by shepherding graduate students through research programs. The Adler clearly offered me the opportunity to not only speak with the broader public, but specifically to reach young people of color via the Chicago Public School system field trips, and our outreach programs throughout the city. At Research University, I would largely be reaching kids who had already made it to college, or to grad school. Perhaps most importantly of all, my success at the Adler would be evaluated along similar criteria to what I considered important for myself, demonstrating the alignment of the institution’s values with my own.

Evaluation Metrics: Measuring Your Progress Based On Your Values
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As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, it isn’t really all that surprising that publications have become the de facto metric by which success in the field is determined: it’s a number, something that can quantify the impact of your research output, something simple enough that it can be calculated by Google Scholar or any number of online tools, and then used to cross-compare between astronomers in very different subfields. As a side note, astronomy has a particularly high publication rate compared to other sciences, which makes it an easy 