Erin Kisliuk

Erin Kisliuk didn’t realize she was interested in astronomy until her senior year of high school in Silver Spring, Maryland. She’d casually decided to take an elective astronomy course before graduation, hearing good things about the teacher. In the first week, as the teacher was describing the concept of a light-year and how that translates to looking into the past, she had a revelation.

“Astronomy is everything; it’s biology, it’s physics, it’s chemistry,” she said. “It’s hard to find a science you can’t relate back to astronomy because it’s everything bigger than us. As a 17-year-old it’s hard to be humble, but it helped put me in my place in a way nothing ever had before. I felt almost a frustration that it was an elective and people didn’t know about this. I was ready to go be an astrophysicist and go to school for jillions of years.”

Upon graduating from high school, Erin studied astrophysics at the University of Maryland, College Park. While there, she reached out to one of her astronomy professors and offered to volunteer with the department wherever she was needed. She ended up working with the university’s observatory for four years. “Scout troops would come in and ask very cute, basic questions that remind you why this is so important. Astronomy clubs would roll through and ask how the telescope works and the big astrophysics questions.”

Then one day she sat down with a university advisor who handed her two pieces of paper that explained her options for astronomy. She could work on observational astronomy, or on theory.

“I had this panicked moment where I was like, ‘Neither — I don’t want to do any of that.’ I went back to my dorm room and had a nice cry about it because I was like, “If I’m not doing what I’m interested in, now what?’”

Erin didn’t like the idea of working in an office, by herself, always behind a computer. But she realized she did love working at the observatory, answering questions, and sharing her knowledge about space. “There’s something beautiful about learning that happens outside of a classroom.”

She switched gears, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communications with a focus on astronomy. She interned while she was in school, doing public outreach work with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Her mentor told her it was important to make connections, and assigned her the task of interviewing everybody in the group she was working with. “I would be talking to one person and they would say, ‘Oh, you should talk to this person,’ and I kept adding people to my list. I was shocked by the titles of the people who were willing to sit down and talk to me for half an hour about their career and my interests.”

After graduation, she went back to her astronomy department and asked if there was anything she could do to be useful while she looked for a job. They had a website that needed help, and Erin taught herself HTML so she could work on it, and then started doing social media for the department as well.

Meanwhile, the job search became a roller coaster. Erin found a position in the library at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t what she was looking for. “It was the kind of job where you have to stand up every half-hour because the lights would go off because nobody would come in, but I made good friends and kept hold of my connections and kept networking.”

Then she was laid off. “That was extremely discouraging, but ‘I said I’m going to give myself six months and network my tail off and get back into the industry and if I can’t I can take these communications skills and go do something else.’”

When an outreach position opened with the Hubble Space Telescope, she leaped at the chance. “I went in and interviewed and thought I’d killed it.” She was crushed when the job went to someone else. Instead, she moved to Houston, Texas, for a job at Johnson Space Center, where she worked on an engineering website for the External Relations office and helped conduct center tours. Multiple members of Erin’s family were engineers, so she could relate to the work, but as much as she enjoyed working at Johnson it wasn’t exactly what she wanted her career to be.

She recalled attending a conference, on the invitation of networking contacts, where she saw pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. “I thought, ‘Oh you’re not interested in space — you’re interested in astronomy. What I’d fallen in love with was not space or even human spaceflight, it was astronomy. I thought the only place for me was Hubble.”

Eventually she obtained another job at NASA Headquarters, working as a communications manager for the Asteroid Redirect Mission, but that unexpectedly ended after only a couple of months when the mission was terminated. When another position opened up with Hubble in 2016, she hesitated before applying.

“I thought, NASA has burned me too many times, I don’t want to work there anymore, I already got rejected. And then I thought, ‘But this is it — the one job you know you want.’”

In the interview, feeling she had nothing to lose, she was direct. “I said, ‘I don’t know what to say except this is my dream job. I’ll do whatever. You can see on my resume I’ve already done whatever it takes to work inside NASA.”

This time, she was hired. Today Erin is the social media lead for Hubble at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where she manages five social media accounts with millions of followers, organizes outreach events and even hosts live shows. “It’s completely evolved. I said yes to everything they threw my way.”

That’s a lesson she’d want others to take away, she said. Connect with people and try things outside your comfort zone. “I said ‘yes’ to a lot of things I was not sure if I could do or not. Yes to website work, yes to moving to a city I’d never been to before, yes to volunteering at a symposium, yes to being an on-screen person. Still, every time I’m like, ‘Why me?’ But you’re going to learn things that can help you down the road and make you more valuable, and it gives you more confidence."

That and persistence can be extremely valuable, she said. “I knew what I wanted and I was ready to give up on it, honestly, and I’m so glad I didn't. I love the mission so much and made the job exactly what I wanted it to be, and I have so many more skills now than if I’d just given up.”