devote myself mostly full time to studying the ethics of Mars exploration, which I have been thinking about in my non-copious spare time for a while. As such, I had stepped a bit away from the research I was focused on in Chicago, but I was not yet ready to give a full talk on the work I’m doing at the Library. The NSF AAPF Symposium is also somewhat unique, in that it’s not often that one has a chance to speak with an audience oriented towards postdocs and organized specifically around a postdoctoral fellowship, so I thought about what my postdoc self would have liked to hear a talk about. What follows is a slightly edited version of the talk I decided to give.

As corny as it might sound, this essay is about success– but success that is defined by you, rather than by the external measuring sticks that those of us in academia are used to measuring ourselves with. A better word for success in this context might be “fulfillment”. “Fulfillment” (as I use it here) is a condition that describes the path you are on, rather than a destination you can reach– and practically speaking, it 