The Blog

As promised, the text of one speech...

My name is Catherine Braiding and I'm a theoretical astrophysicist. It's a great line to use at parties and school reunions, because what can anyone say that could top "theoretical astrophysicist"? Everyone thinks rocket scientists are cool, even if they don't actually get to work with rockets. Unfortunately, doing astronomy also meant that I got a reputation among my old school friends for being "the girl who took the ad astra thing too far". It's a bad pun, and I'm sorry for that, but it's certainly true.

An astrophysicist is a great thing to be, it's why they invited me here to speak to you today, but it's not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I had a list as long as my arm, and more often than not I thought I'd rather end up studying English, maybe with a focus on journalism, or perhaps even music or media studies. As I said, it was a bit of a long list. Nowhere on that list was a science degree, much to the disgust of Mr Clark, my Chemistry teacher, and Mr Dunn, my 3 unit Maths teacher in years eleven and twelve.

Three days before the deadline for changing our uni preferences, while sitting under a tree in the top quad at recess, one of my friends flicked to a different page in the UAC guide, the big list of all the different university degrees offered in Australia, and there was the Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics. And I thought, "what the heck, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, maybe it will be fun", and I put it at the top of my wishlist.

But my then-vague interest in science dated back to long before I was considering career choices. It just took a while for me to remember it.

In 1994, I was invited along on one of the Bankstown to Broken Hill Youth Exchanges, and I got to spend a week in the outback city with some of my friends and our host families. The trip culminated in a bush dance in an old barn in the nearby ghost town of Silverton. My friends and I skipped out on the dancing part of things and instead went out to play on the swings.

It was a very cold winter night, the sort you only really get in the desert where there's no water in the atmosphere to keep in the heat, and we lay down on the ground to look up at a sky filled with more stars than a city kid like me had ever seen before. A bright white haze hung in a line across the sky like an oddly-shaped cloud, and the more I looked at it, the more I realised that it wasn't a cloud at all, but some part of that starry sky that I had never been able to see, coming from Sydney where we have so very much light pollution.

I know now that it's the combined light of the hundred billion stars that make up the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, tilted at such an angle that throughout the Southern winter it's high up in the sky, and that on the coldest of nights in Sydney, when you'd much rather be inside with a cup of hot chocolate, you will be able to make it out faintly passing through the constellations of Scorpius and the Southern Cross. But at that time all I knew was that it was beautiful and that some day, when I didn't have to stress quite so much about school, I would find out what it was.

We all have moments like that: of beauty; of awe; moments when we just look up at the sky and wonder "what is that?" and when that happens you should act on it. Take the inspiration and the chances that are given to you and run with them. Do science if it appeals to you in a moment of wonder. Form a rock band if you can't get a tune out of your head and you want to share it with someone else. Look something up on wikipedia if you just want an answer.

Eventually I was able to follow up on that moment in Silverton, though it took me four years to realise that I wanted to study astronomy. Ten years ago I had just finished my HSC exams, and was being rejected by McDonalds for a summer job, and I made the decision to study at Macquarie University, first doing that Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and then my Honours year, which was an extra year of coursework and my first taste of scientific research, and then the PhD, which has taken me five years but I wouldn't trade that time for anything. Well, I might be tempted in return for an actual salary, but most days I'd say it's worth it and we can't have everything.

In the December of 2002, when I was trying to decide what to do with my newly completed undergraduate degree, my best friends and I packed up some tents and made our way to Ceduna in South Australia, where for thirty seconds we got to see the Moon completely block out the Sun. It was late afternoon, we were sitting on a perfect sandy beach looking out at the ocean, and there were stars visible in the darkened sky. Of course, there was also a little cloud that blocked the Moon blocking the Sun, but that's both life and science for you: as often as it is beautiful and awe-inspiring, and full of the potential for discovery, sometimes things get clouded out. Despite that disappointment, it was on that trip that I decided to go on with further research and here I am today.

One of the things that was suggested as a topic when the school invited me to speak to you was how wonderful it was that a young woman from Sydney's South West had (almost) earned a PhD in Astrophysics. And I was surprised to realise that it was that big a deal.

Yes, I'm a woman from Yagoona, who has spent two and a half nights driving the Parkes Radio telescope, which shakes like an elevator every time one moves the dish and continues to work even in the driving rain; I've spent a few days observing on the Australia Telescope Compact Array, which is a series of six radio dishes spaced along a set of train tracks a kilometre long, and I used to regularly run Macquarie University's Observatory for the general public on Friday nights.

Yes, I went to Birrong Girls High School, and I've travelled around the world on the university's budget, attending summer schools in Japan and Germany on star and planet formation, and a conference in Hawaii, and my only disappointment with all of that was that I only got one afternoon for sightseeing and snorkling on the Big Island. I've organised the Astronomical Society of Australia's Annual Scientific Meeting, a week long series of talks and discussions on all the research in astronomy being done at all the observatories and the universities in Australia. I've met both famous scientists and obscure ones, and they've all been fascinating people that I could learn from.

I've taught both High School and University students; I've written one thesis--a novel-length essay--on the light that we see when the remnant of an exploded star, a supernova, interacts with a cloud that is forming new stars, and large sections of a second thesis describing the results of a computer model that I've built, which shows that the magnetic field in those star-forming clouds causes stars to form efficiently and may even show that planets naturally build as a part of the star formation process. This is all work that no one has done before, and in the ten years since I left school I've become one of only about six people on Earth who truly understand the complexity and importance of this project.

While I was doing all that, the fact that I was from Sydney's South West never really came up except as a point of personal pride. Yes, the university had to pay for my trips upfront, while the policy usually says that they reimburse a person afterwards, and yes, I took packed lunches to uni while my north shore friends bought takeaway food, and yes, I bought second-hand textbooks when money was tight. But my background as coming from this side of town never had any influence on me academically, and only ever came up when everyone swapped stories from High School.

Birrong Girls has great teachers who do care about you and your education, and the extra lessons you have learned about multiculturalism and inclusion, and leadership, and standing up for what you believe in and not letting anyone hold you back, and all the things from the powerpoint presentation earlier are more important than anything anyone may say to you about where you have come from, or what you might achieve as a woman in this world. For despite it being a cliché line, you can achieve anything you set your minds to, and in science, that's all that matters. More than in any other career path I've heard about; in science gender, social status, cultural background and upbringing don't matter as much as people may tell you they do, all that anyone needs to succeed is a mind that is willing to search for the answers to life's mysteries.

As you go out to your summer vacation, your time away from reading assigned texts and maths homework (except for the new year twelve students), your time for swimming and bludging and doing as little as possible for as long as possible, keep your eyes open. Somewhere in amongst all those celebrations of new-found freedom may be the inspiration to do something truly special with your life.

Find your dreams, work as hard as you need to at school to achieve them, and if you can't figure out what you want to be when you grow up that's okay too. Some of us are still trying to figure it out, even if we are currently theoretical astrophysicists.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, and congratulations to all of you, and your parents and teachers, for making it through another school year.

Labels: birrong, high school, public speaking makes me ill, published, snacky's law

Labels: odd smells in my office, photos, postcards, published, send me love, sending our love down the well