UT Austin Astronomy Graduate Student Postdoc Seminar (GSPS), Spring 2018

Every other Friday, 4:00-5:00pm, in the Astro Classroom (15.216B) or Evans Conference Room (15.202A)

Past semesters:

Description/Motivation (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: Patrick Drew (pdrew{at}utexas{dot}edu) & Sydney Sherman (ssherman{at}astro{dot}as{dot}utexas{dot}edu). Webmaster: Samuel Factor (sfactor{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!

GSPS Founding Father: Jeffrey Silverman (JSilverman{at}astro{dot}as{dot}utexas{dot}edu)

Current Semester Schedule:

Date	Presenter(s)	Topic/Title	Location
1/26	Canceled	Canceled	Canceled
2/9	Sydney Sherman	Volunteer from anywhere and help students succeed	Astro Classroom
2/23	Benny Tsang	Astrobites: beyon seven years of astro-blogging	Astro Classroom
3/9	Aaron Lee	Improv for scientists: Connecting with your audience	Evans
3/23	Canceled	Canceled	Canceled
4/6	Sinclaire Manning	History of the World Cup	Astro Classroom
4/20	Brian Mulligan	XQUIZ: an easy to use question bank and quiz generation tool; The UT astronomy grad student wiki and you	Astro Classroom
5/4	Jessical Luna	You have great health insurance, USE IT!	Canceled
5/11	Chris Lindner	Academia Schmacademia Part 4	Indeed

Possible other topics (in no particular order):

practice your second year defense talk
using git and GitHub
making a professional website (with GitHub?!)
adventures in your homeland (or homecity) or your summer conference tour
writing a teaching statement
another CV roast
good interview skills
non-academic job market info (preparing, applying, resumes, interviewing, details of the job, etc.)
Insight Data Science Fellows Program (Emily McLinden, Jeff Silverman)
scientific ethics
putting together good posters (PowerPoint, Adobe InDesign)
astro-related social media, AstroBetter, astro blogs, blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing
astronomy ecosystem online (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
posting talks and slides online (speakerdeck, slideshare)
how astronomers use Python, a collaboration with Continuum (Kris Overholt & Peter Wang)
coding/software (sublime text 3, bitbucket, Flash, MESA, Cloudy, runmycode, astroML, MCMC, emcee, Papers2, rescuetime, productivity suites, BibDesk, JabRef, zotero, PHP, python, IPython notebooks, LaTeX, DS9)
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