One thing that won’t ever happen for me in #GradLife: boredom. I drove down to Tucson for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) 2018 Project and Community Workshop. I had a very productive week at this meeting, balancing going to sessions, meeting with folks, and preparing for another upcoming conference: Comparative Climatology of Terrestrial Planets III (CCTP3) in Houston. Here are a few snippets from my week: Represent! -- I attended a “blending” workshop (blending is where two or more objects are superimposed) and learned that (thankfully) the science I am interested will be largely unaffected by this difficult phenomenon. However, I learned it is good to be present at this kind of event to represent your own field and its scientific interests. For example, in one session, there were probably 20 galaxy scientists, 20 cosmology researchers, but only one strong lensing (space being warped by gravity, a bit like a funhouse mirror) person and only two Solar System Science folks: Henry Hsieh and myself. Three were a handful of other solar system folks at LSST2018, but they were necessarily at other sessions advocating for our field! I never saw such a clear case where it was beneficial, and necessary, to lobby for one’s science. Analogies – I attended a media training workshop with Amanda Bauer at the conference, and gained a real appreciation for the power of analogies. There was a plenary session that defined the capacity of the LSST camera in terms of Corgis you could fit inside (240!). My favorite: it would take 375 4K TVs (or a basketball half-court) to display a single LSST image. And the tolerance was the equivalent of having an ice hockey rink with a maximum deviation in flatness of 1 mm, or 10 sheets of paper. These analogies got the message across, were sometimes funny, and always memorable! Safety – I participated in a topic I feel strongly about: Codes of Conduct. (CoC, also my initials… what are the odds? 1 in 26^3, or 17,576! Nerdy, I know… and yes, I know not all letters of the alphabet are equally represented, but close enough!) I am especially keen on inclusivity, but I was struck by the focus on workplace safety at LSST; they have something like 1/3 the national average accident rate! They have systems like “full stop” where anyone on the construction site can immediately stop all work. I suddenly wondered (out loud): “safety” is the common word in CoC and jobsite safety documents, so is there a connection between feeling comfortable enough to report e.g., sexual harassment, and reporting a potential workplace hazard? How about vice versa? I hope that if the culture encourages people to speak out in one area, positive effects propagate in others. Downtime – I didn’t get much opportunity for downtime, but on Friday the conference ended with a grab-and-go lunch, so I headed over to the nearby Catalina State Park. The ranger warned me that most wildlife would be hiding (it was mid-afternoon and over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), but, seemingly wanting to prove the ranger wrong, I got quite a show on my relatively short hike. I saw a hawk and many birds, different kinds of lizards, and even a fox! Charity – I did the American Cancer Society Climb to Conquer Cancer in Flagstaff last year, and loved it. I registered again this year, and it was awesome. So many people showed up to support this cause, hiking about 7 miles from the bottom of the mountain to the base of the Arizona Snowbowl, some 2000 feet higher. I am certainly sore today, but it just reminds me of this event. I highly recommend it! New Semester – Well, summer sure went by fast. This semester is going to be challenging: my prospectus and oral defense take place, I hope to get a major part of a research project launched, and I hope to write at least one paper as well. My tenure with the National Science Foundation as a Graduate Research Fellow begins September 1, and I’m pretty nervous about it. I am reassured by fellow fellow Daniel Sanchez, a 2017 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awardee who works on bat DNA (amongst other things) I recently connected with. I’ll report back later this semester!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About the Author(S)The contributors to this blog are the students, faculty, and other researchers in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Northern Arizona University. If you have any suggestions, or would like to contribute to this blog, please email mark.salvatore@nau.edu for more information. Archives
January 2019
Categories |