Yesterday, a graduate alumna of my department, Ai-Lei Sun, hosted a meeting with graduate students and postdocs in my department, talking about her transition from a postdoc to a nonacademic job. She was visiting campus for reunion weekend and was kind enough to offer to do this. As background for her, she graduated with her Ph.D. two years ago and has been pursuing postdoc work since then. She was sought out by the company Orbital Insight with whom she had had some contact in years past and…
In my research, I look for planets around stars in a certain type of star cluster known as a globular cluster. Globular clusters are the oldest known star clusters and are nearly as old as the universe. Although the locations of many of these clusters are well known and documented, interloping stars that happen to be in the same area of the sky as these clusters are always present in telescope images. This makes it difficult to know which stars in an image actually belong to the cluster. We…
The astrophysics academic job application cycle starts soon and my preparations, should I apply for academic jobs, need to start now. Because of this, I’ve been considering one last time whether I want to pursue an academic job before I close that door forever. Just in time for this, I had the opportunity to job shadow at a data science company through Princeton’s new “Take a Ph.D. to Work” Program. I shadowed David Robinson, Chief Data Science at DataCamp. David is a…
