If you’re an undergraduate physics/astronomy major in the US or Canada and a gender minority (woman, non-binary, etc.), sign up to attend the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP)! It’s a 3-day regional conference Jan 18-20, 2019 held at 12 locations across the US and Canada, so there’ll be one not too far from you. You can look up the CUWiP hosting universities here.
At Michigan State University (for students in Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania) I’ll be involved in a panel/workshop on mental health! Take a look at a seminar I gave in May 2018 at MSU on mental wellbeing for early career researchers (note that many of the university resources are MSU-specific). Mental health issues are alarmingly common for early career researchers (students and postdocs), so raising awareness and connecting people to resources are very important.
I’m at COSPAR 2018 in Pasadena, CA this week! COSPAR is a giant meeting with 3,500+ attendees from all around the world spanning all aspects of astronomy, astro-particle physics, space physics, solar physics, astrobiology, and any other science from low-Earth-orbit to the edge of the universe. COSPAR 2018 is Pasadena’s largest-ever scientific conference! It can be a bit overwhelming, so here are some tips for networking at and navigating such a meeting.
Networking
“Networking” means making friends/acquaintances with nice people who do interesting science. That’s really all it is! Quick conversation starters: ask them what their latest paper was on, students are working on, and/or side projects are. It’s ok to ask simpler/broader subject questions!
Email people you’d like to meet and ask to meet them for lunch or coffee, and tell them when your poster/talk is.
If it’s your first time at a very large meeting, attach yourself to someone a little more senior than you who you know well (senior grad student, postdoc) and ask them to introduce you to people at coffee breaks and bring you along for meals the first day.
Tag along for meals even if you just met the people! Saying “mind if I join you for lunch?” or “mind if I join you for dinner?” is a totally normal thing to ask at conferences.
Get dinner with colleagues on the majority of the evenings. Mix it up: sometimes with grad students, sometimes some postdocs and profs in the mix. Take evenings for yourself when you need them, but don’t miss out on this part of networking.
Attend the keynote talks. They’re often quite interesting, and people will generally be talking about them at coffee breaks and whatnot.
Try going to a session block that sounds really interesting and is totally out of your wheelhouse. Also go to a session block or two in a related topic to broaden your understanding of your own subtopic. This is one of those great things you can only do at very large, broad meetings like COSPAR!
Prepare an “elevator pitch” (one to two sentence non-jargon summary) if someone asks what your research is on.
Giant 9-day-long conferences can be exhausting, even for the most extroverted among us. Try not to skimp on your usual basic self-care like eating regular healthy meals, getting plenty of sleep at night, and exercising once or twice a week (even just 20 minutes of youtube yoga in your hotel room).
Don’t feel bad about skipping sessions. Acknowledge now that you won’t see All The Talks.
Spend time making new conference buddies and seeing old ones.
Take a nap if you need to! At one of the big AAS winter meetings, I took a nap every day.
Eat a vegetable every day. Your body needs it.
Drink plenty of water.
Try to not go over your usual caffeine & sugar intake. I know, I know, that’s what coffee breaks are for…but try not to go overboard. Doing this helps me manage anxiety better and sleep reasonably well with the jetlag.
Struggling with your mental health at a conference can be more taxing than usual. Reach out to friends (at the conference and at home), and take time to do whatever helps you when you’re at home. Generally people don’t pry and we all know everyone else is busy, but if you need an excuse to get out of something, you’re “not feeling great, but will catch up tomorrow/the next day/after my talk.”
Hack Together Day is a day to work intensively on projects, individually or in small groups, of interest to the astronomical community. A wide variety of projects will be undertaken, spanning everything from software development to community outreach to scientific research to trying out new analysis tools. We’ll also ask the contributors for SS16 (Developments and Practices in Astronomy Research Software) block 3 to be at the hack day, to help participants install, configure, and use the featured software packages. This information will be shared here once the talk schedule is confirmed.
Hack day or programming experience is not required; newcomers are extremely welcome! Project ideas and participants will be solicited before and during the meeting. Participants can lead or join a project, and should plan on focusing on only one thing.
Hack Together Day will take place on Thursday June 29th from 9:00 to 17:30, with the usual breaks for the plenary session, coffee and lunch.
EXCITING NEWS!! There will be a special session at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) 2017 on developments and practices in astronomy research software and a hack day!! I’m co-organizing the hack day and a block on different astronomy software packages, where we will have a variety of speakers (invited and contributed) share open-source software packages of interest to a broad portion of the astronomical and space science community.
EWASS is the general meeting for the European Astronomical Society that will be held in Prague, Czech Republic on 26-30 June 2017, hosted this year in partnership with the Czech Astronomical Society. There will be many symposia and special sessions on a variety of research topics, and registration for the meeting will open in December.
Applications to participate in the Python in Astronomy 2017 workshop are open until December 9th! The workshop will be held on May 8-12, 2017 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Some travel funding will be available if needed, and participant selection will be done with the goal of growing the Python in Astronomy community. All career levels and Python skill levels are welcome to apply.
I’ve been to the previous two Python in Astronomy workshops. At the first meeting, I was a beginner in terms of contributing to open-source python astronomy projects (like, had never done a GitHub pull request, and didn’t know anything about packaging software), but I learned a ton and loved getting involved with a wonderful community! At the second meeting I was able to take a more active participation role, and I co-lead a tutorial on git and GitHub. And I’m now on the Scientific Organizing Committee for this one!
Next week I’m attending the AAS HEAD (high energy astrophysics division) meeting in Naples, FL, USA! My talk is on Monday April 4th at 4pm in the Stellar Compact I plenary session. I anticipate tweeting for at least a little of the meeting, so tweet back if you’ll be there! The hashtag for the meeting is #HEAD16.
I’m currently in Seattle at the Python in Astronomy 2016 workshop and wanted to post some notes and reference links for those of you who want to follow along with what we’re up to:
Hola! This week I’m tweeting up a storm at EWASS 2015 in Tenerife. The multi-wavelength timing of compact objects session is today, and the transitional millisecond pulsar session is on Thursday and Friday. Non-astro followers, you can un-mute/re-follow me on Saturday 😉
