Jessica Kirkpatrick (UC Berkeley) has an interesting post on a recent study by the American Institute of Physics analyzing the types of employment obtained for new physics/astro PhDs: Permanent Jobs Elusive for Recent PhDs – Women in Astronomy

This is a guest post by Jonathan Gagné at Université de Montréal. Jonathan is a graduate student under direction of René Doyon and David Lafrenière. His research topics include the search for young brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood and the development of methods for direct exoplanet imaging. When working with low-mass stars and brown [...]

In short, there’s not enough money allocated to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to do everything the US astronomical community wants to do so some things need to go. In order to figure out what to cut, the NSF commissioned a “Portfolio Review” committee to take a good hard look. Yesterday, the result of [...]

We are almost three weeks into the era of Mountain Lion, so it is a good time to talk about the new cat and what changes it has brought about for us. Which of the 200+ features that Apple talked about are actually useful? What has been made easier? Or which software no longer works? [...]

Let’s talk about phone interviews. Whether you’re to be interviewed by a reporter about your recent press release or by a prospective employer, you can employ the same preparation strategy. I learned this strategy in a media training class*, so I’ll talk first about media interviews, then how to adapt the method for job interviews. Here’s [...]

Johanna Teske is finishing her fourth year as an Astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona, Steward Observatory. Her science research focuses on observing and modeling exoplanet atmospheres, studying in particular their (compositional) relationship to the atmospheres of their host-star. She also dabbles in education research, studying on how science fits into the worldview [...]

What sorts of discoveries do y’all think are worth writing a press release? Sometimes it’s obvious — an earth-mass planet in the habitable zone with spectral signatures of water and chlorine (sorry, watching too much Olympic swimming). But what about most of the time? What rises to the level of a press release? Just pretty [...]

The Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill is more popular than ever, although traffic to the page in August is typically only half of what it is in January/February. I have started the new rumor mill pages for 2012-2013 (yes it IS time for job-hunting season again) and I have relegated the 2011-2012 pages to archives. All [...]

The first time you peer review a paper can be a stressful, but educational, experience. The article below breaks down the overall peer review process. The guide was written for biology; but 99% of it is useful for astronomers as well. I like that the peer review process is placed into a larger context and [...]