UT Austin Graduate Student Postdoc Seminar (GSPS), Fall 2014

Every other Friday, 4-5pm, (mostly) in the Astro Classroom (15.216B)

Past semesters:

Spring 2014

Description/Motivation (cribbed from UC Berkeley's GSPS page):

GSPS is a place where students and postdocs can practice giving talks.
Topics of the talks can be just about anything: their own research (either completed or commencing), career advancement and advice, pedagogy talks, practice/job talks, topics that aren't usually covered in other seminars, etc.
GSPS meets every other week during the semester (modulo University holidays).
The aim is to have one graduate student and one postdoc talk each session.
Talks should be 15-20 minutes + 10-15 minutes for discussion and questions.
Talks should emphasize background material.
No faculty allowed. Only graduate students, postdocs, and early career research staff are allowed.
GSPS is a good place to:
- promote community between grad students and postdocs
- practice speaking and discussing your research
- feel comfortable asking lots of questions
- learn about topics outside your own research
- learn about applicable non-science topics
If you would like feedback on your presentation, the organizer(s) would be happy to take notes and discuss it with you afterwards (and/or ask other audience members to do so).

Organizer: Jeffrey Silverman (JSilverman.at.astro.dot.as.dot.utexas.dot.edu). Please contact me if you have questions, comments, complaints, or requests for future topics or snacks and thanks for participating in GSPS!

Current Semester Schedule:

Date	Slot 1	Topic/Title	Slot 2	Topic/Title
8/29¹	Kyle Kaplan	The Amazing Power of Scripting DS9: Cooler Than It Sounds, Really! (example files)	---	---
9/12²	Lara Eakins	Scopes, Scopes, Scopes! Star Party Basics	Rachael Livermore	Bringing the Awesomeness of Astronomy to Everyone: How to Give a Great Public Talk
9/26	Spencer Martin	Teaching Astronomy to High Schoolers
10/10	Jacob Hummel	IPython Notebooks Will Change Your Life: Tutorial and Workshop
10/24	Natalie Gosnell	Panel on Applying to Postdocs and Fellowships	Adam McKay	LaTeX: Not Just For Papers (It's For Talks and Posters Too!) (here is the talk source file and here is the poster source file)
11/7	Brian Mulligan	You have a PhD... who cares?	Stefano Meschiari	Make your Emacs sparkle! (interactive demo)
11/21	Marshall Johnson	The Secret History of Graduation T-Shirts: A Stroll through the Archive	John Feldmeier	What it's Like Being a Professor at a Predominantly Undergraduate Institution
12/5	Aaron Rizzuto	He Comes From a Land Down Under: The Life & Times of ARizz	Rachael Livermore	Summary and Future of Astronomy on Tap ATX

¹Will be held in Evans Conference Room (RLM 15.202A).

²Will be held in Lara Eakins' Visitor Classroom (RLM 13.132).

Possible other topics (in no particular order):

CVs, resumes, and LinkedIn profiles
writing grant and telescope/computing time proposals (Adam McKay)
good interview skills
academic job searching (Dave Pooley)
getting a tech job (in Austin), w/ possible field trip (Chris Lindner) (John Jardel?)
Imposter Syndrome (or we could just watch this)
scientific ethics
women's issues
underrepresented minority issues
diversity issues
putting together good posters (PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign)
Summary of the AAS Astronomy Ambassadors Workshop (Keaton Bell)
social media, AstroBetter, astro blogs, blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing
asking questions and getting responses on Facebook (Kevin Gullkson?)
posting talks and slides online (speakerdeck, slideshare)
coding/software (bitbucket, Flash, MESA, Cloudy, runmycode, astroML, MCMC, emcee, Papers2, rescuetime, productivity suites, BibDesk, JabRef, zotero, PHP)
what's your software stack and why? what tools do you use for which tasks?
what do you want improved so that you can put out more papers?
CS and/or stat department mixer
basic Korean
preview of next semester's colloquia

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number AST-1302771.