Reach for Your Own Star
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I share the segments of my life’s paths that got me here, which, for
the most part, were upstream and against the winds of society.
As an astrophysicist and as the Director of New York
City’s celebrated Hayden Planetarium, I get to decode
the nature of the universe and create journeys through it for
all the public to see.
What was not apparent, however, was the somewhat peculiar
profile that I carried into the job. Although everyone’s
life is unique, certain categories of life experience can be generalized.
My tenure as a nerdy kid—complete with winnings
in the science fair, membership in the physics club, and high
scores in mathematics—greatly resembles all that you may
have stereotyped for the world’s community of nerds. My
time as an athlete—as captain of my high school’s wrestling
team and as a varsity competitor in college—was no different
from that of any other athlete. My interest in the universe—
carrying me to a PhD in astrophysics—led me down paths
shared by many of my colleagues. And my life as a black
male in America—getting stopped for no reason by the police
or being trailed by security guards in department stores—
is hardly different from that of other black males among my
contemporaries. But when you combine all ingredients, my
experiences offer a possibly unique portal through which to
view life, society, and the universe.
I want every generation of stargazers—whether they sit
atop a tenement roof or an Appalachian Mountain—to have a
Source: © Neil deGrasse Tyson 2004. Adapted from The Sky Is Not
the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (New York:
Prometheus Books, 2004).
fresh lens with which to see the universe and to reach for
their own star.
I was just nine years old and had just seen a space show
at the Hayden Planetarium, but I now had an answer for that
perennially annoying question all adults ask, “What do you
want to be when you grow up?” Although I could barely
pronounce the word, I would tell them, “I want to be an
astrophysicist.”
That was the night. The universe poured down from the
sky and flowed into my body. I had been called. The study of
the universe would be my career, and no force on earth would
stop me.
A precocious childhood friend of mine, who lived in my
neighborhood, taught me to play chess, poker, pinochle, Risk,
and Monopoly. He introduced me to brainteaser books. I loved
teasers that involved math. The more we played, the more
stretched and sharpened my eleven-year old brain became.
My friend’s most important contribution to my life’s path,
however, was when he introduced me to binoculars and encouraged
me to look up. He encouraged me to look beyond
the streetlights, beyond the buildings, beyond the clouds, and
out toward the moon and stars of the night sky. The moon
was no longer just a thing on the sky—it was another world
in the universe. I later learned that Galileo’s “observatory” was
his windowsill and his rooftop. So was mine, having grown up
on the eighth floor of the Skyview Apartments in the Bronx.
My sixth grade science teacher, aware of my growing interest
in the universe from my book reports, clipped a small
advertisement from the newspaper announcing that year’s
offering of astronomy courses at the Hayden Planetarium.
She probably also figured that if my excess social energy
were intelligently diverted outside of the school that I could
grow in ways unfettered by the formal limits of the classroom.
A student’s academic life experience can be constructed
from much more than what happens in a classroom. Good
teachers know this. The best teachers make sure it happens.
From then onward, the Hayden Planetarium became a
much broader and deeper resource to the growth of my life’s
interests. I had previously only known it to be a place with a
beautiful night sky—but the actual universe is much, much
bigger.
For my thirteenth birthday, I received my first telescope.
And I had a backyard where I could observe the heavens for
hours and hours without distractions of any kind since my
family temporarily moved for one year from the Bronx to
Lexington, Massachusetts.
When I was a student in elementary school and junior
high school in New York City, I eagerly attended monthly
public lectures given by visiting experts on various topics
on the universe at the Hayden Planetarium. The speakers
were so smart and knew so much that I wanted to be just like
them when I grew up. Fifteen years later, I returned to the
Planetarium to deliver an invited public lecture of the same
monthly series that I had attended as a student. Immediately
following my lecture, as if I had passed through a loop in the
space-time continuum, a 12-year-old student walked up to me
after my lecture and asked, “What should I do to be just like
you?” At that moment, I knew that I had helped to plant a
dream in someone else the way others before had planted
a dream in me.
Word of my cosmic interests spread among my extended
relatives and family friends. The family network helped in
many and varied ways to provide an intellectual buoyancy
to my pursuits. One of my mother’s cousins worked in the
Brooklyn Public Library and never failed to acquire and send
deaccessioned astronomy and math books my way. A close
friend of my parents had some expertise in photography and
back-and-white film processing. She served as a first mentor
in my early days of astrophotography. Another close friend of
the family, who happened to be professor of education at The
City College of New York, recommended me to one of her
colleagues, an instructor at CCNY’s Workshop Center for
Open Education—a program that offered continued education
programs for adults. The instructor, in turn, invited me to give
a talk to her fall classes on the cosmos. For me, talking about
the universe was like breathing. I suppose it was no different
from another kid talking about his treasured baseball card
collection or a film buff recalling scenes from a favorite
movie. I could not have been more comfortable sharing what
I knew.
At age 14, by summer’s end, my fate was set: I was a
card-carrying member of New York’s Amateur Astronomer’s
Association.
In the fall of my senior year of high school, I applied to
five universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Cornell, which
were my top three choices. When it came to actually choosing
a college to attend, I devised a decision matrix that tallied
the number of physics and astronomy articles in Scientific
American written by scientists who had been undergraduates
at the schools that admitted me. I also tallied where these
same authors earned their Masters degrees, their PhDs, and
where they were currently on the faculty. Harvard won in
every category.
My parents never told me where to go or what to learn. In
retrospect, that was for the better—because they could not.
This ensured that the expression of my life’s interests were
as pure as space itself. To this day, my parents remain two of
the warmest and most caring parents I have known. Of all the
places I have been, the troubles I have seen, and the trials
I have endured, let there be no doubt that I continually felt
their guidance ahead of me, their support behind me, their
love beside me.