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Speak from your heart
Professor Jay Pasachoff
Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy, Williams College, USA
I like describing astronomy so much that I just do it in a relaxed fashion. In graduate school at Harvard, I took on a voluntary role that involved interacting with undergraduates, and it turned out that the chairman of the astronomy department remembered it and wound up recommending me for my current job, as a result. Also, I wrote an article about the Sun for volume 1, number 1,
of the popular magazine Astronomy, so I have been writing popular articles for some time. That article, as I recall, helped persuade the appointments committee at my university that I could indeed teach undergraduates, though I had had no formal involvement in doing so aside from grad-school teaching fellowships.
My hints? Enjoy yourself. Do what you are inclined to do about describing astronomy in general terms, even if some senior people think you are wasting your valuable research time.
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