I was born and spent my childhood and early adult life in Boulder, Colorado. For those who haven’t been there or don’t know about Boulder, it’s home to the University of Colorado and a whole slew of science research institutions including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Space Science Institute. Ball Aerospace makes its home in Boulder, along with other space-related outfits.
Both of my degrees are from CU, and as an undergraduate, I worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and hung out at the campus planetarium. In graduate school I worked for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and continued doing a few lectures at Fiske once in a while to keep my finger in the live planetarium show end of things.
It was interesting to grow up in Boulder’s science community, once I got old enough to appreciate it. There were always lectures on campus, covering just about any topic in science you can imagine. I remember going up to CU once to hear a fellow speak about the emergence of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, and it was the first time I ever heard of stromatolites. Another time a group of us went up there to see a physics lecturer and his amazing experiments. Astronomers, geologists, physicists, you name it, they were available to us, and as I grew up, I met some who were the parents of variousradiosond school classmates.
My dad often talked about the science these folks were doing. One time we found a radiosonde from a weather experiment. It had landed in our fields (we had a farm outside Boulder). He called around and found out it belonged to one of the research institutes (probably the predecessor to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Together we took it back to the lab and I remember looking around with awe at the place. Daddy also worked at Ball Aerospace briefly and used to bring home pictures of some of the spacecraft the company was working on.
Like most kids, I went through the whole “I wanna be an astronaut, I wanna be a pilot, I wanna be a … whatever…” thought process. Eventually I ended up deciding I wanted to be an astronaut and writer. Of course, I haven’t gotten to do the astronaut part, although I certainly have met plenty of them and understand what it is they do. My science writing is a direct result of growing up in a place where science research and education is an integral part of the community.
Being an astronaut or a scientist isn’t an idea outside of the realm of possibility in a place like Boulder–not then and certainly not now. It occurs to me that kids growing up in other places where science isn’t such a big part of community life might feel differently, as if science was being done “somewhere else” or was for “other” people. I’m glad I grew up in Boulder; there are days that I miss it very much. Would I go back? That’s a question we talk about once in a while. I don’t know if I can go back “home” or not. But I’m sure as heck glad that I lived there in the first place. There aren’t too many places where one small town holds so many research groups. Perhaps that’s why I think of it as the center of the cosmos, and I know that for those of us who grew up in Boulder with an interest in science, it definitely took a village to create that interest.
Living in Golden I cared less about the astronomers and more about the aerospace engineers. I’ll never forget how welcoming they were when I was a freshman in high school looking for a place to go for the new ‘Take Your Daughters to Work Day’. Our high school had gotten a grant for encouraging women in science etc so they paid for me to go to Boulder. It was a blast playing in their cleanroom, the shuttle bay room (down to the mm in size to match the shuttle) and the wind tunnel. Having students argue over whose class they were going to take me too seemed cool and so was watching their experiments and hearing about their classes (namely the Mars mission class where they had to design a mission). I do remember later in high though using the astronomy library to grab articles from ApJ for my college composition class where my ‘project’ was on quasars.
Then again, I also got my fill of physicists from Mines given that friend’s fathers were professors in the physics dept and the fact that my dad went there. When it came to college applications though I applied out of state because CU didn’t add the astro major until the 1999-2000 school year which is when I was a college sophomore.