Astronomy (Extra)Ordinaire

Check

2007-11-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

General application - DONE
Carnegie application - DONE
Princeton application - finish end
Zurch and Toronto - finish end
Copenhagen & UCSC - needs more work

2007-11-25T20:37:00.000-08:00

I was soooo tired after the last deadline and soooo ridiculously burned out I couldn't function properly for a while. Then I spent a week working 12 hour days on my thesis which was productive but ended up in another major burn-out. This week was Thanksgiving. I ate, played football for the first time in my life and went for a hike - November in Arizona is one of the most beautiful times of the year! I am working on another batch of applications due on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. Half of them are regular postdocs so I am just doing a generic one-size-fits-all application. The other half are several fellowships - some of the really nice (Carnegie and Princeton), some more obscure and not as mainstream (Toronto, Zurich). Work, me, work, please! My brain is threatening a strike, I sleep 12 hours, and I get easily distracted. I do realize this is all very important but it is so hard to stay motivated when at times the "nobody loves me, am I gonna get a job" voices in my head get a little too vocal. Work, me, work! Please!

past two weeks

2007-11-10T23:27:00.000-08:00

All right, from the end to the beginning: today I spent the day in bed and reading and I went running and I am watching a second movie. It feels good! But I am starting to feel guilty for taking the day off. Gosh that is so terrible - I am having a guilt trip for taking Saturday off!
So the last few week. I went to Boston for a conference. I gave a talk at the conference. I shmoozed with a few people, but not nearly all I should have shmoozed with. Oh well, next time. I submitted 3 job applications on Halloween and spent the rest of the evening on the patio with the friends I was staying with drinking some amazing hot chocolate and waiting for trick or treaters. Then I gave a 45min talk and got to get a free lunch and see a friend who had just moved to CfA a month ago. Gosh, I really loved Boston! And the CfA wasn't that bad of a place. In fact I somehow mirraculosly managed to arrange for them to sponsor an application of mine this week - for the Hubble Fellowship, which means if I get it the CfA would be my first choice place to go to. Second went to UC, Santa Cruz and third to Columbia. Oh, well. I am so burned out from doing job applications, it's unbelievable! Never felt so burned out in my life! I hardly got anything done this week! Oh, I still have a pile of job adds over the next two months and I really have to sift through them and figure out which ones I really want to apply for, which ones I can get out of the way now and never think of them again and which 2-3 jobs I really want to will spend some more time on the applications for.
Spitzer proposals due this Friday too. Oh, well, it never ends.

Today is a memorable day...

2007-10-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

...my advisor gave me comments on my drafts! I can hardly tell the original text - there's so much stuff written on top of it, but it's great! I feel (masochistically) happy. I also got pedicure and manicure with a beautiful bride to be today... maybe that's why I'm happy... hmmmm

LIST!

2007-10-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

I was at a preparation for friends' wedding tonight and the bride is so organized she had a pile of lists. So I feel inspired to start my own list here, of important things I am learning about job applications, that I wish I knew before.

4. Be proactive about things - ask people to read your drafts, talk to people about your ideas, sign yourself up for talks and conferences. That's what a good postdoc will do, and, because you are hoping to be one too soon, you should too.

3. This is from a few days ago, but bears repeating: don't rely on your adviser to help you with your research proposal. It must be your own ideas! It has to be your own writing. Get your act together and move it along!

2. Collaborate! Or be known. Work with or interact with senior people in your field OUTSIDE of your own institution! SENIOR people. Those connections will come handy when you are wondering who will write your letters of reference.

1. Start research independent from your adviser well ahead of job applications. May be a year ahead is a good time. Think of interesting things to do, write your own proposals, get your own observing time, collaborate with your peers - other grads and postdocs. These projects will lay your road to writing job applications.

enough for now, more later.

yet another day (in paradise)

2007-10-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

Life is coming along. My research proposal is shaping up. My advisor finally read it and contrary to my expectations, didn't quite throw it back in my face. I forget if I've mentioned it previously, but some of the jobs I am applying for are fellowships and they require a research proposal that you are planning on carrying out with the money they give you. So that's really hard to do because it has to be somewhat disconnected from your thesis, and I haven't even written my thesis yet. It's difficult for way too many reasons to enumerate here. Anyways, FOUR of these fellowship applications are due next week, actually three of them are different. The problem is that the schedule is getting tight. I am photographing a wedding on Saturday, I am leaving town on Monday to go to Boston and give a talk at a conference and then, holly sh*t, give a colloquium at Harvard, submit the applications in the mean time, and come back on Friday all refreshed and ready to work on the "Holly Ghost" of job applications - The Hubble Fellowship, due on Nov. 8th! I'm getting out of breath just thinking about it! Wish I could go get some exercise!

