All projects and challenges as of 21.11.2024 12:45.
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julia-nbody-io
format-agnostic N-body simulation snapshot reader in Julia
Meditation practice
I will guide you through a meditation session, so you learn some basic tools that can help with mental health and relaxing.
Mental Health in Academia
Let's discuss how to approach mental health in academia, what techniques can we use to improve our mental health, and more!
Navigating challenges as an international PhD student!
Inviting fellow international PhD students to discuss (or create) resources to help getting used to life (& bureaucracy, ugh) in Germany!
Reproducible research environments
Sometimes you really need to run this awful old code. How to make this easier for your future self?
Why is it important?
Sometimes you really need to run some old code. Maybe it is a obscure Fortran 77 program, written by an advisor of your advisor. Maybe it is a Python script from another PhD student who left a few years ago, which uses particular combination of packages no longer working in Python 3.10. With some luck there might be a README file, but you never know for sure how accurate it is.
Needless to say, how painful it could be.
So, what can I do?
Time-traveling still works in only one direction. There is never enough time to write the documentation. However, not all hope is lost: you can always try to make things easier for your future self (or for another poor soul).
The idea of this session is to overview & compare the tools, which can help with creating the environments for your projects and reconstruct the same environments in the future.
Which tools?
- conda / mamba or any language-specific package manager
- environment modules or spack
- containerization: Docker, Charliecloud or Apptainer
- functional package managment: Nix and Guix
- something else?
How to contribute to this session?
- Tell a story how you were trying to run some very old code
- Do you pack your stuff in Docker? You can show the Dockerfile and explain what's inside.
- Do you compile some MPI codes on a few different clusters and also on your PC and laptop? (where there is MPICH insted of IMPI for example) How do you archive it?
- Share your tricks to make python scripts do not break with every python update :)
I (Iliya) have some experience with conda, Docker and Guix, so I can talk about all these things. Something similar (but not limited to) to this.
SciComm & Outreach as an Early Career Astronomer
Let's discuss how to talk about our work to various groups (general public, journalists) and how to get started in SciComm!
This session will detail the types of science communication and outreach opportunities available to early career astronomers, and how to make the most of them. Particular emphasis will be placed on situations that may occur as a part of your research - an institute open day, being interviewed by a journalist, appearing on a podcast or pitching a press release.
I am an active astronomy podcaster myself, and have previous experience in the ESO press office. Ideally, collaborators would have experience with typical social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter/X, Bluesky, TikTok etc), experience in working with the public, or other relevant experience.
Spectroscopic intuition
When we look at a spectrum, what information can we get from it before any measurements? How can we improve our insigths from a first sight?
Challenges
A Crash Course in Teaching for PhDs
We don't typically get taught how to teach, even though we're expected to as part of our PhD. In this session we'll discuss what works, and take you through some of the dos and don'ts,
From closed source to open source
What does it take, to publish a closed source project as open source community tool?
Introduction to Git
Learn the basics of Git, or discover advanced features
What to do after your PhD?
The goal of this session is to systematically examine your own interests and abilities, as well as your own personality and the values that are important to you. This can help you to become clear about what kind of future careers you would like to pursue, whether they are in science or not. I took a similar course at university and would like to share with you the aspects that I found helpful. The way I see it, the course is structured so that I give you assignments and you work on them on your own to get to know yourself, your abilities, etc. After we have completed the tasks, we discuss our results and thoughts together. This systematic approach may make it easier for you to decide which field you would like to work in later.