Last week I went to a reunion for Harvard astronomy PhD graduates. This was kind of an unusual event — Harvard does lots of reunions, but they are usually for people who were undergrads there, and whom the university hopes will donate lots of money. The astronomy department was also attempting to raise money from this event, although one might think that soliciting scientists would be fairly futile. (Certainly my initial reaction to getting a fundraising letter was that surely Harvard astronomy professors could write grant proposals, just like the rest of us academics.)

You might find it interesting to know, however, that people with PhDs in astronomy from Harvard are not all astronomy professors, not by a long shot. There is a complete list of all alumni here, and you can see that there is a variety of careers, from professor to medical doctor (!) to lawyer (!!), with quite a number of people now working in the financial industry. Presumably the fund-raising effort was aimed more at these folks.

At the reunion itself I shook hands with an astronaut, rubbed elbows with a Nobel Prize winner, and caught up with classmates who are now Harvard and MIT professors. I also talked to many of my colleagues who (like me) fill out the fainter end of the luminosity function. I think most of us are happy in our fields, even if there is the occasional pang when our mothers ask us why we’re not famous too.

The two panel discussions covered the hot topics in astrophysics — cosmology and exoplanets — and featured both alumni and profs. I found both to be a bit bittersweet, with justifiable excitement about recent accomplishments but worries that we might not be able to follow up on this excitement. Nobody, even rich Harvard astronomers, is without funding problems, it seems; as I have opined here before, we may have to get used to doing more with less. On a grander scale, Frank Shu noted that the Fermi paradox  is a deep mystery and possibly does not bode well for the future of human civilization. Geez, just as we figure out all of cosmology, our descendants won’t last long?

At this particular reunion, two groups were represented that are not ordinarily at a reunion: current astronomy professors—not all Harvard alumni, although there are many—and current grad students. I was interested to see that the current grad students seem to be just as concerned about future jobs in astronomy as students I have seen elsewhere. The faculty didn’t seem to be particularly worried about this and it’s also interesting to note that the size of the grad student  class has expanded by about a factor of 2 since I started in 1995. This PhD-training-versus-jobs disconnect is something that I plan to talk about more here; it was addressed nicely in a recent Globe and Mail op-ed piece.

All in all, it was an interesting day, providing a nice snapshot of how the field of astronomy has changed over the past few decades and ideas about where it will possibly go in the future.  Actually I find it pretty difficult to imagine what the field will be like in 20 years; I wonder if this blog post will still be around then for comparison!