missed oportunities

2007-10-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

I was talking yesterday to one of my house-mates that I wanted to be a writer when I was in high-school. In fact I wanted to be a journalist. I loved writing essays, short form stuff and had some stuff even get awards. I used to get a kick out of looking at ideas from lots of different angles and going all poetic or all philosophic about them. May be writing this blog would help me get my bug back, the joy of stringing words into ideas that actually have impact and make people thing. So far I certainly haven't done that. It's been more of an outlet for stress and frustration. And that serves a purpose too, I guess. I just hope I go back to being a better person when this is all over! I hate myself being stressed, because all the worries make me self-absorbed and self-centered and I forget there is a world out there where other human beings struggle with their own lives just as much as I do. I am grateful to my house-mates for bearing with me!
So I hope that tonight my inspirational bug would come visit me again. I talked to my advisor today and though she still didn't read my research proposal, she at least herd what my proposal is all about and let herself be convinced that it was interesting and doable, which is a major stem forward! So I am going home to write! Wish me luck!

about expectations

2007-10-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

A realization of the day. Your advisor is not going to help you with your job application. No. Read it? Maybe. But not help. Good luck!

2007-10-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

I was just hit by an yarning for a lost freedom while listening to this song:

An ex-bf of mine loved this song many many years ago and it grew on me and has always reminded me of him when it comes on the radio once in a while. I used to imagine us getting in a car and taking off into the sunset/sunrise. It just dawned on me, listening to this song today, that I have put chains around my ankles, that I don't have the freedom to get into a car and disappear out my life for a while. At least not without loosing something won with a lot of work. I know I did it to myself, but it makes me sad nevertheless.

yet another day

2007-10-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

Saw the Martha Graham Dance company tonight. Had a sip of Bordeaux. And now I am sitting in bed with my laptop in the hope that I will do some work on my Past and Present research statement and send it off together with a CV and a list of addresses to my letter writers. I have already submitted 4 job applications so for 3 of them the letters will be late :( Oh well. I have the sniffles. I hope I am not getting sick! That would be very bad timing!

some more job applications

2007-10-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday night and I am soooo tired. I just spend the weekend working and it sucks so bad! I feel like I haven't really done much of anything - I've been just editing this 3-page write-up over and over again, At the end of the weekend I have a better sounding 3-page write-up than I did in the beginning of the weekend but it still doesn't feel like an achievement. Such is life during job applications. I am tired. Two proposals are due tomorrow and because they are for jobs in Europe I have to submit them by noon. Thank God! My research proposal is shaping up. I like it. I am enthusiastic about it. I am kind-a excited about these jobs I am applying for tomorrow - I'd be happy to get one of them, though one more than the other. We'll see. I'm going to work on my CV now.

About personal life

2007-10-08T21:09:00.001-07:00

clipped from www.comics.com

I've wanted to write about some personal stuff for quite some time and because I'm sick of complaining about job applications to everyone including my blog, and because I feel enough time has passed, I think now is the time to do that. *Cough, cough*. It is very common that women in astronomy date men in astronomy, or that women in astronomy date women in astronomy, (probably men in astronomy also date men in astronomy but I have no personal example of that). Not only do they date each other, but they get married too. I have always been ambivalent on whether that's a good idea. At times (like now) I have been convinced that's actually a terrible idea. I am sure there are zillions of theories and pontifications on the benefits and pitfalls of dating in the workplace, but I never read them. May be I should have. I can certainly understand the allure of such a relationship - takes a lot less explaining what you do, how you do it, why is it important and why do you need to move every couple of years or so. It makes for a supportive relationship and both people are usually equally smart and accomplished. In fact the being together part is great. It's the breaking up part that I don't recommend. Especially if there is a very real threat you'll keep running into each other for the rest of your lives at conferences and such. Especially if you don't keep things very amicable. Especially if the relationship is at the point where the whole department knows ... and your collaborators around the world too. Especially if you stick with him whole he goes through tough times only so that you don't tear his life apart but he doesn't seem to care that your job applications have higher priority that his books still at your house. Then it sucks so bad that you never want to do it again. Ever. Ever. I already have two such corpses too many and that's enough. Amen.

2007-09-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-22T00:13:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-09-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-12T01:07:00.000-07:00

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!

