This is a guest post by Chris Faesi, a graduate student at Harvard, on behalf of the organizers of the conference described below. To address the need for training in communication skills, and to enable future scientists to become ambassadors for their work and for science generally, members of the Astrobites and Chembites community are [...]
Orsola from Oz has gotten in touch with AstroBetter and asked about the current state of Scisoft. For those not familiar, to me, Scisoft is a big installer that is the quick and dirty way of getting Python and IRAF installed on a Mac. I briefly looked into the current status of this package while [...]
Joshua Pepper is starting a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Physics Department at Lehigh University, after working as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University for the past five years. His research centers on exoplanets and small telescope surveys, primarily with the KELT project. Upon embarking on his search for a faculty position [...]
This is a guest post by Prof. Kris Stanek, an astronomy professor at The Ohio State University (OSU). Kris works on a wide range of topics including stellar explosions (GRBs, SNe), transiting planets, and other variable objects. I am on a much-needed sabbatical at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii Manoa, and I recently [...]
This is a guest post by Emily Rice, an assistant professor at College of Staten Island of the City University of New York (CUNY) and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. She studies both the observed and synthetic spectra of low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets as part the BDNYC collaboration. [...]
In response to my last post about the transition from Astronomer to Data Scientist many readers wanted to know the pros and cons of academia versus tech. In the below post I outline a few of the major differences between these career paths. Obviously, there is a lot of variety in individual companies, institutions, and experiences — [...]
The final output for scientific research is typically a paper published in a scientific journal. There may be electronic versions of figures and tables that accompany the paper. However, the links between the input data (e.g. images, spectra, time series), the analysis (e.g. code, databases), and the output paper (LaTeX, EPS figures) is often weak. Everyone has [...]
In the spirit of the Parental Leave Policies and Grad Student Representation Wikis, I think it would be useful and timely to discuss how different institutions treat their postdocs with regards to benefits. So let’s hear it, what kind of benefits did your institution give you as a postdoc? Decent, affordable healthcare options? Dental? Vision? [...]
This is my annual plea to everyone that is frantically checking the rumor mill: please sign up to receive email updates instead. You can “monitor” individual wiki pages and receive an email every time the page is changed, along with a summary of the changes. Setting this up requires a few steps: Sign up for an account [...]
This is a guest post by Brooke Simmons, a postdoc at the University of Oxford, where she works on black holes, galaxies, and the Zooniverse. Hack days have been around for years in pure programming circles, but last year at the .Astronomy conference was the first time I heard the phrase used in the context [...]