2013 in Review

It's that time of year again (Birthday, Christmas, New Year's eve) and most websites and news outlets are doing it. How has the year been?

I had to compile it anyway as part of leaving-ESA and I am pretty happy. I had nine (!) successful principal investigator telescope proposals and five as co-author.
As a first author, I had four papers and thirteen as co-author. Pretty productive. More of course are submitted or nearly ready to go.

I started a new job with Rychard Bouwens. Life in the fast lane of high-redshift. Suits me so far. It's very interesting, even if I am playing catchup here and there.

So professionally very ok. I would like to cut down the time it takes me to write papers (I am just a slow writer) or get various things done but who doesn't? Probably shutting Facebook more is a thought...

Paradoxically, my other new year' resolution is to blog more. Oh well, we will see.

Brace for Rejection

Astronomers have to make a lot of pitches: observing proposal pitches, pitches for funding, job applications. Maybe not as many as some professions (hello car salesperson) but more than others.
And the chances range from 30% down to less than 1% of being successful, i.e., 30% is for time on crappy  unpopular observatories, 1% is for that job everyone wants (AstroSanta).

This translates into a lot of "Thank you for your interest" and "We regret to inform you" emails (and letters still sometimes). There is a lot of disappointment in the work. It is inherent to a profession that is creative and to a level, competative. There is no infinite amount of funding, there is an infinite amount of interesting Universe out there.

I have become quite Zen about it (ask me again when this postdoc is running out) and in part this is because the writing by Will Wheaton. He is in a creative profession. He pitches himself a lot. He gets rejected a lot (like every time right after Star Trek it seems). But he stuck with it.

But the importance of the sales pitch and the inherent rejection is something we might want to warn starting grad students about.

Second Week on the New Job: life beyond ALMA

Second week at the new job. As a general purpose monkey versatile astronomer, I was thrown two new projects pretty much immediately. Welcome to the Jungle high-redshift Universe!

It is actually quite interesting. Trouble is that is feels like one of those things that should not take a a lot of time...and yet it does. Re-learning galfit for example...

Meanwhile, I thought of an idea to work on S4G. And in a brief email exchange, this idea was indeed vetted as worthwhile. Ho hm.

Wrote up my LEAPS project. It will be fun to have a student next summer.

But the highlight of the day was the family visiting (together with bagles for lunch).

New Job. New Proposals. And awesome ESA going away presents

I started my new job at the University of Leiden's Sterrenwacht. Hurray! Made it in bright & early this morning to get a good jumpstart on the day. As the only one it felt.
Never mind. It gave me some time to hack more on my ALMA proposals. Most Astronomers I know seem to frantically working through all the cool stuff they could do with it and getting headaches from working in Janskies and frequency instead of good ol' flux and wavelength in equal measure.

New "temporary" office (we all know what temporary in this context can mean, i.e., I won't decorate for a year and they'll move me 3 minutes after I do) has some interesting new office-mates. Two guys from North Korea! huh. On loan to the physics department I guess. And a rather random historian from time to time. okay...

I got the seat by the window. My laptop is set up now (mostly) and ALMA is due on December 5, an hour an a half after Sinterklaas arrives at the department (candy? proposal? candyproposal?).
One down and one more proposal to go. Game on!

My perky attitude is helped tremendously by the cool presents I got when leaving ESA from all the "beautiful people" (Guido included): a seriously awesome ESA jacket, fleece and dustpan. The last one because of my abiding interest in Dust.

which brings me back to ALMA!