(December 21, 2015 at 3:40 am)Quantum Wrote:Thank you for that well thought out reply, I really appreciate it and what you said makes a lot of sense.(December 21, 2015 at 3:00 am)Heat Wrote: I want to be an astronomer, even though I don't tend to excel in either science nor math[not that i'm bad at those].
Very good choice
I am not exactly an astronomer, but close enough.
So in retrospect I would do the following if I were you, assuming you are USian: check out which universities have the best research programs which are involved in the great telescopes either on mauna kea etc. or in space, you get my gist. They don't necessarily are identical to the top 5 ivy league unis, though there is of course always some overlap. Don't overlook the radio astronomy research, they do great things (beginning of next year, we might get the first radio array images of our central black hole event horizon, how cool is that?). It can't hurt to try and talk to some of your potential advisors there beforehand in order to get a better idea how the process of getting into a research thesis would ideally work (though be aware that in a bachelor level thesis, one can only get to a limited understanding of the field and will only work on a very specific problem - ideally, it has nevertheless some connection to cutting edge research, and it would be useful to have an advisor who makes sure that this is the case).
Look at the best handful or more of them, look at the requirements of the universities to get into the undergrad program. That is the crucial part for what you are doing now. Realize that their tuition fees are insane and work even harder in school in order to get scholarships to ease the pain a bit. If going out of state is out of the question for you, it would depend on where you live. With a bit of luck, there is an uni around with a good program from which you can later go on somewhere else.
Then apply to those and several alternative choices (not getting into your first choice is of course no big deal). Then work your ass off in college in order to get to do an undergrad thesis on one of the telescopes for a first taste. You will be in competition with people who are crazy smart and have always excelled at maths and science, so brace yourself for being a little bit intimidated, but don't let that deter you. You don't have to be the top maths whiz in your cohort to get to do great astronomy research, but you have to become damn good nevertheless. Sometimes it can be better not to go to the most famous and bestest and biggest one, because one might in some cases have a better chance to get a nice project and advisor in a somewhat smaller program with less extreme competition. Still, what you currently know about maths and physics is probably child's play in comparison to what you will have to learn if you want to do groundbreaking research. Why not just for fun check out some college level and graduate level books to get an idea what awaits you.
I know some guys who did their undergrad thesis at MIT on one of the LIGO gravitational waves detectors (watch out for results from that next years, there have been rumours). I can only guess that similar things will be possible in optical astronomy. It doesn't hurt if your advisor is influential in the field. Then get into one of the best phd programs you can get into in the country, and in particular find a phd advisor who is a very active researcher. By that time, you will know which one that might be, and you will have experience, some good connections in the relevant community and with a bit of luck an influential researcher writing a letter of recommendation for you.
Which is better:
To die with ignorance, or to live with intelligence?
Truth doesn't accommodate to personal opinions.
The choice is yours.
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There is God and there is man, it's only a matter of who created whom
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The more questions you ask, the more you realize that disagreement is inevitable, and communication of this disagreement, irrelevant.