How Not to Do a Survey

2007-08-29T01:38:00.000-07:00

Here is the biggest problem with my life these days, personal problems aside. I am working on a spectroscopic survey - ~20,000 galaxies, taken over 4 years with 4 different instruments and during 15 observing runs. Wow. We have observed 28 different fields, half of them were observed with more than one instrument and/or during more than one observing run. Putting all these data together in one pile is a challenge because of all sorts of systematic effects that array of observations may have. But we did next to nothing to take care of that problem during our actual observations and now that we are trying to figure out what the errors are drawing straws. We are banking on two methods - one is measuring the velocities (i.e. offset from zero) of the sky lines (which I have already talked about), and the second is matching redshifts of objects observed twice. The second is the one causing my sleepless nights these days, the biggest problem being that the number of objects observed more than once is miniscule and that the very reason we observed them twice is because we didn't get them the first time. Errors turn out to be big, bigger than my advisor likes and I feel like crying.

My computer got upgraded today, a happy news except for the fact that the OS got upgraded too and now nothing seems to works quite as I would like it. Aghhhrrrrr!

Every other Tuesday our department holds Galaxy Group meetings for people working in extragalactic astronomy. The format is the usual "Bring-your-lunch-and-listen-to-two-speakers" thing. One of the talks today was particularly striking - what to do with a Spitzer warm mission when all that's left will be the IRAC 3.6 and 4.5 um chanels. It was ... wow!

More later... getting too sleepy...

2007-08-27T02:13:00.000-07:00

Wow! Haven't written since Wednesday! Bad girl! I should be going to bed now (it's 2:15 am) so here's a brief summary of what I've been up to the last few days. I analyzed the good files and I am currently finishing up the reduction of the last bad one. The last 2 bad ones need to be analyzed which is a task for tomorrow. I am running some more sky extractions. I actually wrote the nth nearest neighbor script. Yey! Sounds like not much work but it took 3 days!

For tomorrow: Match up objects observed during different runs and see what the dispersion in the redshift differences are after the correction from the skylines. Make a tar-ball with all Hectospec files for my advisor. Play with the nth-nearest neighbor algorithm and talk to a new postdoc for ideas. Finish up with the analysis of the last 2 files!

A little musing on grad student life: it is Sunday night. I've spend most of the day in my office working. I wasn't the only person in the building, there were other grads and postdocs there. I skipped dinner because there's nothing dinner-able in the building and had a cupcake instead. What the hell!?!? Why am I doing this to myself?

Stop postponing!

2007-08-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

I did almost all I had planned for today. I finished the analysis of the good data. I am rerunning the 2 files of bad data. And my computer is crunching the numbers on the extraction of ~1000 sky spectra. I am almost done with the extraction of 50% of the sky spectra.

The nth nearest neighbor code seems to be the most postponed piece of work I have ever had. It's been on my "To Do" list for about a month. It really shouldn't be that hard to do. In fact I wrote out the algorithm and seems really easy. I just haven't been inspired to do any coding lately. IDL would probably be the easiest to write the script in. Once I get around to coding I need to do 2 more things - rewrite Ann's velocity dispersion script (very important) and finish the damn coffee page (less important).

Getting up early and hiking was great! If I had gotten some more sleep the night before it would have been even better. It was so beautiful and lush and full of butterflies! Wow! Took a picture of a petroglyph of a "sunbathing man/lizard". Hope I get some more sleep tonight. Too stressed to sleep ...

Today was the first Journal Club for the semester. It was pretty packed. Journal club is an hour long weekly meeting where two people present recent papers in 30 min each. The presentation today were vastly different but both interesting (which is not always the case). One was on a recent discovery of a planet (possibly 2) around an M star and the statistics of planets - apparently more massive stars have planets more frequently. The other was on a yet another weird cluster (exhibit #2) where the galaxies, the DM and the intracluster gas are all in different positions. Is there really dark matter or is it all just a modification of Newtonian gravity? I don't know enough about the latter to pick a stand (but nobody knows anything about the former and that doesn't stop them).

Tasks for tomorrow: Nth nearest neighbor algorithm first thing in the morning. The last 2 files with crappy data. Analyze all the sky spectra I've extracted. Analyze the 2 files of data I re-extracted today.

Frustration is setting in.

2007-08-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

I didn't do all I had planned for today. I am hanging my head down in remorse. I did about half. I *almost* analyzed 2 of the 4 big files. I found that the other 2 need some re-reduction - the edges of the slits are too bright for some reason and that screws up the following extraction which thinks the light is in the artificially bright edge. I need the re-run the the extraction with a lower "upper" parameter to get rid of the edge.

My computer keeps extracting sky spectra.

A friend of mine is visiting town this week and he is staying on our couch tonight. We had a BBQ in his honor so that he can meet some people and so that I can have people over at our house which I love. Lots of people came. We had a good time.

Tomorrow: get up early and have a short hike. Re-extract the 2 files which I found to be screwed. Re-run the cross correlation for them. Keep extracting sky spectra. Write the n-th nearest neighbor algorithm.

