I thought I had the worst day of my life yesterday but today topped it! Advisors are so important in your grad school career and choosing who you work for can make your life heaven or hell. You build up a certain relationship with your advisor, ohhh... why and I trying to philosophize on that when all I want to say is that I don't seem to be getting along with my advisor these days and it is so DAMN FRUSTRATING! Have I lost the ability to interact with her during the year she was away on her sabbatical? Why do I feel she's talking down at me? Why do I feel so sensitive? Because I spent the last 4 years working on this project and she changes it with a flick of her finger - we'll include this, we'll throw away the rest, etc. Because I've put so much passion, so much thought, so much work, such long hours, into getting it all done, that throwing half of it away doesn't make sense to me! Why didn't we decide to throw is away a year ago? I would be so much further along to finishing my thesis if I'd had 10,000 spectra! Gosh, I'm feeling miserable! I hate it all! I hate this thesis! I don't want to do it. Not this way. Not being told what to do! Gosh... I ... am ... so ... upset... I've been crying since 4:30 pm today and I still can't quite figure out why I'm crying... I am totally having a nervous breakdown! Oh, the joys of grad school!

If I ever...

If I ever get around to submitting a dissertation (as impossible that is to imagine now), I'd like to put the following poem by Stanka Pencheva in the front:

Sleeplessness chase me
Outside
And collapsed upon me with all its might
The grandouise and fearsome
Night
The floating darkness of the sky was carrying
The Milky Way's thin mesh
Unbearably bright the stars
Were peircing my transparent flesh
And sucking me in with the mouth of a divinity
Was silently above me
Infinity

(translation is mine)

What did I do today?

Gosh, it's the end of the day and I feel like I have been very busy all day long but I cannot remember what I did... Ummm... I know I did do something! Sent my advisor a new draft of my past and present research. I went to a lunch talk where I heard about the new SDSS - After SDSS 2. Wow! 1.5 milion galaxies to z=0.7, 100,000 quasars at z>2, planets and 100,000 stars in the galaxy. Some impressive instrument projects too - an infrared multi-object spectrograph and an optical spectrograph with 1000 fibers. These guys know what they are doing. Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been groundbreaking in so many ways scientifically. It also started the "big survey" phenomenon in astronomy as an extremely productive scientific collaboration. I really need to read some papers now instead of watching "The Curse of the Golden Flower". PAPERS!

A good feeling!

Despite some disturbances in the ether I've been making some really awesome progress lately. Pat on my own shoulder ;) I finally feel I am figuring out a way to manage all of our data in a way that makes my life easier. That is so important with a survey like ours. Nothing special, just making it all as uniform as possible in terms of data format and file names and directory structure, as well as consolidating the data into single files whenever possible and finally carrying as much auxiliary information (even a little redundantly) as possible. The book-keeping part is still horrendous but I feel that once it's done I'll never have to deal with it again. Phew! So for several of the fields I've consolidated all data we have into a single spectroscopic catalog (with a few hundred entries) and a single file of spectra. Now I can plot anything I want vs. anything else. Fun time! The nth nearest neighbor script is working. The spectral fitting code is working. I don't have any of my plots right now so instead here is a plot from the CfA redshift survey. Large scale structure, baby! I'll talk more about it tomorrow. For now here is a movie of LSS evolution with cosmic time:


Now back to job applications.

New York, New York and other things

I was in NYC over the Labor day weekend and while I try to avoid personal details, I will make a little detour here. I love traveling. I especially love traveling with my sister. We just kind-a get along and manage to make our time together enjoyable. (I need to think a little harder about why this works so well, mostly because I can name a few (ex-boy)friends with whom I've had the hardest time to travel!) I also love New York, and while I think it would be a catastrophe if I lived there because I wouldn't get anything done, I love to visit as often as possible. I visited my advisor who was on a sabatical there in April and it was just too much fun! So I figured my sis would like NYC too and I suggested we go there as a B-day present for her. The one month delay, logistical difficulties and the weather in Dallas aside, we had a grand time! Why did I want to make the detour? Ummm..., right, travel and flexible schedule! Doing astronomy, as surprising as that may seem gives you a lot of opportunities to travel and also lets you take a 5 day weekend at a moment's notice. Nice.

Of course, to offset the damage of being away for 5 days I've been working non-stop ever since I came back. What's happened since? I actually finished the data analysis that I have been struggling with since June! Hooray! It feels so damn good! One of my collaborators is actually helping me finalize things, which means so much to me, (surprisingly) on a personal level - I wanna hug him and kiss him (lucky for him he's two states away). I have been tinkering with a few small things the last couple of days like writing scripts to cross-match catalogs based on RA and Dec, to make master spectroscopic catalogs and other "master" files. I think I got most of that figured out. So the big things I still have to do are the following: look into the last dataset which is already reduced but we want to re-reduce with the new tools; figure out the environment measures; maaaaybe re-write my advisor's Fortran code in C or IDL, but only if necessary; make lots of plots and write the paper; start fitting the spectra. Ready, steady, go!

Job applications season is officially open! Hand me that box of Kleenex, please... I am feeling miserable already... and now is the worst moment to feel down low. I got my CV for the most part and I am working on the other parts of the application. I have a list of ~30 jobs I may apply to with deadlines spanning from *now* to some time in April, but mostly concentrated between Oct. 15th and Dec. 1st. The BIG deal about job applications for the good jobs (fellowships that is) is writing a research proposal that you plan to carry out during the next three years. This is where the BIG trouble is - coming up with an original research idea for a three year long project. This must be BIG. It can't be "oh it would be nice to get 4 nights next semester and look at this cute thing we found". No. Big science questions. Grand ideas. So I have a few little projects I have already started (i.e. written observing proposals for) and while my advisor is pushing me to make them grand, these are really not the things I want to be doing for the next 3 years. I also feel that no matter how much I pimp them, these little projects are never gonna shine in a pile of very competitive job applications. They'll always be the shabby relatives they were at the start. However the grand questions I have in mind are very ephemerous now but while I am dragging the mental box of Kleenex around I don't feel like discussing my ideas with anybody. And, you know "truth is born in the debate". The department I work at has some fabulous people I can talk to, if I could only muster up the courage. Why the hell am I feeling down? My advisor's been kind-a harsh, though probably honest - she told me that my publication record sucks and that may prevent me from getting a good job. That made me really despondent because I really don't feel like working for someone for three years - that will be like grad school all over again... May be I need some time to get used to the idea that I am not as great as all other grads who got great jobs, but right now I feel like I'd rather be baking cupcakes, taking pictures, making babies (you really didn't hear me say this last one) or doing just about anything else with my life than slaving for another three years. So instead of feeling motivated to get the best application there ever was, I feel discouraged to keep going down this career path :( I really need to get a grip and start working these job applications first thing tomorrow morning!

Now, sweet dreams!