Sometimes when she’s alone in an observatory, surrounded by computer screens and terabytes of data in some remote control room, peering deep into the mysterious black cosmos, Taylor Hutchison ’22 likes to take a moment to remind herself just how fortunate she is.

It’s hard to blame Hutchison, a graduate student in the Texas A&M University Astronomy Program, for being a little sentimental about it. After all, it’s not everyone who can say they’re making a career out of probing some of the earliest known galactic formations.

“I love my job; it’s a dream come true,” Hutchison said. “I get to travel the world and go to these amazing telescopes to take data. I get to do this as a job [...]