in Matthew’s eventual success, and it seemed to me (and still does) to have been a combination of the two.

Shortly after that colloquium, I applied for and got the TED Fellowship. Many people have heard of TED Talks, but if you don’t know, those TED talks come from a big conference, not unlike the AAS in size, but attended by various movers and shakers from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (which is what its acronym stands for). However, it is several orders of magnitude more expensive to attend TED than the AAS, so TED started the TED Fellows program to bring early career people who would never be able to afford it to the conference for free. TED was a great experience for me in a variety of ways, but possibly the biggest outcome was that they teamed me up with a career coach, Jen Sellers, who has patiently spent the last 5-6 years walking me through the dark forest of uncertainty that is being a living human being, and most especially, a postdoc. Just as a good research talk distills down some of what one has learned about the universe, I hope to pay Jen’s generosity 