The second semester

Thesecond semester asa prof is done. Can I get an "Amen! haleluja!"? Between writing grant proposals with nextto nothing in the tank, a relelntless teaching schedule and still pressures to do all teh things, it was quite the ride.

To begin with, it has been a banner year checking off the boxes that one needs to check as a starting associate prof: HST time ($), hired a kick-ass postdoc, took on students for projects, applied for NASA and NSF funding, gave colloquia, developed a phd project with a student that led to a successful Kentucky space grant, etc etc.

So many different balls to keep in the air. I could tell from a variety of clues that the stress had been getting to me (small infections take forever to heal, an involuntary muscle twitch, insomnia...ok these were not subtle).

So the next priority will be to increase efficiency on teaching/logistics. Not with the aim to do more mind you. To decrease stress. Just that.

In that particular vein, i discovered this awesome present from Matt among our things in boxes:

So that concludes a year at uol. Curious to see how 2018 will go.

Science Twitter

I joined twitter a while ago. It is a great tool to learn what other people are doing and to send small BB's of encouragement to other people. The other day I stuck my neck out and asked for help with research on Elliptical galaxies. I have a student with a keen interest in galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing. I had to get up-to-date with these and especially where we could make a difference.

Twitter responded in awesome fashion. And even better, Jackie Monkowiez put it all in a Storify:
Best Twitter Thread Ever!

These are some of the suggested papers:

The Great Big Review Paper
Renzini+ 2006
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.astro.44.051905.092450

Graham+ 2013
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013pss6.book...91G

Ongoing discussion on the Initial Mass Function in these following papers:

Cappellari+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04267

Lyubenova+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07448

Smith+ 2014
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.443L..69S

Conroy & van Dokkum+ 2012
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ApJ...760...70V
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012ApJ...760...71C/abstract

and also there were these papers:

Schombert+ 2009/2015
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AJ....150..162S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ApJ...699.1530S

Bender+ 1993a,b
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992ApJ...399..462B
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993ApJ...411..153B

Faux Emergency

Two things that have always sort of annoyed me with academic culture is the interruptions and the faux emergency. The two are related.

First, there is an underlying understanding that if you are on your office, you are approachable. Some academic institutions have an open door culture where no one closes the door. This is impossible right now with a busy lecture room right outside my door. Even with the door closed it's plenty distracting. One thing that I really like about the new place is the fact that everyone knocks. It's a little thing but it allows me to disengage and focus on the visitor. Want me to do a thing? Knock on the door first.

Secondly is the faux emergency. This happens when a deadline or requirement has been poorly communicated and suddenly it's an emergency. Not only am I now interrupted for a thing but a "drop everything and do this RIGHT NOW".

So tempted to blow this sort of thing off. The issue is however often that if I do, it's some poor student that suffers. These are often not the creators of the faux emergency however.

These two issues completely shred my ability to do much focused work (e.g. Writing) during business hours.

Writing

I had a student come up to me and we ended up chatting about writing assignments. He was doing the same what I heard enough in college "when am I going to use this skill in the real world?"

All the time.

I can now confidently say 90% of my job is creative writing/editing to some degree of creativity (minimum is grant reports, maximum creativity is for expense reports ;)
But nearly all is creative stuff. This is why I have been mildly jealous of those in science who could write well. Not just sufficient but with clarity and, my favorite, brevity.

At this stage I would be happy to write okay and fast. Faster at any rate.
I want those grant proposals written, the homework and exams, oh and finish that paper, and edit that student's paper.

It never ends though. Keep truckin.

Insomnia

It seems do be a particular academic thing to have insomnia. Big brain will not shut off. And it sort of meshes with the "I-am-so-busy-I-cannot-afford-sleep" toxic attitude.

Last night was insomnia once again for me. Not so much brain cannot stop thinking insomnia ("the hamsterwheel") or anxiety dream insomnia. I just woke up at 2:30 with All Systems Red Alert. Could be an anxiety dream but it did not feel like it. Some noise must have flipped a primordeal switch reading "All AWAKE NOW".
Well I got my class for this adternoon mostly prepped.

Brain:"we should have insomnia more often!"

"shut up brain"

How cool was the worst kept secret in astronomy?

Today was the big day for LIGO amd just about every other observatory (see what I did there? LIGO is "just another observatory" now). This has been rumored on astro social media for some time now. With Hubble observing logs public and an overenthusiastic tweet to boot. Yet it made a big splash anyway. Coordinated press events, a monday news cycle almost to themselves (president is golfing). All very well done. The graphics are amazing and I can start using this whole thing for my astro 101 class. Great!

Can I cop to being a little jealous? Such an inspiring global effort. Would have loved to have been a part of it. Barring that, I'll be cheering this magnificent achievement on.

The 100% myth

One thing that is now a nodding-in-agreement topic in academia is how overworked we are. Not that it has led to meaningful evaluations of people's efforts in any way but one can get a nod of symphathy out of most people when complaining about the workload.

Something that is not so often considered is how we arrive at said workload. It happens when we (or those doing the planning for us, but let's be honest here it is us) plan for anything. Subconsciously or not, the assumed our performance is 100%. On a flat, even surface with factory settings. But we rarely function at 100%. Your car engine certainly doesn't. No one else does all the time.

R told me to aim for 70%, and expect 50% from time to time. That does make planning anything much more realistic. And my own evaluation of my performance teaching etc.

I blame all those idealized models for our poor planning model. Assume spherical professor in a vacuum with no friction from paperwork.