doing the public communication that had become very important to me, and I kept thinking, “what if I get hit by a bus in Year Five?”

The Adler, on the other hand, had its own sacrifices: while the positions are not term limited, they are also not tenure track. It’s also a non-profit institution and on a 12 month, rather than 9-month, salary– which means the job is less stable and the pay is lower than what I would have the potential to earn at a university. In general, your starting salary is one of the biggest influences on your lifetime earnings, so that also means lower lifetime earnings overall.

So: was I willing to sacrifice the part of me that likes spreading scientific knowledge beyond the experts, or the part that wants to never be in danger of eviction again? In the words of A Tribe Called Quest, “Riding on the train with no dough, sucks”– but ultimately, the decision came down to values. I decided that I would rather devote the majority of my time convincing as many people as possible that science is accessible to them if they want it, than to focus on creating new astronomers 