If your field is getting crowded, perhaps it is time to look for a new field. For so many of us, competition is getting tougher because the field is getting smaller. Traditional sources of funding are cut back or are disappearing all together. The choices seem to be: Try harder. Wait for better times. Take you ball and go home. But what if these aren’t the only options? 

Expanding a business can follow three strategies: Sell more to the customers you already have. Expand into adjacent markets like selling your products to people who haven’t previously bought from you. Or create a new product and sell it to a different set of customers. The third option is by far the most expensive and least likely to be profitable.

At the end of graduate school I thought I was a product (studying compact x-ray objects) looking for a market (a post-doc). Alas either my product wasn’t competitive or the market was already pretty crowded. Most likely it was a combination of both. So the going was pretty rough. What I had not considered at that point was, whether I would enjoy studying compact x-ray objects for even longer than I already had. Soon I had to chose. Did I want to move to the Netherlands to study compact objects? Or did I want to move within California to work in detector development? I had been so busy selling that I hadn’t taken the time to consider what I really wanted. In the end, I declined both and opted for an internship at a public TV-station in Germany. 

Over the next three decades or so, I had to learn over and over again that I am not a product. I realized that I can produce results in a lot of different contexts and that my education and, much more important at this point, my professional and life experiences have set me up to be flexible and adaptable. What’s the saying: You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf. 

I spent a lot of time in graduate school defining myself through what I was not. I’m an astronomer. I do not study the Sun, although the Sun is a star. But the Sun is too close and we therefore know too much about it. I study x-ray sources in the sky, therefore I know nothing about infrared sources. And so forth. Very soon I knew more and more about less and less. When I left academia, I was suddenly a scientist and was asked not only about anything in astronomy, but also about Earth’s weather, climate, Mars and Venus. 

Have you ever asked yourself what you want to do? How do you want to spend the time you may have? Honestly, this has been a very hard question for me to answer. I always had to try things out and see how they fit. Sometimes my guess was right on and sometimes I was way off. But perhaps you already know what you want. Your next step is then to figure out how to sustain this. Is it a job, is it grant writing, starting a business, something else? The options are many and not all fields are crowded. Though in any grant or job application, business proposal, selling opportunity, it is up to you to make the connection from what the people with money want to what you can and want to do.

If you are able to build the bridge from what your sponsor, employer, customer wants to what you have to offer you will thrive in whatever you do. And if it doesn’t work. There is always the next wave. Surf’s up.