Describe a typical day at your jobOne day at my job is never like another: I may sometimes be busy with analyzing data from telescopes (e.g. images from clusters if galaxies), sometimes be writing a scientific publication about it, sometimes be reading about the advances of colleagues. Also, it happens regularly that I need to prepare talks or seminars to be presented to either colleague astronomers, or to an audience of students or less expert people. Tasks of my job are thus extremely various, which makes it exciting!
Travelling regularly to meet fellow astronomers around the world is definitely one of the coolest parts of my job! As I said earlier, I also really like this diverse aspect of my job, which ensures me to never get bored of it. Finally, nothing is more inspiring than waking up every day and ask to myself “What am I going to learn more about the Universe today?”.
The most difficult part of being an astronomer is the fact that working contracts are usually very short: 2-3 years at most. This implies to move regularly and go to live to several countries for many years… which is of course very exciting in a sense, but also difficult family-wise. Some astronomers manage to find permanent positions, however the few number of those make them quite difficult to get.
I completed a Bachelor degree in physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) before moving to the Université de Liège for a Master degree in space sciences. Afterwards I complete a PhD thesis in astrophysics at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands, which made me become officallay a professional astronomer.
I suppose the biggest challenge will be to keep moving with new technologies that will make the future of astronomy, in particular machine learning and the handling of big data. This may be quite tricky to learn from scratch (in fact, I still have no experience with machine learning!), however I have good hopes that classes in universities will adapt to these new tools and methods.
I had quite an intense training in mathematics (7 hours per week), which greatly helped me at the University. It goes without saying that physics classes are extremely important to develop in this field of expertise. This being said, languages are not to be neglected. French and Latin helped me to structure my thoughts (very important to write good quality articles!), and English is also essential (although nothing is better than real immersion in a foreign country).
THE big non-technical skill is… curiousity! In fact, curious astronomers are usually the most successful of us. This job is mainly about finding new ideas, inventing creative methods to solve long-standing issues, and so on. Being curious about everything naturally leads to other critical skills such as motivation and perseverance.
By reading some cool stuff about astronomy (in books, magazines, on tv or on the Internet). I also regularly attended youth astronomy camps, which really helped to trigger curiousity about all these topics.
Defending and completing my PhD thesis has been certainly one of those. But many other everyday-life events sometimes makes me extremely proud of my career path so far. For instance, presenting a good talk at an international conference, having a scientific paper published in a high quality journal. Or, most simply, meeting and talking routinely with worldwide experts in astronomy!
Probably the one that I’m having now! But if I could get a permanent position in astronomy, I would definitely be the happiest man in the world.
My best advice is: always keep that great curiousity for everything around you! Being fascinated by whatever you like will boost you with positive energy and will make you take the right choices in your future life. Also, keep in mind that everything is possible and reachable. At school I was a rather good student, though not exceptionally brilliant… yet, curiousity and motivation brought me to being an astronomer, which is a job I love! If you keep in mind that even the most prestigious institutes (NASA, ESA, and the world’s best universities) are filled with humans like you and me (sometimes working on great ideas, sometimes doing mistakes as well), then nothing will stop you!
