As a reminder, here the AAS Policy on Postdoc positions:

The AAS Council has passed (1988) and reaffirmed (2003) a resolution stating that no postdoctoral position should require a candidate response prior to February 15 of each year. This policy applies to postdoctoral positions whose recruitment cycles follow the normal academic search timeline (offers in early spring to begin summer or fall of the same year). The text of this resolution is available on the Council Resolution webpage. Employers should take this policy into account in their recruitment process.

Prior experience shows that the rumor pages are not 100% accurate. If you need to make an important time-critical decision based on the status of a job opening, we strongly encourage you to get your information from the official search committee, not the Rumor Mill.

Finally, remember, even if you find disappointing news on the Rumor Mill, please remember that you still do good work and are probably absolutely crushing it in your current position. Your research is cool!

As a reminder, here the AAS Policy on Postdoc positions:

The AAS Council has passed (1988) and reaffirmed (2003) a resolution stating that no postdoctoral position should require a candidate response prior to February 15 of each year. This policy applies to postdoctoral positions whose recruitment cycles follow the normal academic search timeline (offers in early spring to begin summer or fall of the same year). The text of this resolution is available on the Council Resolution webpage. Employers should take this policy into account in their recruitment process.

Prior experience shows that the rumor pages are not 100% accurate. If you need to make an important time-critical decision based on the status of a job opening, we strongly encourage you to get your information from the official search committee, not the Rumor Mill.

Finally, remember, even if you find disappointing news on the Rumor Mill, please remember that you still do good work and are probably absolutely crushing it in your current position. Your research is cool!

While each tool covered in this series contributes to an effective workflow independently, there were a few aspects that I found lacking when using them individually. Specifically, I sought a centralized space for logging research, summarizing papers for future literature reviews, managing projects, tracking ideas, and monitoring progress. This led me to Notion—a powerful project management system, and my personal favorite.

Notion

Notion’s strength lies in its adaptability.  It’s a remarkably customizable application that leverages diverse block coding features—enabling the creation of text, markdown, pages, nested pages, and more. The key to Notion’s prowess is its “databases” feature–tables of information that offer unparalleled flexibility. These databases can house a wide array of data—dates, numbers, links, custom tags, and even JavaScript-based formulas. Interlinked databases seamlessly funnel data from one to another.

Notion’s aesthetic versatility is equally noteworthy, as it enables users to populate their workspace with icons, images, GIFs, and widgets. I often find that this blend of functionality and aesthetics makes the actual work itself even more enjoyable.

Now, we’ll go through each vital page within my Notion setup. By examining their functionalities, we’ll uncover how to maximize their potential and seamlessly integrate them with the tools discussed earlier in this series.

Calendar Page

The calendar page offers a straightforward representation of Google Calendar within Notion. While the integration process between Google Calendar and Notion is somewhat involved, a YouTube video guide simplifies the setup. After integration, tasks created or modified in Google Calendar are automatically synchronized with this Notion calendar and vise-versa. For a clean integration, ensure the “Type” field and color in the Notion calendar database match that of your Google Calendar(s). Various views—Week, Today, Month, and Breakdown—offer insights into tasks, their status, and categorization by simply changing the manner in which the data in the calendar is displayed. By selecting a task, you gain access to detailed information and can adjust data as needed. You also can have a page associated with each task for notes, links, images, typeset or even more data tables.

Projects Page

The projects page is powered by the Projects database and serves as the core of project management in my Notion setup. Here, ideas for various undertakings like AstroBetter articles or new research projects are conceptualized. This page highlights essential project details, including titles, GitHub links, authorship, priority, progress, and project status. Clicking on a project leads to a project template, where organization and progress tracking occur. The “Action Items” field links to the calendar database, connecting tasks to specific projects. This data facilitates progress calculations and generates progress bars. The “Research Diary” field links to the Research Diary Database, housing logged research related to the project. Similarly, “mentors/mentees,” “collaborators,” and “proposals” fields are linked to respective databases. The potential of the project’s database and Notion as a whole extends beyond what’s described here, and as you delve into its intricacies, you’ll customize it to suit your needs. What I’ve created is merely a starting point, and the template can be further refined to your preferences.

