(and perhaps more significantly) I was fortunate that there were a number of opportunities for which I felt I could make a good argument. Again, there are factors out of your control, and I am writing from a position of privilege. During the process of writing down why I thought certain jobs were a good fit, I realized that I thought I would be happy in a fairly wide variety of settings, from teaching-heavy, undergrad-only institutions, to traditional research universities, to something focused on public communication (like the Adler). I interviewed at a sampling of each of these kinds of institutions, and ultimately got two offers, one from the Adler, and one from a very traditional physics and astronomy department at a research university, which I will refer to as Research University.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge here that one factor beyond your control are the norms of astronomical society. When I was in grad school, and I think this is still true now, getting a tenure-track faculty position at a research university was supposed to be the pinnacle of one’s existence as an astronomer. Nobody outright told me that, of course, but I had gleaned as 