How Getting My GED After Leaving a Neglectful Home Made Me Rethink an Astronomy Career
I remember the day I finally walked into the community college testing center. Fluorescent lights, plastic chairs, a faint smell of floor cleaner. I was 19, and I hadn’t been in a classroom since I was 16. My home situation wasn’t the kind that makes headlines—no violence, no courts, no social workers knocking on the door. There was just… nothing. Empty fridge, no one asking if I did my homework, no one waking me up for school. I stopped going, and no one noticed. Eventually I left.
Astronomy was my escape long before I earned my GED. I’d take my cheap binoculars to the apartment roof and find the moon, then Jupiter, then a few constellations I’d learned from a library book. It wasn’t romantic stargazing. It was just quiet. The sky didn’t ask anything of me.
So when I passed the GED a few months later, the obvious next step seemed to be figuring out how to turn that quiet escape into a job. That’s when I hit the wall.
The career advice I found online was either too broad—”follow your passion!”—or so deeply buried in jargon I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t know what an astrophysicist actually did. I didn’t know the difference between astronomy and astrophysics. I didn’t even know you could work with telescopes without being a scientist. And I had no one to ask. My parents weren’t in the picture, and my high school was long behind me.
I remember one embarrassing attempt: I called a local university’s physics department and asked if they had “anything for people like me.” The office manager was polite but confused. That call went nowhere.
Eventually, I found a professor’s email on a faculty page and sent a short message. I wrote that I had recently gotten my GED, that I was interested in astronomy, and that I didn’t have a single guide in my life. I asked if he’d be willing to talk for ten minutes.
He said yes, and that meeting changed how I thought about everything—not because he gave me a grand pep talk, but because he was brutally specific.
We met in his office, which was cluttered with papers and coffee mugs. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said, “Look at stars.” He smiled and said, “That’s a start.” Then he told me the truth: research astronomy is intensely competitive, and the common path is a Ph.D., which takes years. He asked if I was good at math. I said I didn’t know, because I hadn’t taken a real math class since ninth grade. He didn’t flinch. He just said, “Start at community college. Take Calculus I and II, plus physics. Work hard there. Then transfer to a four-year school. If you still like it, go further. If you don’t, that’s fine too, because you’ll have a degree in physics or math, and those are useful regardless.”
He also mentioned something I had never considered. “There are technician jobs—working on instruments, wiring, software for telescopes. Those don’t require a Ph.D., and they’re often easier to get started in. People overlook them because they think the only job in astronomy is ‘astronomer.'”
That ten-minute conversation did more than any career quiz. It gave me a map. The map wasn’t pretty, but it was concrete. And that’s exactly what I needed, because when you grow up without someone to help you make a plan, the hardest part isn’t lack of motivation. It’s not knowing what to do on a Tuesday afternoon.
So I enrolled at the community college. I signed up for Calculus I, something I genuinely believed I couldn’t do. The first exam, I failed. Hard. I panicked, thinking, This is the proof that I don’t belong here. But then something useful happened: I told my advisor that I was having a hard time. Not emotionally—I didn’t know that language—but practically. I said I couldn’t focus during evening classes because I still didn’t have a stable routine. She didn’t give me a lecture about study skills. She just said, “Let’s get you a tutor.” And she did. It turned out that I wasn’t bad at math. I was just hungry and exhausted and scared. The tutor turned out to be patient, and she asked me a question that no one had asked before: “When you solve a problem, what do you think about?” I said, “I think about the roof, and the sky.” She said, “That’s good. That’s motivation.”
Around that time, the college’s observatory—a tiny building with a dome the size of a car—hosted a public stargazing night. I volunteered to help set up telescopes. A woman from a local science museum was there, showing kids how to look at the moon through a smaller scope. I told her I was thinking about astronomy careers. She said she had a GED, went to community college, then got a bachelor’s in education. Now she did planetarium programming and science communication. “You don’t need to be a professor,” she said. “There’s a whole field of people who translate astronomy for the public.”
That opened yet another door. I realized that “astronomy career” was a category, not a single job. There were research scientists, engineers, data analysts, science writers, planetarium staff, optics specialists, lab managers. Each had different educational paths. And none of them expected a kid with a GED to know all that on day one.
Here’s the part that stuck with me, and it’s what I want parents and teachers to hear: when a student like me asks about a career in space, don’t just say “study hard and follow your dreams.” That’s the losing move. Instead, break it down. Ask what part of astronomy appeals to them. Then give them a concrete next step that doesn’t require money, a network, or a roadmap they already have. For example:
– Check out a local astronomy club. Most have meetings that are free and open to the public. You’ll meet retired engineers, schoolteachers, and sometimes professionals who are very willing to talk.
– Email one college professor—just one—and ask for a fifteen-minute phone call or a coffee. Don’t ask for a job. Ask, “What do you wish you had known when you started?”
– Look at a community college’s course catalog and find the first math class. Then find out when it starts and what it costs. That’s the plan, at least for the first semester.
– Consider programs like NASA’s OSTEM or internships at a local planetarium or science museum. They aren’t always competitive in the way you’d think—some just need a responsible person who shows up.
And for the student themselves: you don’t have to declare a major on day one. You just have to take one class. Then another. That’s how you build a path when no one handed you one.
I’m now at a four-year school, majoring in physics with a minor in astronomy. I’m not sure if I’ll go to graduate school. The logistics—funding, applications, letters of recommendation—still feel intimidating. But I found out about instrumentation and telescope operations, and that’s pulling me in. I might end up as the person who builds the machine, not the person who uses it to write papers. And that would be okay.
Last night, a friend from the astronomy club and I took his old 10-inch Dobsonian out to a field outside town. We spent an hour following Saturn as it drifted across the eyepiece. No one had a camera. No one was recording anything. We just looked. He chatted about a gremlin in his telescope’s motor drive, and I talked about a physics problem I’d been wrestling with. Neither of us had big answers.
I don’t have a neat conclusion. I still don’t know if I’m “destined” for an astronomy career, and I think that’s the wrong question. The real question is: can I keep taking one more concrete step without collapsing? So far, yes. And that’s enough for now. For the teachers reading this—if a kid sits at the back of your classroom and asks about space, try not to say “the sky’s the limit.” Instead, say, “Let me show you the next thing you can do on Thursday.” That’s what made the difference for me. That’s how a GED turned into a physics major, and how a lonely roof with binoculars turned into a plan that could actually work.
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