Travel Plans

I get to go to Paris!

So part of the deal of being a Swinburne astro grad student is that the Faculty gives supervisors $3000 per student and are encouraged to use it to send students to international conferences to promote their work (and in turn the University). Last week half of the department was in Kuala Lumpur discussing galaxy evolution in clusters and groups while two other students have been in Egypt talking about pulsars. Well, the WiggleZ have decided to send me to France to talk about my project in Marseilles and Paris for two separate conferences in the first two weeks of July (woot!).

This is convenient as Karl, my supervisor, will be at Oxford then for sabbatical so I will travel to England to chat with him for about a week after the conferences.

Well I'm pretty excited considering the only other time I traveled to Europe I was with my parents and was determined to be a moody teenager (you can see evidence of this in the photos). I also will catch up (to some extent) with my siblings who have all travel to Europe on their own.

I've submitted to present a poster at both conferences and Karl may give a talk at one of them. Otherwise I am looking at doing some traveling on my own for a week or two, but have not sorted this out. But from what everyone here has said I should stay in Paris for as long as possible.

So I am also going to Auckland for 5 days with a bunch of the students at the end of this month because its so close and there was a deal with Qantas. :)

But really I need to stop dreaming of all my travels and get back to the grindstone as I have to give my sixth month review talk next Wednesday. I've been working on the review document over the weekend (except when I locked myself out of my apartment with half a gallon of milk and four not-so-frozen pizzas). I wish I paid more attention in writing classes or was forced to take something more helpful than Introduction to Fiction and Poetry in college. They made it very easy for science majors to leave Hopkins with as few writing classes as possible. Well, after 4+ proposals and this document I am starting to realize that a lot of science is writing and I wished I learned how to communicate more clearly.