How I became an Astrophysicist | 2004-2020

scientists aren't normal people is a phrase I hear a lot is this all we care about is science all day every day because we just happen to pop out of the ground that way and the dwarfs just what does what all scientists started out as kids learning about the world they just kind of got distracted enough by their curiosity about the world around them when they were growing up to end up with a career as a scientist a career trying to figure out the answers to questions that no one knows the answer to how you go though from kid in school to fully fledged scientists is not exactly clear to many people because unless you have a scientist in your family or in your friendship group you're not really gonna know how that happens and there'll be many people out there that are probably curious about how you go about becoming a scientist mainly because they want to walk that path themselves so I figured today I'd sit down and tell you my path from kid at school learning all they could to working as an astrophysicist I'm also going to talk about cost at each stage she's not exactly the British thing to do but I think it's important money isn't everything but I know that it factors into a lot of people's decisions about whether to pursue further education so I didn't feel like it was something that I could leave out and finally just before I get into this I want to acknowledge that my path comes from a place of great privilege I was very lucky to be born in a country where girls education is a given it's not questioned I was very lucky to have parents that were so supportive both emotionally but also financially for any decision that I decided to make and also I went to an all-girls school and that allowed me to grow up away from those sort of weird societal norms that say that there are subjects that girls do and girls don't do which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard please don't ever tell any kid that I just went to a school where there was the subjects the cool kids didn't the subject the cool kids didn't do and obviously the cool kids did physics so I want to start when I was 14 years old in high school this was year 10 in the UK and physics was my least favorite subject surprisingly I even remember vividly like my French oral for my GCSE being like drag I least wear measure D technique kind of very high pitched voice in school but luckily for me science was a compulsory subject for all people in the UK taking GCSEs and so that by the time I was 16 physics had actually become my favourite subject because we've stopped doing all the stuff that we were doing in the lower years on like forces and light travels in straight lines and we started doing really cool stuff like radioactivity and astronomy and astronomy was something that I had loved since I was a kid I was obsessed with space and it was at that point I realized that actually space is physics and so if I wanted to learn more about it I'd need to take physics so when I was 16 and it came to picking the four subjects that I would take further into my final two years of high school so I chose maths further maths physics and chemistry but I chose them because they were my favourites objects at the end of the day when I'd come back with a huge pile of homework at home they were always the ones that I would pick off of the pile first to be like well let's get the maths homework done first because I can do that and I get it and we'll deal with that massive English essay later I ended up getting all A's in my final exams for my a levels which I am still immensely proud of to this day now good grades aren't everything to traveling the path to being a scientist like for me they were literally just a hoop to jump through in order to get into university but you'll find that good grades do open more doors for you so just remember practice makes perfect you wouldn't expect to pick up a violin and be amazing at it the first time round you can't immediately become fluent in a language overnight it's the same for math and science you really got to work at it until it becomes second nature to you but those grades meant that I got into Durham University to study physics with astronomy when I was 18 I loved my time at university I went to Ayden's College Durham I met some absolutely wonderful people and lifelong friends I got to use the telescopes on top of the roof of the physics department which was awesome and also had some incredible nights out while I was there as well I was there for four years because I did what's called an undergraduate master's degree so instead of doing normal university degree where you just get like a Bachelors of Science and then you graduate and then you go on to do your masters I did my masters all the while without graduating so my friends might have graduated after three years I didn't graduate until four years so my first three years were essentially just being taught lots of lectures a couple of different like lab projects and then in my fourth year it was all about research half of my entire mark for the year was going to be the research project that I was doing with a project supervisor who was a sort of a professor or a researcher in the department who is basically advising like what science we would do and what questions we were asking now I didn't pay for my university course I took a student loan which is very commonplace in the UK there's this massive central system that's all done through the government it was about three thousand two to five I think per year intuition and then three thousand a year is a living cost loan so every year I was essentially borrowing just over six thousand pounds to go to university times that by four years and I ended up with probably about a twenty five thousand pound loan okay that's a lot of money the whole idea is that you do not start paying it back until you start earning and it comes straight off your wage as well so it's almost like you don't miss it because you never see it before you pay it back also you pay it off in proportion to how much you're earning and it's sort of exponential so the more you earn the more you will pay off but if you haven't paid it off after 25 years since you started earning then it kind of gets written off by the government anyway of course since I went to university UK tuition fees have actually increased from just over three thousand a year to nine thousand a year so I understand that people thinking about going to university in the UK today thinking about a much larger loan than I ever had so after I graduated I actually went to the Bahamas for six weeks to learn how to scuba dive but also I was doing a lot of marine conservation there it was fantastic scuba diving is still one of my favourite things and I'd do it as often as I can which is not often enough and one of the reasons I did that was because I was terrified to leave University I was terrified to graduate I was terrified to find a job I didn't know what I wanted to do still I didn't really think I wanted to do research cuz I just done that research project and it was okay and it was fun but you know there was other things out there in the world and I was kind of putting it off for a very long time thinking about what I actually wanted to do and so I did the classic thing that you shouldn't do which is I did what everyone else was doing if Millhouse