How Getting My GED After Leaving a Neglectful Home Led Me to Ask About Astronomy Careers
The computer lab at the adult learning center had three rows of old desktops, and the one closest to the window had a sticky space bar. I had been pressing it too hard, and every sentence came out with an extra gap. My GED test was two weeks away, and I was supposed to be taking a practice math section. Instead, I had typed “NASA” into the search bar and was looking at a picture of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe.
The career counselor, Ms. Alvarez, came by with a clipboard. She was the kind of person who sat down in the chair next to you instead of hovering over your shoulder. She noticed I was not looking at the math questions. She asked what I was thinking about. I said, “If I pass this, I want to do something with space.” She didn’t laugh. She just said, “Okay. That’s very specific. Do you know how people get into that?” I said I didn’t even know if it was something you could do without a regular high school diploma.
I had left home a year before that, at seventeen. It wasn’t a dramatic escape. There wasn’t a single moment of violence or a slammed door that made me leave. It was more that I woke up one morning, and my mother hadn’t come home, and I realized I was already taking care of myself. I was the one who made sure there was food in the house, when there was money. I was the one who remembered to pay the electric bill. When I turned eighteen, I just moved in with a friend from my part-time job. No one stopped me. No one asked where I was going. It was a quiet kind of neglect, and I had learned to meet my own needs pretty well by then. But I did not know how to do school for myself.
I had dropped out in tenth grade. Not because I was failing, but because it felt pointless to sit in class while everything at home was falling apart. I had tried to go back a few times, but the school didn’t have much patience for someone who didn’t have a parent to call for truancy. So for a long time, I just worked retail and told myself I would figure something out eventually.
What got me to the GED program was a simple conversation with my manager at the store. She had gotten her GED three years before me. She said the classes were free and the teachers didn’t treat adults like kids. She said I could take practice tests and nobody would send a note home to my parents, because there were no parents any more to send notes to. That last part convinced me.
The first few weeks were strange. I sat in a room with people who had all kinds of reasons for being there. A woman in her forties who had dropped out to raise her kids. A guy who got his credits taken away after a juvenile detention stint. A kid just a little younger than me who said his online school had shut down in the middle of the pandemic and he had simply. fallen through the cracks. No one asked for anyone’s backstory. We just did the work.
What helped most, looking back, was that the teachers treated time differently. They didn’t say, “You have to pass by next month.” They said, “Let’s see where you are now, and then we’ll figure out what to do.” The math teacher, Mr. Osei, taught fractions using receipts from the dollar store. He had us bring in our own shopping receipts and break down percentages and discounts. It was the first time I understood why numbers mattered outside of a textbook. I passed the GED in the middle of the spring, with a score that surprised me. I had done better in math than anything else. Ms. Alvarez said that made sense, because I had spent so many years counting bills and groceries.
When she asked me about next steps, I still had the Juno picture open on the computer. She told me that you don’t need a specific high school path to work in astronomy. You need math, and you need a college degree, but you don’t need to have had a perfect childhood. She said a lot of people start at community college.
That was the beginning of a much longer and more confusing road. I assumed astronomy was a single job where you looked through a telescope all night. I have since learned that most astronomers don’t look through telescopes at all. They work with data. They write code. They build instruments. They study the physics of light and gravity. That sounded even better to me, but I had no idea where to begin. I did what I always do when I need an answer. I started asking strangers on the internet.
A few people answered me. One was a software engineer who worked on a satellite project. She said she also got a GED, years ago, and then went to community college and transferred to a four-year university. She told me to find a community college with a decent physics department and to just start with calculus. She warned me that community college courses can be crowded, but that you can always go to office hours. She said professors are usually happy to talk to you if you show up with specific questions.
Another person, a graduate student in planetary science, told me to look for citizen science projects. She said I could participate in real research right now, before I had any degrees. I found one where you help measure craters on Mars using images from a spacecraft. I spent a Saturday afternoon clicking through images. It was a tiny task, but it made me feel like I was part of something actual. That was more than I had felt in a long time.
I also started looking into local astronomy clubs. The nearest one met at a community center on the second Tuesday of every month. I was nervous to go. I pictured a room full of people with expensive telescopes and advanced degrees. I went anyway, and it was just a mix of retirees, a high school science teacher, and one person who had worked at a planetarium. They had a telescope set up in the parking lot, and a guy let me look at Saturn. I saw the rings, my own eye. I didn’t tell anyone much about my background. I didn’t need to. They were just happy to talk about the sky.
The weirdest part about stepping away from a neglectful home is that you don’t always know what is normal. You don’t know what questions to ask about college or money or careers, because no one ever walked you through it. I had to learn to say, “I don’t know what the first step is,” and listen to what people told me. That was harder than the math.
If there is something that helped me, it was having a few people who offered small, specific things. My manager at the store told me about the GED program. Ms. Alvarez handed me the number for the community college financial aid office. Mr. Osei gave me a list of free online math courses. None of them said “follow your dreams” or “you can be anything you want.” They said, “Here is a place to start.” That kind of concrete help mattered more than any big speech.
I am taking a calculus class now. It is my first semester at community college, and I am not going to pretend it is easy. I have to write down every step of every problem because I never learned it the first time. I have a meeting with an astronomy professor later this month to ask about the transfer program and whether my plan to start with physics is realistic. I have narrowed my career question down to a few specific things. I want to know what working in a lab is actually like. I want to know if it is okay to be older than the other students. I want to know what happens if I fail the first class.
I still do not have a clear answer. The path to astronomy is long and I am only at the beginning. But I have a GED, I have a library card, and I have a date to look at Saturn next month again. For right now, that is enough. I don’t know what the next step is after that. I am learning to be okay with not knowing, as long as I am still moving forward.
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