Jana

Does Jana look like she has stars in her eyes? Well she should, since she's a graduate student in Astronomy. But Jana wasn't just wandering around campus hoping Comet Kohoutek would come whizzing by, she was part of a weeklong effort plugging the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (don't you see the IYA 2009 button on her jacket?).

I've had a bit of a romance with astronomy myself. I think it's safe to say that I was the only kid in grade school with subscriptions to Sky and Telescope and Astronomy magazines! Though astronomy was just one of the many cool things that held my interest as a kid. There was also paleontology, archaeology, meteorology, vulcanology, earthquakeology...I wanted to either be looking up or digging in the earth.

It was fun to dream about my future back then. I remember thinking that I'd do great in high school, maybe go to Stanford, and then come out and be some kind of scientist. Who knows what kind. But I was a lousy student in high school. Actually, that shouldn't have been much of a surprise since I was a lousy student in grade school. It wasn't that I wasn't smart. I knew I was smart. It's just that everything I was smart in wasn't being taught by my teachers. I just wasn't interested in what they had to offer. I had more fun looking through books in the library about all those cool things from the previous paragraph and so much more. Yet with all of these interests, I still somehow found time to get into lots of trouble. I might have been the original multi-tasker.

Today, I don't mind being on the sidelines of science. I can still read stuff, or watch Michio Kaku spread the gospel on the Science Channel. I'm content with that.

At least that's what I keep telling myself.