Meeting up with students

I saw this comic on http://phdcomics.com/ and I was tickled and worried like all professors...

This is why I reserve a specific slot for each student. That time is theirs. If one does not do that, the above scenario starts happening.

Astroph habit

Like most professional astronomers I check the archive every day for new papers. Typically there are 40-80 papers waiting to be scanned. Even discarding all the cosmology ones (because I cannot tell it is a crackpot one or not anyway), that leaves a lot of papers that are interesting.

And it all becomes TL;DR. I file the ones that look interesting into my bibtex but I certainly cannot read them in depth. Now to remedy this, I plan to tag all the papers to relevant lines of inquiry. Maybe that will speed up the next paper writing challenge?

Not reading the arxiv is right on the myriad of things I have heard call "research debt". I think I dislike that term already but I plan to unpack it at a future post.

Oh look a shiny!

Sometimes a bit of astronomical news, a dataset or a new tool catches your eye and you just gotta chase after it. Meanwhile there are other commitments, possibly (likely) deadlines and you have to finish stuff on occasion.

And yet the shiny. I have to admit I chase the shiny more often than not. Quickest way to burn it out. Or have some sort of productive procrastination.

examples include using a self-organizing map on the catalogs of M101 to identify background galaxies, wondering how much power telescopes use and at what point it becomes viable to run them on solar panels and a big battery, etc etc

Chase the shiny (within reason). You'll learn a new thing and probably end up using it later. This is often where my ideas for a student project comes from.

Focus-switching

One of the trickier things in academia is the focus-switching between all the different tasks and the requirement to produce the kind of work which is characterized by focus aka "deep work".

As a result I have often now seen colleagues working at odd hours or pull all-nighters. I simply can't do that as I lose focus or the ability to switch with lack of sleep. Hence i try to cheat by doing things like this blog and dealing with the tides of email during little waiting moments. Waiting at U-haul for example. In the bus etc etc.

Still. How to avoid the weird hours and carve a bit of time to code/write. Suggestions welcome.

Inbox 0

Inbox 0 all stsrted with a google guy getting swamped with email and worrying about how to not drop things. Of course there is no simple solution but fearing a similar scenario, I converted to the inbox0 idea under Matt Kenworthy's guidance.

Optimistically, I named my categories "today", "this week", "this month". "Someday" and "waiting". Of course I do not get to all the things today in the "today" folder. Or maybe even this week. It is a rough idea of urgency level.

Better to use the South Africanisms "Now", "Now now", "Just now" and "Later".
Yes these are all future tense in increasing levels of urgency.

At any rate it seems to work well on one level: i have a simple system for my todo list. The general feeling I am dropping the ball by forgetting has abated some. Of course stuff ages out (well blew past THAT deadline) but part of the system is to be ok with that.

The good part is that it dovetails nicely with my commute. I sort my list on the bus and have my todo list for the rest of the day. And instead of urgency, I try to match up an item with my time/energy level.

So I am a fan so far. Of course; no email, and I am not doing the thing. So i send myself some too (Moar email) ...

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!!