Aditya Sharma: From Astronomy Olympiads to a Career in STEM
An interview with an astronomy olympiad medalist, engineer, and science communicator.
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Aditya Sharma is a silver medalist in the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) as well as the International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO). He is currently working as an engineer at Gush and writing about popular science. You can subscribe to his Substack, Science Sundays, here:
What sparked your initial interest in astronomy? In my eighth standard, there was a book by Stephen Hawkings. One of my close friends had it, and he was reading it. We were just talking about it, and he was like, “Hey, you should read it once, or at least have a look at a few pages.” So I borrowed his book, and I started reading it. Generally, I was not keen on reading any book apart from my normal curriculum books. But this book was The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking,1 and it was amazing. That’s what sparked my interest in astronomy and physics.
My newsletter is geared towards high school students who are also interested in astronomy olympiads. What advice would you give to them? People who are interested in these competitions but aren’t sure where to start? I don’t know about other countries, but in India, there is a system in which you go step by step - four to five rounds of examination - but each examination is harder than the previous, so you just have to have a basic understanding of physics and mathematics for the examinations. I think this exam format is better because you need not read, apart from your school curriculum. If you’re just interested and maybe know a few facts about astronomy - like which planet is the fourth planet, something like that. That was the system in India. The advice would be: just keep reading stuff outside your school. Maybe follow a few cool websites. The internet is filled with content about astronomy and astrophysics.
Would you say, in India at least, that astronomy olympiads are similar to physics olympiads? Did you have experience with physics olympiads? The first few stages are similar. I even helped design a few questions. We designed the questions in such a way that we don’t assume that the person giving the examination has an in-depth knowledge about astronomical concepts. They just have to have a basic understanding of physics and some out-of-the-box thinking. It is similar to physics olympiads in that regard. Later, in the final stage, we do invite people to a camp hosted in Mumbai, and we teach people about the concepts pertaining to astronomy directly.
Besides competing in astronomy olympiads, what other experiences did you have in astronomy? I attended a two week program in IST, the Indian Institute of Space and Technology, and we tried to derive some values for a molecular cloud. So, we were divided into many teams, and we were analyzing a molecular cloud. Apart from this, I studied astronomy for fun and out of interest — no more professional experience.
What were your priorities when you were considering your career options, and how have those changed over time? When I was considering which branch to take, I obviously considered which field has the maximum scope with regards to job [prospects]. I had to think about a few financial decisions as well. Now, I have more free time to think about my hobbies. On the side, I try to write about science - pop science. If you break down science papers into simple language, they are easier to understand. I think we should popularize that part of science more.
What was your first job? I did my bachelor’s in computers. My first job out of college was a software engineer job in Samsung Korea, which I did for about two year. Then I came back to India to join a startup, again in computer science. The startup was started by my college friend.
Can you tell me more about what you’re doing at the startup? We are building an application which helps people do their SEO - Search Engine Optimization. It’s how a website can rank better on Google in a relevant context. We are doing it in a more AI assisted way. I’m involved in building the application for that.
Do you provide these services to companies? Yeah, it’s B2B, so we provide these services to companies, specifically small and medium businesses in which there is no in-house SEO team. Even if there is an in-house SEO team, we try to assist them.
What’s an example of a problem that you’re working on now? The engineers devote quite some time to learning how Google itself ranks pages. What’s the best strategy for a company to be better in the ranks? If your Substack, STEMScribe, wants to rank on a keyword, first we have to determine whether that keyword really holds value for you as a company, right? Should Google put STEMScribe on the top when it may be possible that someone’s just looking for some object named stem, which is not relevant to science? We determine which keywords are relevant for a company, and it all happens automatically. The conventional agencies do it manually.
You have a diverse set of experiences. You’ve been in astronomy, and then you worked at a big corporate job, and now you’re working at a startup. How have the skills you gained in one field helped you in other aspects? Many of the things in computer science are derived from the natural world. Like the genetic algorithm, which tries to find an optimum set of values for a function, is purely based on how genes work. So there is a correlation, and computer science can learn a lot from nature. The natural world may not be astronomy specifically, but astronomy does take a lot from computer science, from data analysis. NASA and CERN have employed very good computer scientists to analyze data.
What’s the favorite topic you’ve written about on Substack? My favorite article would be: Why do you have four minutes extra each day? This is kind of misleading, but it explains how the rotation of the Earth and revolution of the Earth, coupled together, leads to the length of the day increasing by four minutes. The Earth does one rotation in 23 hours and 56 minutes. But a day is actually 24 hours. That is because the Earth has gone slightly forward in the orbit, so it has to rotate more to face the Sun again. And we measure our day not by rotation but by when the Sun comes to the same position in the sky.
Written by Chloe Xu
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and Leonard Mlodinow