Bus Activities

The University of Louisville has an arrangement with the local bus company allowing students and staff to take the bus for free. It's now a "green" initiative of course but itstartedas something to control the parking space issue on campus.

I love it. We now live pretty close to the bus line that stops right in front of work. I hate driving into work. So i have been taking the bus in and sorting email in the meantime. I will blog about my inbox 0 experiment in a future blog entry. And tweeting and facebook. Yup. Get that out of my system before work is the idea.

So now i have added blogo app on my phone to see if i can jot some thoughts down while waiting on the bus (lovely sunny day here) or bumping along to work.

Student Supervision Plan

This summer I have four (!) students doing a project with me as well as my PhD student starting on his project. I am very happy students already want to do projects with me. At UCT and Leiden, I gained some experience with student (summer) projects at various levels. Together with Matt Kenworthy, I started to formulate The Plan[tm] for a student project. These are the tricks and tips I have so far:

1. set up the data/papers/code/etc in a dropbox with the student's name.
2. set up an overleaf document wth all the writing and references on the project for the student to turn int a report. I use the MNRAS template for ease of use.
3. Set up a first meeting, draw the drop-dead date on the white board and work backwards from that. Have everyone say when they have a Thing.
4. Set up a regular (weekly) meeting at a set time. I take notes during these and I plan to put those into Evernote from now on to make them searcheable.
5. Make a separate email tab under the general student folder. Move all correspondence there.

This has many advantages. For starters, all the data/code will be in a central spot, backed up automatically. Secondly, I can check the last time the student has worked on his/her report/thesis. It allows me to rapidly convert the report into a paper manuscript without issue. There is built-in version control. All these things make supervision much easier.

The regular meeting can be big time/brain bandwidth commitment but I rather have that than that the student is stuck for longer than a few days.

I need to do this because as opposed to most professors (I'm a professor wheee!) I don't have a single topic with lots of little offshoots from the main research topic, I have lots of small projects and interests. Two students this summer will be working on overlapping galaxy pairs, one on the Milky Way from Brown Dwarf counts found in BoRG, one will be working on galaxy morphology, and one will be working on the "sustainable observatory' (power use for different observatories, when do alternative energy sources make sense?).

So lots of different stuff to keep tabs on. Hence the organization. It saves the student time and effort and gets them off to a flying start...hopefully.

Suggestions on student supervision, helping with projects, is all helpful. Please let me know!!

Focus

One of the things that ican be both exhilirating and deeply frustrating for a professional astronomer is the amount of switching that happens. One hour teach, then respond to email, write proposal, respond to more email, talk to student, what was I doing again?

It gets worse when on top of that I get tired and the first thing to go is the part of the brain that handles priorities. Suddenly spending time on a low priority is fine only to realize that I should have been working on this lecture/proposal/urgent thing.

So focus...or blog...suggestions for improvements are welcomed...

Time (well) spent

So for this past semester I've been diligently toggling my time. This is in part thanks to Matt Kenworthy, in part a desire to track what I've done so I can show it and part a way to just focus on a single thing.

I did not work at 100% efficiency at all times. Obviously. Sometimes these are hours where the tv was on and I was picking at a laptop working on a proposal or something. Honestly I am trying to get rid of "work" times like that. Either veg or not.

That being said. I was a hectic first semester with much last minute improvisation (not my favorite) and making up for earlier mistakes (even less my favorite). Yet is broke down like this:

Which is I have to say... not too bad. But keep in mind that it was ~60 hr a week. And it wasn't like I left toggl running and then just "kept idle time". That is a lot of hours worked. And a lot on other/admin. But note the 25% on grant/telescope proposal writing.

Yeah that eats up a lot of my time already. To be more efficient, I strongly suggest brain dumping the idea as soon as the call comes out and refine only in the week leading up. This is probably a bit skewed since all the major deadlines were in this semester (think HUBBLE!) and the HST cycle was 1.5 years so I threw everything I had at it. Still. A lot of time...


This gives a good idea for the time individual projects took. Note HST clocking in at 136 hours... but given I put in 8...that is 17 hours per proposal. Most of them re-writes/polishes but it gives a good idea how much time it takes. Really a week for one. At least...
That 76 hour Keynote? A public talk I gave. The email is a low estimate since I count that as a "everything" entry but I do lots of reply/triage on the bus while not toggling that.

All in all ok but must have a critical look as to improve efficiency or just not do stuff since 60hr/week is too much. And inherently inefficient.

Monographs

I attended a workshop for young faculty (I'm young!...well for faculty...). It was about writing, something I feel I struggle with a lot. I do alright (pretty high output) but I then read something that JD Dalcanton or her many students has written and have to just admire the writing.

Much of writing is the editing of course. I am re-learning that as I am now editing down a MsC report into an A&A paper. It's tough and requires focus. Focus is where is all lies really. The ability to do deep work. And distractions aren't just the UPS flights that land practically on my head here. It's twitter, facebook, politics global and local etc. It all...distracts...

So I read the book by Scalzi on writing ("Your hate mail will be graded" etc) and I try this blog. Quick writing exercises.

Back to the workshop. These are very considerate in that these are organized. How do I write? Put all my effort in grant writing? Papers? And the question came up on the writing of a book (monograph) which is essentially a requirement for tenure in certain fields (not astronomy thankfully) and the advice was to get up at the crack of dawn (middle of the night really) and write 1-2 hours with a word count target. Edit later but hammer out that word count. Unfortunately the advice on prioritizing is...harder for a panel to give and thus we end up with Do All The Things once more...

It struck me also how it strange it is that a University requires such a Deep Work effort all the while not really providing the environment to hammer it out. Now I strongly suspect nothing but gibberish would appear if I start writing at 5am but I agreed with the carve-out-time-interval and dedicate it to writing and also that it should be every workday. And mornings should hopefully work best. But 5am? Really?

So here goes...blog/articles/grant prop...

PS: I am glad there is no need for another astronomy book. I would have serious issues getting up so early and write one...