by William Balmer | Jul 28, 2023 | Career Navigation, Guides, Personal Experiences, Teaching
As graduate students in astronomy progress through their degree-granting programs, they evolve from students into teachers, mentees into collaborators, and occasionally from advisees into advisors. Taking on a younger student to advise them on a research project may seem difficult, stressful, or daunting, and that’s because it can be. But it can also be an incredibly enriching, exciting, and fun experience for you and your student. Advising students, to many, is one of the most rewarding aspects of doing research, but it’s one that many graduate students may not experience over the course of their Ph.D., in part because it can appear so intimidating.I won’t claim to be a great expert on the subject, but this summer I advised my first undergraduate researcher on a project, and my hope is that this Astrobite can serve as an encouragement to others who might be interested in taking on that kind of responsibility during their Ph.D.Your opportunity to advise a research student varies dramatically depending on your employing institution, research group, and funding situation. You might work in a large lab, where older graduate students are expected to supervise younger graduate students; you might be your advisor’s only student; you yourself might be funded through a teaching assistantship, a large grant, a fellowship, or a variety of these; your institution might have money set aside for PIs to take on undergraduate summer students. The point is, most student projects aside from undergraduate theses or unpaid internships require funding in order to compensate the researcher for their work, and often the source of this funding is beyond your capacity to influence.In my...
by William Balmer | Apr 27, 2023 | Daily Paper Summaries
Could interactions between a magma ocean and early hydrogen rich atmosphere have created liquid water on Earth?
by William Balmer | Feb 25, 2023 | Daily Paper Summaries
Direct imaging exoplanets is difficult, but a new method of vetting targets has just helped three independent teams discover, and image, a new gas giant.
by William Balmer | Jan 6, 2023 | Current Events
Most astronomy is done by graduate students, but many aren’t compensated fairly or treated well. Ongoing struggles to unionize, especially in the past year, might give the confused and frustrated graduate student hope headed into 2023.
by William Balmer | Nov 7, 2022 | Daily Paper Summaries
Astronomers study the orbits of a sextuplet system, an absurdly complex arrangement of six stars in orbit around one another, in order to measure their masses once and for all.