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

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

Past semesters:

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
1/30	Michael Gully-Santiago	The Shell, The GitHub, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution (bring laptops)
2/13	Chris Lindner	Academia Shmacadamia pt. 2: It gets better! (Careers in data $cience)	Adam McKay	First You Get the Money, Then You Get the Power, Then You Get the Telescope Time: Writing Grant and Telescope Proposals
2/27	Keaton Bell	Does Being an Astronomy Ambassador Give You Astronomy Diplomatic Immunity? Summary of the AAS Astronomy Ambassadors Workshop	Trent Dupuy	How to Give a Great Technical Talk
3/13	Aaron Smith	Parallel Processing at your PC (...or Mac, I just really like alliteration)	Kevin Gullikson	Bokeh For Beginners: Plotting in Python
3/27¹		Canceled: Prospies in town
4/10²	Sera Markoff	How 2 Apply 4 (and Get) Stuff
4/24¹	Sarah Tuttle	Book (Club) Report: Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race, Plus Some Stuff About TMT/Mauna Kea
5/1³	Anthony Scopatz	The Awesomeness of Scientific Python and Effective Computation in the Physical Sciences (and check out the book version!)
5/8	Rachael Livermore	Feeling Like a Little Fish/Mermaid in a Big Pond/Ocean: (shr)Imposter Syndrome and You

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

²Will be held 3pm-5pm (extra bonus hour!!).

³Special off-week GSPS!

Possible other topics (in no particular order):

CVs, resumes, and LinkedIn profiles
good interview skills
academic job searching (Dave Pooley)
getting a tech job (in Austin), w/ possible field trip (John Jardel?)
scientific ethics
putting together good posters (PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign)
setting up a UT Astronomy Dept. "Ask-an-Astronomer" page (Stefano Meschiari?)
bash scripting and the wonders of 'awk' (Jeremy Ritter)
social media, AstroBetter, astro blogs, blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing
asking questions and getting responses on Facebook (Kevin Gullkson?)
posting talks and slides online (speakerdeck, slideshare)
how astronomers use Python, a collaboration with Continuum (Kris Overholt & Peter Wang)
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.