Astrobites@Austin: Tuesday Morning Sessions
A collection of thoughts about AAS events throughout Tuesday morning.
Careers 101 Workshop
The Monday morning workshop “Careers 101” at the AAS Austin meeting provided a room full of graduate students with several important aspects to ponder when considering our potential career paths, as well as some action advice to follow to develop our careers in the direction that we choose. I blogged a summary of the workshop here, and promised to follow up with some more specific details. I invite comments on this post, if you have any suggestions or advice you would like to contribute related to astronomy career paths.The workshop was organized around a panel, introduced and moderated by Alaina Levine (founder of Quantum Success Solutions).Panelists: Dawn Gelino (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute) Adam Kraus (Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow) Edward Ajhar (NSF Program Officer) Anita Cochran (Assistant Director of McDonald Observatory) Joe Bernstein (Argonne National Lab)Advice (in no particular order): 1. Network. Establish your brand, realizing that at every stage of your career you can be the world’s expert on a niche subject at some level. Find confidence in this.2. Make yourself stand out. If you are in a collaboration (especially if it is a large collaboration), take ownership of some aspect of the science.3. Prove yourself by earning your own grants and fellowships. Writing proposals is good experience, even as a grad student or postdoc.4. Think about what will make you happy. Is an R1 research career, tenure track, what you would enjoy doing? Ask others, do some soul searching. Keep in mind that only 1 in 4 of us will get a tenure track position. Whatever you decide, you CAN change your mind later, but you should start on...Through a lens, darkly: a dark matter map of the Universe
Simulations tell us of a web-like Universe but it’s hard to explore this topic observationally because we can’t see dark matter. But the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) Lensing Survey has made the first large scale map of dark matter. On the first day of AAS #219, the CFHTLenS survey shared their results with us.a
Astrobites@Austin: Monday Afternoon Sessions
This year, Astrobites will be liveblogging AAS. In order to avoid inundating our readers’ RSS feeds, we’ll be updating this post with short paragraphs about the talks we’ve heard and posters we’ve seen. So keep checking back throughout Monday afternoon! Earlier, we covered the Monday Morning sessions. A side noteThanks to everyone who stopped by the Astrobites poster today! We loved getting to meet you all in person, and getting to hear about your work as well as chat about ours. 3:40 PM The Challenges and Achievements in 50 Years of Human Space flight, Steven Hawley (University of Kansas) Quoted in this talk:“Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world; knowing they’re going to light the bottom—and doesn’t get a little worried—does not fully understand the situation.” — John Young, shuttle commander, after being asked if he was worried about making the first Space Shuttle flight. 2:30 PM – Press Release: SCIENCE SO FAR FROM LOFARLOFAR: The Low Frequency Array Heino Falcke (MPI Für Radioastronomie/Radboud University/ASTRON, Germany) Michael Wise (ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)First Results from the LOFAR Multifrequency Snapshot Sky Survey George H. Heald (ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)Pulsars & Fast Transients with LOFAR Jason Hessels (ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)LOFAR and the Epoch of Reionization A. G. de Bruyn (ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)LOFAR (a multi-purpose sensor array which stands for the LOw Frequency ARray) is a new science project comprised of 200 astronomers from 40 institutes in several countries. LOFAR has components at stations in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the UK and France. This press conference is to...
Astrobites@Austin: Monday Morning Sessions
A collection of thoughts about AAS events throughout Monday morning.
