Outreach
The most effective outreach and education program that I’ve worked with has been the Planet Hunters Coffee Chat team. This effort was a spin off of the Planet Hunters TESS project built and run by Dr. Nora Eisner.
In brief, the Planet Hunters TESS (PHT) project was a citizen science project (with more than 50,000 global users) aimed at finding exoplanets in time-series data collected by the NASA TESS satellite that algorithms missed. Since the project was community driven, Dr. Eisner partnered with a team out of NASA to build an online lecture series that would teach the citizen scientists involved in the project how to analyse the data on their own. I contributed to this series to talk about the time series signatures of several types of variable stars and how to identify them. I’m particularly proud to have worked with this team, so go check out their content!
ERASMUS+ Summer School:
In 2022, I was invited to prepare some lectures and jupyter notebooks on asteroseismology and time series analysis for the ERASMUS+ summer program in La Palma, Spain. The workshop still hosts the notebooks online!
Fun fact, I got invited to do this after responding to a tweet.
MESA Summer School:
MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Evolution) is an open-source stellar evolution code with a global user community. One of the best things about the MESA community is that they organise yearly summer schools to teach people how to use the code. I was a part of the 2023 MESA Summer School hosted by the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary. All of the labs are hosted for free online, so you can take a look and see if the labs cover one of the problems you’re dealing with!
Application resources
Bachelors to PhD:
I want to start this off by saying that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in my journey, and the start of my career really came down to asking a question and other people being very kind and generous with their time.
During my Bachelors degree at Villanova University, a trio of postdocs who worked on binary stars and asteroseismology came to give talks. After the talks, I fell in love with the idea of asteroseismology, and began asking around about how I can study it properly. A professor at Villanova (Prof. Andrej Prsa) listened to me, sent some emails, and got me in contact with two asteroseismology titans (Prof. Don Kurtz and Prof. Conny Aerts) who literally wrote the textbook on the field. I went to do research on asteroseismology of r-mode oscillations with Don Kurtz at the University of Central Lancashire in the summer of 2012 and take courses on asteroseismology and stellar structure and evolution with Conny Aerts at KU Leuven in the fall of 2012. Eventually, I would go back to Leuven to get my Masters Degree in Astrophysics with a MSc thesis supervised by Conny Aerts, and I would then go on to successfully apply for a PhD with Conny.
TLDR: The moral of the story is go to your department seminars and ask people for help - most people are nice and want to help! It all comes down to who you know.
Postdoc applications:
I defended my PhD in May 2020 as the second PhD defense that was hosted virtually. Yes there is a recording of it on youtube, please do not watch it, it was a pretty bad presentation on my behalf. Between November 2019 and January 2023, I submitted 63 postdoc applications to fellowships and postdoc positions in the US, UK, and various places in Europe. To this date, I’ve only received responses from 26 applications, 23 of which were “no”.
Something to keep in mind is that I had already been working with most of the people who hired me when I received the postdoc offer. Unless you’re an absolute superstar who is known by everyone, you’re most likely to be hired by people who are familiar with your work and have seen you give talks. This is why its so important to make collaborations and give talks in as many departments as possible when you’re on the job market.
Postdoc applications vary in length and are a pain to convert from one format to another, but generally, once you get the science goals down, the rest is just modifying for a given institute.
The most helpful thing that people did for me when I was writing applications was to provide me with their old applications. Seeing how people write and frame things really helped me figure out my own research goals and how to be clear and concise in communicating my vision. To that end, I’ve hosted some of my postdoc applications here for you to take a look at.
Radboud Excellence Fellowship, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, (2020; kind of successful, separate offer)
FWO Junior Postdoc Fellowship, KU Leuven, Belgium (2020; invited to interview, no offer)
James Arthur Fellowship, NYU, New York, USA (2022; no offer)
Max Planck Fellowship @ MPA, Garching, Germany (2022; offer made)
Newton International Fellowship, The Royal Society, UK (2023; offer made)
There’s a lot of ideas in here (some are good, and some are bad), so I hope that you get some inspiration!
TLDR: Postdoc applications suck. You’ll likely get tons of rejections, unless you’re a great scientist like my wife who submitted 8 applications and got 7 offers, but the important thing is that I’m not bitter about that.
Professor applications:
I wrote a few applications for professorships - and similar to the case of postdoc applications, seeing how other people structured their applications was the single most helpful thing while I was writing mine. The other crucial aspect is to get as many other people to read your application and give feedback as possible.
Professorship - ISTA, Vienna, Austria, (2022; invited to interview - no offer)
Professorship - KU Leuven, Belgium (2024; first reserve candidate for interview - no offer)
Professorship - University of Amsterdam (2024; invited to interview - no offer)
Hopefully, there’s something useful in these - the biggest difference between postdoc and professorship applications is the scale and vision (2-3 yr for postdoc to 5-15+ yr for professor). In any case, if you’re here looking at these, good luck! And keep in mind that I didn’t get the positions - that being said, I was up against really amazing competition, all of whom are doing awesome things in these places.
Education and access to knowledge is the most important form of currency in the world. Unfortunately, there are numerous circumstances that prohibit everyone from gaining equal access to learning material. Similarly, the path through academia from Bachelors to postdocs and professorships is an incredibly opaque and frustrating process. On this page, I’ll list some of the open-source learning efforts that I’ve been a part of as well as some of my own coding and teaching materials for free use. Additionally, I’ll briefly describe my path through academia and provide links to my postdoc and professorship applications as examples of what does and does not work.