My Educational Journey

crossposted from vocal dot media and added to/edited.

So imagine you’re 8 years old. You are flipping through channels and you hear something that catches your attention-except you can’t see it! You did catch something, though- a name, a title, the two words: Black Hole.

So you furiously flip through the channels looking for it again because you swore you saw this furiously out-there looking CGI depiction of a scene in space. Now you’ve never heard of a black hole before. You keep flipping until you see there’s an episode playing and now a man named Michio Kaku is on the old Toshiba television talking about them. The fuzz on the tv vibrates as low bass reverberates eerie cinematic music. The swirling vortex of doom consumes a red giant like it’s cotton candy. The layers of the star are being violently shoveled into the black hole similar to a human eating cheese at 3 am. Ah, delicious delicious destruction. As if that wasn’t exciting enough you learn it’s not just CGI-these hungry massive tears in the fabric of reality itself are real.

These things are really out there and it isn’t until the picture of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 is taken in 2019 and retaken in 2021 that I truly realize this childlike wonder is permanent and perhaps, simply human.

Astronomy seems to be one of those phases we get into as kids like zoology or biology. Kids are always switching career choices like astronaut, veterinarian, marine biologist or doctor- but I wanted to be an astrophysicist.