Research Diary Page

The research diary is my personal favorite database within my Notion setup, primarily serving as a repository for tracking research progress across projects. Its fields and settings enable categorization of entries based on their nature, such as code, problems, resolutions, ideas, and methods. Each entry can be associated with individual or multiple projects, ensuring easy access to relevant research logs. Notably, the “Commit Link” field stands out as a powerful feature. I’ve established an automation using Zapier to link every new GitHub commit to a Research Diary entry. With this feature, you can click on the commit link to view the version of your projects repository on GitHub as it was when you made the diary entry, enhancing record-keeping and reproducibility.

Reference Database

Another invaluable database within my Notion setup is the Reference Database, which beautifully integrates with Zotero. Although it doesn’t import PDFs, it enables Notion pages associated with each paper. I use this space to summarize papers, record ideas for my research, and store crucial plots. Templates are provided to streamline the process. These summaries, along with Zotero annotations, enhance my understanding of research articles and facilitate writing literature reviews. It’s worth noting that you could link specific papers to relevant projects by adding a “Projects DB” field, though I’ve neglected to do this as of yet.

The breadth of Notion’s capabilities can be overwhelming at first. To tackle this, many users have crafted templates, both downloadable and importable into your Notion account. While most templates come at a cost, I’ve taken the liberty to make a template out of my own Notion, tailored to astronomy researchers, available for free download from my personal website. Though Notion’s learning curve may appear daunting at first, mastering it unveils its potential as the most formidable tool in this series.

As we conclude this series, we’ve unraveled the intricacies of an optimal scientist workflow, where each tool plays a vital role in managing the plethora of academic responsibilities. Notion emerges as a cornerstone, seamlessly connecting various aspects of the workflow and enhancing project management, documentation, and organization. You can download a template of my Notion setup from my personal website or you can use it as a base to build your own!

Visual Studio Code

In the previous installment of this series on “Tools for Scientist Workflows,” we explored Git and GitHub—invaluable tools for code management. Now, let’s delve into a personal favorite of mine for actual code development—Visual Studio Code (VS Code). While various Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) exist, VS Code stands out as a particularly versatile and user-friendly option (see the official VS Code Tutorial to get started).

Multiple Language Identification and Compilation

VS Code’s strength lies in its “extensions” feature—a library of downloadable tools crafted by a mix of developers, which act to expand the functionality of VS Code. For example, a powerful capability of extensions is to allow the user to compile code of any language all within VS Code—no need to have an individual software for each language!

Enhanced Code Documentation

Extensions also enhance the editing process. For instance, the “better comments” extension facilitates organized comments with customizable highlighting. You can tag notes such as “TODO:” in green for reminders or “FIXME:” in red for fixes, all neatly organized in a toggle-able tree within the editor.

In the theme of detailed documentation, there is also an extension that integrates Zotero with VS Code.  Citation Picker for Zotero allows you to cite references stored in your Zotero account right in the VS Code editor. With this extension, if part of your code uses ideas or equations from specific publications, you can document as such in your code.  If you ever want to open the publication you’re referencing, simply copy and paste the citation from VS Code into Zotero. I’m particularly enthusiastic about well-documented code, and these features significantly elevate this aspect.

Git and GitHub Integration

However, VS Code’s capabilities extend beyond language support and editing tools. Extensions integrate VS Code seamlessly with Git and GitHub, eliminating the need for confusing terminal commands. Upon integrating these extensions, you can access Git commands and even manage GitHub repositories directly within VS Code.

My workflow exemplifies this synergy—starting with coding in VS Code and seamlessly transitioning to using Git-integration to commit and push changes to GitHub repositories. An extension like “GitKraken” enhances this further, offering a comprehensive overview of commits, comparisons, and metadata, all within the VS Code environment.

LaTeX Integration

The power of VS Code doesn’t stop there. It even accommodates LaTeX, albeit with a somewhat more involved setup. This integration allows you to maintain a self-contained project workflow, housing code, figures, LaTeX, and PDFs in one location. This approach ensures automatic coherence among files and simplifies updates and recompilations.

As an illustration, consider a file structure where code generates a plot saved to a specific path. Using LaTeX, you can include and display this plot directly in your paper by specifying its path to be the same as the location where you saved it in your code. Any code updates automatically reflect in the paper, maintaining synchronization and eliminating the need for manually uploading and re-uploading.

