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Ever since I was a small child I was always fascinated in things that fly, and space. I decided at age 6 that I wanted to be an astronaut, so I spent elementary school reading up about astronomy and flight and all that mess.
Some time in junior high I realized that becoming an astronaut was hard, so I set my sights on becoming a pilot instead. So I focused on that but still focused a lot on astronomy and spaceflight.
At the end of high school I took flight lessons to get my private pilot's license. I ended up skipping half my classes to go flying, but I still got As in them so it wasn't that awful. After high school I entered a flight college to get my commercial license and a few ratings, plus an aviation diploma. In the airline industry, you need an aviation diploma or a full degree in order to remain competitive. It's that or work for a few years on ramp or up north in the worst shitholes Canada has to offer. So I spent about a year in the aviation college, but the college had to replace their entire fleet after one aircraft had a piston cylinder explode in mid-air. The people flying at the time made it back safely but the upshot was that tuition fees quadrupled overnight. I couldn't stay on so I dropped out and got my license at a local flying club. I'm now a commercially licensed pilot.
I still needed a degree of some sort, so I went into astrophysics since it was something I loved since childhood. I'm having a hell of a lot of fun and doing well in those classes. My first astrophysics prof specialized in infrared astronomy, so when I found that out I started talking to him about SOFIA. Turns out that he was doing a small project analyzing preliminary data from it.
SOFIA is this big old 747 with an infrared telescope slapped on the back. They've been developing it for a decade, and it's where my professions squarely meet. My prof signed me up as an intern over the summer and I did a lot of busiwork calculations for him. It kept me busy and it was very fun.
