UT Austin Astronomy Graduate Student Postdoc Seminar (GSPS), Fall 2015

Every other Friday, 3:30-4:30pm, in the Astro Classroom (15.216B) or Evans Conference Room (15.202A)

Past semesters:

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

GSPS is a place where students and postdocs can practice giving talks or share information and knowledge that others might not have.
Topics of the presentations can be just about anything: their own research (either completed or commencing), career advancement and advice, pedagogy and teaching, practice/job talks, software packages/languages and apps, topics that aren't usually covered in other seminars, etc.
GSPS meets every other week during the semester (modulo University holidays).
There will be one main presentation/talk/workshop each session, led by one to a few people.
Presentations should leave plenty of time for group work and/or discussion and questions.
Presentations should emphasize background material so everyone is on the same page.
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 new techniques and tools for 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).

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

Current Semester Schedule:

Date	Presenter(s)	Topic/Title	Location
8/28	Jeremy Ritter & Brian Mulligan	Bash Scripting and the Wonders of 'awk' (plus some notes and more scripts here)	Astro Classroom
9/18¹	Chris Lindner	Academia Shmacadamia pt. 3: Having a Tech Job in Austin (and field trip to Civitas Learning)	100 Congress Ave., 3rd floor
9/25	Raquel Martinez, Natalie Gosnell, Sarah Tuttle	Discussion & Summary of the Inclusive Astronomy Conference (Conference Website)	Astro Classroom
10/9	Jacob Hummel	Beyond @astro: Tools for Intradepartmental Collaboration and Pictures of Pugs	Evans
10/23	Matt Stevans	Search For Common Characteristics of Hubble Fellows, slides originally from Jonathan Trump	Astro Classroom
11/6	Kevin Gullikson	Packaging & Distributing (Python) Code for Fun and Citations (related talk by Erik Tollerud)	Astro Classroom
11/20	Yao-Lun Yang	The Dark Magic of Radio Astronomy	Astro Classroom
12/4	Keaton Bell & Stefano Meschiari	Astro Writing for the Public (Keaton's press release) and McDonald Observatory's "Ask An Astronomer" Page (page is here)	Astro Classroom

¹Special off-week GSPS!

Possible other topics (in no particular order):

CV/resume advice/roast, LinkedIn profiles (possibly w/ junior UT faculty)
good interview skills
facility/EPO/non-University astronomy jobs (Joel Green)
academic job searching (Dave Pooley)
non-academic job market info (preparing, applying, resumes, interviewing, details of the job, etc.) (Chris Lindner, John Jardel)
Insight Data Science Fellows Program (Emily McLinden)
scientific ethics
putting together good posters (PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign)
astro-related social media, AstroBetter, astro blogs, blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing
asking questions and getting responses on Facebook (Kevin Gullikson?)
posting talks and slides online (speakerdeck, slideshare)
how astronomers use Python, a collaboration with Continuum (Kris Overholt & Peter Wang)
optimizing & profiling code (in Python) (Brian Mulligan)
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.