Another Late Night

2007-08-21T03:00:00.000-07:00

I have been working pretty late nights lately (when I am not out drinking late nights that is). And then I come home after midnight and I start doing chores and cooking amd making all sorts of noises that probably keep my house-mate up. But then he gets up at 5am and Skype-s with his g-friend who's on the other side of the world and wakes me up. So I guess we are even.

Work is coming along. But so is frustration. I am THAT close to finishing my main data analysis which involves looking at every single one of my 20,000 spectra. I have less than 1,000 left. If I finish 4 of the 6 files I will be VERY happy. It is mind numbing but I want it to be over that bad, I will spend the whole day tomorrow doing it. I have promised myself I will get a belly-button piercing when I am done with my data reduction and analysis. I have spend a year working on it! I kind-a need a physical memento of the experience. Other than the hunch I mean. I am afraid that will have to wait for a little longer though. I have this teeny dataset I also have to get re-reduced and that may take a while to figure out. I need to flux it, format it, cross-correlate it and look at every single one of the ~900 spectra. I really shouldn't be complaining, though I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that. Patience, my dear, patience.

My computer is crunching numbers at an unprecedented rate, extracting sky spectra like you wouldn't believe it. I even managed to kill my task bar tonight trying to speed it up. Well, I did speed it up, but the gam_server does actually do something! My Adviser agreed I can get a small upgrade. Yay!

Tasks for tomorrow: Finish the analysis for the 4 big and easy files. Write the nth nearest neighbor algorithm. Do more sky-subtractions. Get a ticket for the burlesque. Have a fun BBQ.

2007-08-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

I really need to get my act together with this blog. I have been chased down with guilt over the last week or so and haven't written much because of that. Just the usual - at the end of the day I don't feel like I have done much and I don't feel like writing. This is a really bad condition and I need to work on it because it propagates to the day after and then the day after and so on. This state is in large part due to personal problems that I have been having a difficult time dealing with - people whose mentoring I have greatly enjoyed leaving the department as well as trying to sever a relationship with a colleague leaving me less than motivated and concentrated. Both will probably get their separate posts in the future when the issues are not so emotionally charged in my mind. Now back to business. Last week I wrote a draft of the data reduction and analysis sections of the paper I am working on. The goal is to have the paper in a solid draft format by the end of the month. Goals are good and motivating but I haven't managed to get my adviser on board of this one and it's a little disconcerting about her lack of plan and sense of time.

I am still working on figuring out the systematics in the data for my thesis (I should probably describe my project one day too...). After the data reduction and analysis this is certainly the next biggie. And because we will be looking for low velocity dispersion systems we want to hammer the systematics of our redshift measurements down to minimum. So half of the data looks fabulous. But the rest is just sketchy, with varying errors. I am thorn between trying to figure out what is the ultimate source of these errors and just hardwiring a correction. For now I think we are going with the latter, but it is still a huge effort and requires many, many CPU hours. I need to upgrade my computer!

Finally, I am trying (desperately) to finish the analysis of my data. There are still a few bits and pieces here and there and it is driving me crazy! I did a huge data analysis effort earlier in the summer but then I ran out of steam and got brain-dead and stopped. That was bad, I should have just knuckled up and finished it. It's getting close...

All righty, until tomorrow!

Slow Friday

2007-08-04T00:12:00.000-07:00

There are some of those days when the world is just not cooperating! And today was one of them. The reduction code I have run 1000 times was giving me trouble all day long (and still is as of this moment). I am hoping that the particular dataset I was working with is to blame and I am trying with a different dataset. I learned a few fun little tricks in IDL - how to construct a histogram and how to fit a Gaussian, very useful. I am using the sky spectra to zero-point my spectroscopy. At least for the instrument I am looking at, the offsets of all ~300 sky spectra per mask are fairly small (~10km/s) and their distribution is tight and very well fit by a Gaussian. Both the mean and the median as well as the center of the Gaussian seem to be good measures of the center of the distribution - they are within 1 km/s of each other. Sky spectra are messy!

Dear Blog....

2007-08-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Today is a random Thursday afternoon in a random month (August) of a random year (2007) and I am sitting in a house on a street in a town on the planet Earth in the Solar System of the Milky Way which is flying in a semi-random direction in our (supposedly) Lambda-CDM Universe. I am a graduate student in Astronomy in this random town and I am graduating a year from now which points to an extremely ill defined graduation date within the next 12 months. I will try to write about the work I do every day for the next 12 month. By then I would have (hopefully) graduated and (hopefully) found a job. So if you want to see what the life of a last-year grad student in Astronomy is, you've come to the right place. Let the journey begin!