jumped off a cliff nihlus jumped off a cliff and there which was applying for graduate schemes companies that have these big schemes to hire graduates fresh out of university and train them how they want to be trained so that they can progress through the company and my idea was that I wanted to do satellite technology I wanted to work in the space industry you know launching things on rockets and getting things into space because I saw that sounded really cool and I couldn't get a job directly with company say Astrium which is the UK satellite company I did apply for them but I didn't get the job but I did get a job with rolls-royce who don't make cars they make jet engines and I figured jet engines Rockets they're not that far apart the thing is it was an engineering grad scheme it wasn't a physics grad team it wasn't a research grad scheme either so I realized very quickly that even though I was doing very similar things to what I've been doing in my research project in my Master's you know sitting crunching data sitting at a desk all day and solving problems I wasn't doing it for any reason that I cared about I didn't care about the engineering things we were talking about like test beds for jet engines and stuff so every meeting to me was kind of boring and I just really missed talking about space all day and I missed talking about the galaxies and stars and black holes even though I started in September by the November I was ringing my master supervisor again saying I think I've made a terrible mistake and I really want to come back to astrophysics because I've remembered that yeah I want to be a scientist I want to think and answer questions that no one knows the answer to that that's what I want to do and what I want my job to be so it took me a while and figuring out what I actually wanted to do with my life because basically that was my fault because I procrastinated the decision but I got there in the end also note that some of my friends told me I was absolutely crazy at this point because I was leaving a very good job that was paying something like twenty-eight thousand pounds a year to go back into education and do a PhD and that was what I did at 23 I started a PhD at Oxford researching all about how galaxies changed their shape over the lifetime of the universe and I had never been happier I didn't care about that paper I'd gone from what 28 grand a year to being paid a grant of about thirteen thousand pounds a year which was tax-free didn't I pay my student loan back national insurance free and so it was essentially like being paid a wage of about twenty thousand pounds after tax I was really happy I was talking about space again and I was working towards writing my thesis this huge big document that essentially out lies all of the independent research that you've done over three years under the supervision of your PhD supervisor advisor and a PhD is there to prove that you are an independent researcher by the end of it that you can come up with a question that we can ask about the universe or the world that we live in and most crucially a feasible way of actually trying to answer that question and then you can report back on it get your findings published and show to the world that you are someone who is knowledgeable and an expert in that incredibly specific subject that you have focused on during your PhD during my PhD I got to go all around the world on conferences presenting my results talking to other researchers I've got to use telescopes in La Palma and in Hawaii as well which I still can't get over the fact that they pay you to go to Hawaii before I could graduate from my PhD though I had to prove that it really was all my work and so I had to go into a thesis defense exam what we call a vive it's essentially an exam where you sit in a room with two other people who are experts in your field they've read your thesis beforehand and then they pour over it and question you on every specific tiny little detail in there thankfully I passed my fiver after a three-hour grilling from my examiner's and I've just realized that I'm recording this on the 3-year anniversary of passing my viber as well so kind of all the feels right now since then I've had two jobs as an astrophysicist in universities doing research one at Nottingham for two years and now in Oxford which I've been there for 18 months and both of those jobs are what are called research fellowships so instead of a professor who has specific research that they want doing until they advertise that job for someone to apply to do it a fellowship is like we have this pot of money tell us what research you would like to do and if we like it we will pay you to do that research so at Nottingham I started on a similar salary to what I'd left rolls-royce at so I bounced straight back again after my PhD and then when I moved to Oxford my wage increased about 20% more top of that as well which means I'm now paying back about a hundred and twenty quid a month or so on my student loan it's not much at all I think every decision I've ever made has always been motivated by a piece of advice my dad gave me when I was younger which was do something you love and you'll never work another day again in your life and that's always resonated with me so at school I picked subjects I absolutely loved because I knew that I would actually want to learn and want to do the work and therefore get good grades at university I did a subject I loved because I knew that it would eventually lead to a career that I loved even if I didn't know what that was at the time and then I went to do a PhD because I knew that that was the way that I would get to call myself an astrophysicist a scientist and I would be able to do what I loved every single day which was talk about space and answer the questions that we still don't know the answers to or at least try to do them because I'm still learning all scientists are still learning all the time whether it's about the universe or a disease or computers and by getting new people into science we get different viewpoints on problems that haven't been solved for decades and we learn more and that's always what I've loved to do in life is to learn and be amazed that we even have the hope of understanding a tiny fragment and what the universe has to offer dance monkey dance monkey dance monkey tangled in Malaya I think about this new angle oh I don't know about it I don't know how I feel we've rearranged the room for guests and now I'm this way and you're there rather there and I'm like because when you're 15 and somebody tells you love physics I'm gonna believe them oh sorry I just got completely distracted by Instagram and totally though it's still recording Oh Becky we're done now you

Channel: Dr. Becky

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Keywords: Space, Outer Space, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes, The Universe, Science Fiction, Maths, dr becky, becky smethurst, rebecca smethurst, astronomy, space, physics, astrophysics, dayinthelife, university, college, collegelife, universitylife, academiclife, phdlife, scientist, astrophysicist, cosmology, drbecky, galaxies, supermassive black holes, school, education, academia, scicomm, postdoclife, learning, anyone can be a scientist, female scientist, women in STEM, women in science

Id: IVQ3yH-Zusg

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020