One Astronomer's Noise

I’ve been thumbing through some of my oldest blog posts in an archive I’ve saved, some over 20 years old. Oh… oh sweet summer child. I was resolutely sure about ideas and philosophies that I later ditched. But… there are the seeds of the person I am today in there.

I found musings on who gets to decide college curricula after serving as a student member of my college’s curriculum committee. I had no clue, literally no clue, about this thing called “shared governance” among college professors, administrators, and trustees that is so central to my current work. Yet I had the idea that different factions worked together and that the individual places and people had a profound impact on the student experience.

I cared a lot about good science education, and I seemed overly obsessed with intelligent design trying to make its way into K-12 science classrooms. It feels silly now, but perhaps that’s not silly after all. We know that using intelligent design as a “wedge” in the 00’s was part of the larger social conservative movement that led to… all this. I’m proud of 20-something Nicole after all, silly and sophomoric her writing may seem to be now. She was on a journey that led to this moment.

There are posts from when I discovered Phil Plait’s blog (now a newsletter!) and Astronomy Cast, never imagining that I’d eventually befriend and work with those people! There are others that need not be named that I followed as well, but they turned out to be huge disappointments. (And we have the RECEIPTS.) Many of these experiences feel like a lifetime ago, but I still feel how they are a part of who I am today. I feel like I’ve stumbled upon my old journals, only I actually shared them with the world at the time!

What led me back here? After 11 years in the professoriate, I’m finally taking a sabbatical. This is a time period when your institution of higher education actually gives you a little break from teaching and administrative tasks to work on research and scholarship. For someone that teaches three courses per semester every semester, that’s a huge deal. If you read my most recent post, “What it means to be at the helm,” you know that being department chair on top of that these past two years has taken its toll. For one glorious semester, I get a break from all that.

I’m primarily going to be working on expanding Radio JOVE‘s participatory science offerings, blending two passions of my career up until now: radio astronomy instrumentation and citizen science. I’m also going to be helping an open education textbook that is currently in development. Along the way, I look forward to slowing down and perhaps catching up my pedagogy to the myriad of challenges posed by generative AI.

Most of all, I need to slow down and rediscover what it’s like to just be ME again, whatever that means. I have piles of books to be read, piles of junk to be sorted, piles of thoughts to be weeded through for what actually serves me and what doesn’t. Maybe at the age of the answer to life the universe and everything, I get to hit reset. And that, for me, always involved getting back to writing.

I look forward to posting a few more “From the Archives” posts here after scouring my archives for what I still find interesting to share. And, it’s time for the words swirling in my brain to be put down somewhere. This seems as good a place as any. It’s almost anachronistic to blog when everyone has a newsletter, but I don’t see my writing as being that consistent or coherent just yet to embark on that journey. (Except, apparently that’s an option to subscribe via email on WordPress if you want it! See below.)

So, as I wrap up my last finals week of 2026, I look forward to reconnecting with the part of me that can string words together in a way that, hopefully, others will find worthwhile.

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