have choices to make in how/if we choose to specialize versus generalize.   Both are effective, fulfilling paths, and while mutually exclusive at any given time, can be combined over time, when the environment seems right.