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Some days I love my life. Other days I hate my life and those days would include the days I have to write conference abstracts. I especially hate my life when I write the abstracts for LPI organized conferences- it’s like they want a mini paper as a freaking abstract.
Let’s all be honest: for most of us signing up for conferences means that we’ve managed to give ourselves a deadline to get something done. In my case I find it handy- then I know that I’ll have X done approximately in time for the conference. For that reason I much prefer the following type of abstract:
“I did some shit with some data. Or rather I will do some shit with some data about 2 weeks before the meeting when I realize that it’s sneaking up. Oh by the way, here is me talking out my ass about some “preliminary results”. They may be right, or when I get my poster/talk together I may decide my preliminary results are wrong. But hey, they’re preliminary and I told you that so don’t quote me on it m’kay?”
I know I didn’t finish the science for my DPS talk last year until about 10 minutes before I needed to upload the sucker. I am however happy that I waited until the last minute as my talk turned out better after to talking with folks at lunches and finding out what sort of info they wanted to know.
I’m still digesting this meeting. I was twittering during the meeting which was interesting too, I might have figured out how to post something interesting enough to get re-tweeted.
I’m wondering if age is getting to me though-I didn’t really find the talks as illuminating as much as I normally do. None of them had me going “oh my I should look at my data for x,y,z!” but I guess that may be because I’m getting that more these days from DPS conferences where I see a lot more people in my corner of research experience. On the upside, on the day of my poster, our posters were right by the front door so we got a nice flow of traffic. The lab undergrad whose poster was next to mine remarked that I was pretty much slammed the whole time I was in the poster hall and she was right. I guess it paid off to be the one asteroids person in a sea of comet posters since the solar system all gets lumped together at AAS.
This time I found much to be disappointed in and maybe it was just me. The news of the job prospects in astronomy shouldn’t have really been news to me but the discussions of which is better for grad students: abortion or infanticide to do the needed culling since the number of graduating grad students is greater than the number of available jobs were a bit unsettling as I wasn’t one of those students that came with straight A’s and a shining physics GRE score which seems to be needed to get into the top tier schools . And in some of the town halls I felt some growing ire from other members of the community when instruments are promised but never materialize or are being held back with little to no explanation. I’m not really feeling myself overly motivated and I’m just not sure if it’s winter or what I consider to be not so good news at this meeting.
But for now I get to fight with an oversize catalog that I don’t think was produced with much in the way of usability in mind. Oh my day is full of such excitement.
Much as I look forward to a meeting in driving distance I dread this meeting. It’s the one where I need to be dressed up and schmooze for jobs. Its also the one where I get to serve as the mentor for the undergrad who has been working in the IR group at University of the Frozen Tundra because my PhD advisor (and the only one of the two profs she worked with this summer attending the meeting) will be busy with other professional duties.
It doesn’t help that I’ve basically set myself up for personal failure with my poster this time around- I’m taking a blogging break as I frantically do photometry on even more data to throw it on a poster. A poster that I need to get to Kinkos on Wednesday in order to get it printed before the meeting. You can imagine the case of Eeeek I have right now. And like an idiot I signed up for the Chambliss Award judging and I want to do a poster better than the one I did last year Long Beach that got me a Chambliss Award. Perhaps the poster didn’t get me the award and my amazing knowledge and ability to *cough*bullshit*cough* might have impressed the judges.
But. . . .my good news as of Saturday was that rejection emails for the postdocs at a certain Ivy League school in Boston went out last week and I wasn’t at the recieving end. So apparently I made the shortlist of 30 people for a generalized astronomy postdoc where I’m sure there were plenty of applications (similar programs are listing ~250 applications) and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel good about it. If I don’t get a postdoc just getting on the shortlist isn’t really going to help but it gives me hope that maybe for the Sagan I have a chance against people doing extrasolar planets, especially since the logical continuation of my dissertation is to use my results to select outer main belt asteroids for further optical and spectroscopic study as a test of giant planet migration models (namely the migration of Jupiter and Neptune). If we could show the theory works in our own solar system then we might really be able to understand how the super-Jupiters around other stars got so close.
But for now my world view is just trying to get photometry of another 400 asteroids from the main belt and Hilda populations done. . . .
I Study Asteroids 