4:00 PM. People are lining up for “Cool Jobs,” one of the festival’s hottest events among the not-yet-employed. A pair of 9-year-olds, Eli Cash and his friend Orion, peer down the escalator and speculate about physics: “Imagine if this disappeared and it was over a hundred million feet down to the bottom and it took you fifty years to get down there? And there was no elevator?”
When he grows up, Eli plans to write a book about history from the 1400s to the 1900s, with special emphasis on the Pilgrims. Orion--“like the star”--plans to be a nuclear scientist “and maybe make something that would go all the way to Neptune in one day.”
The boys snag seats in the front row of the packed auditorium. A few rows behind them, Jason Pflueger, a chemistry major at Columbia University, and Jackie Stone, a physics major at Bard College, settle in to watch five scientists talk about their work. Both have just finished their freshman years. Stone wants to do research, but she also loves teaching, so she’s planning an academic career. “I find it so amazing how awesome the universe is and how we can understand it, even though we just have a tiny place in it,” she says. Pfleuger plans to do research, whether in industry or the academy. He loves chemistry because “it lets us not only study the world around us, but also manipulate it and improve it,” he says.
When the lights come back up, Stone and Pflueger agree that while the jobs--primatologist, forensic scientist, planetary scientist, aquanaut, and the guy who designs amusement park rides--do sound cool, they’re sticking to their original career choices. But Eli and Orion have reconsidered. “I want the job living underwater,” says Eli. Orion agrees.
--Polly Shulman
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