annastronomer

[This is a super old draft blog post that I wrote years ago. I never posted it and just rediscovered it, so I dusted it off and am posting it now because I still agree with the takeaway!]

My third day at work in Heidelberg, I got an e-mail advertising “PSF Coffee” in the Horsaal (main auditorium) and, despite not knowing what PSF stood for, I decided to go along and check it out. So there I was, in a big auditorium, looking around the room and counting a total of Zero familiar faces. I pulled out my journal and a pen and began a diary entry, and continued writing even as Casey – the guy running PSF Coffee that day – stood up and asked if anyone had news, announcements, or new people at the institute to introduce. 

Uh oh, new people. That’s me!! My pen hesitated. But can I introduce *myself*? Would that be weird? I decided to keep my head down and keep writing. 

“I think I got one e-mail from a new person,” Casey continued, scanning the crowd. “Anna?”

On June 17, I got an e-mail alert reporting a flash of light in the sky. This by itself was not unusual. Those of us who study the deaths of stars find flashes all the time; supernovae, the brilliant cosmic explosions that accompany the deaths of stars, are actually pretty common, and on any given night the night sky holds dozens of them. However, this particular flash appeared remarkably quickly for a supernova, and it was so bright that it was difficult to explain as a normal explosion.

In the early 80′s, physicist and professor Rush Holt arrived on Capitol Hill to begin his year as a AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. He encountered scientist-politician culture shock right away. On Day 1 of orientation, a speaker from the Office of Technology Assessment (abolished in 1995) said that “we’re in Washington, where facts are negotiable,” and on Day 2, another speaker said that “you have to understand that here in Washington, facts are up for debate.” These first two days were a wake-up call to think deeply about the relationship between scientists and what we deal with, and policymakers and what they deal with. 

Originally written on 10 June 2016, and finished much later!

Yesterday afternoon, 15 of us crowded into a conference room designed to accommodate 10. Kishore Hari, the loud and animated director of the Bay Area Science Festival, told us that we were going to tell each other personal stories. “Are you all on board with that?” Well, sure, I guess, even though none of us had never met each other before.

Kishore handed the first volunteer a card, and she flipped it over. It read, “My Crazy Family.” The volunteer now had two minutes to improvise a story on that topic. So, the first thing I learned about this person I’d just met was that her family loves playing pranks on each other, that her father is a hunter, and that for a while a running prank in her family was to hide a dismembered turkey’s foot in someone’s pillow or shoe. This led to an awkward moment during a sleepover in 7th grade, when a visiting friend found the turkey foot in her bedsheets and didn’t find it funny at all. 

Another volunteer, C, got the card “car.” So, the first thing I ever learned about C was that when she was 15, nearing the end of her Driver’s Ed course and feeling a little overconfident, she took the family SUV on a 5-minute errand and got it crushed in a gate. 

This is part of the Communicating Science Conference (ComSciCon), a national workshop for graduate students in science fields who want to become better communicators and help make science more accessible to the public. The event is a mixture of panels with experts representing fields from government policy and law to journalism and K12 education. After the panel on Communicating through Creative Outlets and Storytelling, we split off to get some hands-on practice.

My partner was K, and the card I flipped over read, “laughter.” The result was that the first thing I ever said to K was “Hi, I’m Anna,” and the second thing was “I’m going to tell you about the time I laughed the hardest.” I told K about an incident from my 9th grade Comparative Cultures class. Our teacher was very intimidating, and we used to have to give in-class presentations while she sat at the front of the room and stared at us over the rims of her glasses. One time, my classmate got a long serrated wooden stick stuck in his afro at the beginning of his presentation, and our teacher had to pull out scissors from her desk to cut it out. 

In return, K told me that she and a friend once listened to the same Jack Johnson song 46 times, over two hours, without realizing that it was the same song, while remarking to each other that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same.

After telling our stories once, we gave each other feedback by answering three questions. What words do you remember? Jack Johnson, friend, iTunes, same, “46 times.” What emotions did you feel during the story? Surprise, familiarity (I also think that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same), silliness. What questions were you left with? When did this happen? Do you still listen to Jack Johnson? Do you even like Jack Johnson? And which song was this? I was surprised by the words K remembered from my story; my enthusiasm for certain details somehow didn’t serve to emphasize them, and some of what K noticed most were things I hadn’t noticed I’d said. 

With that in mind, we told our stories again. And again. And then performed them for the rest of the group. 

I don’t remember where my fellow ComSciCon attendees are from, what they study, or how many siblings they have – usual questions from a gathering of graduate students. But I still have a strong sense of their personalities, their sense of humor, their families, and their friends, not only from the choice of content of their stories, but of the way they delivered them.

The session was short and too few stories were told. I found myself wanting to carry the cards around with me (other cards in the deck included “unsupervised children” and “a time I felt embarrassed”) to use the next time I meet someone. I think it’s nice to start with a story! And I think it’s nice that the first thing K and I did together was make each other laugh. 

Originally posted on the MIT admissions site

I used to think of decision-making as a complicated optimization problem. There was some quantity I wanted to maximize (say, my happiness, or the good I could do for the world) and would maximize, if I could only be prescient enough to solve for the best combination of choices. Once solved for, I could plan my future by laying these decisions out in front of me; once in place, I could follow them where I wanted to go.

Maybe I’m excessively conscious of the purpose of Fulbright, but I often feel the pressure of an invisible nametag on my chest that says “Hi, I’m Anna! I’m here in Germany representing America” – no matter how casual the social context. I want to draw an asterisk next to “representing” and scribble “I’m one small data point from a country of over three hundred million people. Please do not draw generalized conclusions about America or Americans as a whole from any of my actions.”

It’s strange to imagine that my personality or behavior could - does - leave impressions of America on the people around me. That maybe, years from now, one of my friends will reply to an opinion on America with “well, I knew this American on a Fulbright in Heidelberg…”

It’s even stranger to imagine that these anecdotes might come from situations as informal as the regular lunch with my officemates (there are eight of them, all Germans.) 

There are more formal ways to be an anecdote. The Rent an American program, for example, brings American students to German schools. The idea is to learn about German culture and the German school system in exchange for a first-hand perspective on American life, culture, education, politics. My first school visit was in Bietigheim-Bissigen, a quaint Medieval town near Stuttgart, and my second took place a week ago in Heilbronn.

I had a lot of plans for Thursday evening. I was going to take the bus home from work, grab my climbing shoes and a bag of chalk, then go bouldering with a group of coworkers for an hour. I was going to go straight from the Boulderhaus to the Altstadt, for the weekly pub trivia at the Brass Monkey pub. 

I made it as far as the bus to the Boulderhaus.

This was the shadow cast by my hand on Friday morning:

And this was the shadow cast by a bush:

No, I didn’t stuff little wads of paper between my fingers. And no, the leaves on that bush aren’t shaped like crescents. The shadows looked funny on Friday because the Sun looked funny. Here’s a view of the Sun on Friday morning, as projected through a telescope. Around 70% of it is blocked out by the Moon: a partial solar eclipse.