While this system works wonders for single-author projects, collaborative efforts via platforms like Overleaf may introduce some problems. Collaborative papers may possibly still be managed through a combination of Overleaf and GitHub integration, albeit with potential merge conflicts. Nonetheless, for individual projects, this integrated workflow, coupled with version control, fosters a streamlined and well-documented process.

In the next entry of this series, we will discuss the research command-center Notion, and its most powerful functionalities for organizing your research.

Picture the frustration: let’s say your research requires you to change or add a feature to a code. You might work for days or even weeks implementing it. By the end of your efforts, you realize the way you did things before is favorable to what you’ve produced. Or perhaps you’re interested in recreating a result you had with the old version for comparison sake. If you don’t use version control, you would be fresh out of luck in reverting back to your old code. Version control is a practice that allows one to conveniently manage these challenges. With Git and GitHub, we have the essential tools for version control, archiving, and collaborative coding.

In essence, Git serves as the bookkeeper of your code’s evolution, meticulously tracking every change. In tandem, GitHub is where your code and its iterations are stored. It’s a dynamic synergy: Git encapsulates your code’s evolution, while GitHub houses the code itself and the documentation of its evolution. Notably, GitHub is a remote repository, a digital sanctuary safeguarding your code from local vulnerabilities and mishaps.

Git

Git boasts a multitude of functionalities, but for our purposes, we will discuss the “clone,” “fetch,” “commit,” and “push” functions. “git clone,” duplicates a repository onto your local machine, a crucial step preceding any code alteration. “Git fetch” acts as a local refresh, ensuring your version mirrors the latest repository modifications. “git commit,” saves your local modifications. “Git push” takes the local modifications made by you and stored by “git commit” and stores them to the remote repository—GitHub.

GitHub

I use GitHub primarily for the purposes of backing up my projects remotely.  However, GitHub does have a few other functionalities that I have found useful for my research.  For example, it has the ability to display two versions of your code side-by-side while highlighting the differences from one version to the other.  This is a game changer if you are hunting down any changes that you have made to your code, especially if such modifications have drastically altered the result.

GitHub is also an indispensable tool for collaborative projects.  Say you have multiple people working on a set of codes.  Each of you contributes something to the code, but how do you keep track of what changes were done by whom?  GitHub (alongside Git) makes this information easily accessible.  For any repository, you can see a list of all the “commits” that have been made to the project.  Each commit will show the author name, date and time, as well as a short message associated with the commit .  If you click on the commit itself, you will have access to the details of the changes made to the repository.

In my research, Git and GitHub join forces to create a dynamic diary of my code’s changes. While I am still in the process of refining my approach, I try to make weekly “commits” and “pushes” so as to keep a very detailed record of my projects. Traditionally, the Git commands are done through the terminal, a skill well worth mastering (see Atlassian, W3, and TutorialsPoint for tutorials). However, contemporary tools like Visual Studio Code (VS Code) integrate with Git and GitHub, enabling code management with intuitive button clicks. In the next installment of this series, we’ll delve into the world of VS Code, my favorite all-in-one code and text editor.

Staying current with research publications is a daily ritual for graduate students—an integral aspect of our journey toward becoming leading professionals in our fields. For this reason, a well-structured approach to reading and annotating papers is indispensable.  There are a couple choices out there for keeping track of your papers. Two popular ones are Zotero and Mendeley.  Check out this Zotero vs Mendeley comparison to help you choose. I personally use Zotero.

Citation Manager

As a citation manager, Zotero adeptly stores citation information from an array of sources, spanning publications, websites, books, and journal articles. When you’re ready to start writing a paper, you can export the citations into a Bibtex file to use with LaTex.  However, Zotero supports other forms of citation styles that are standard across an array of disciplines.  You can see the support formats on the Zotero website here.  I like to use folders that categorize my references based on specific topics within my research, thus allowing me to easily navigate to individual publications.  You can enhance your organization even further by using the tags feature.  All of your references and folders are stored within a specific library.  By default, your first library will be a private repository named “My Library”.  However, you are not limited to a single library.  You can have multiple libraries, and you can even make them shareable with other Zotero users, say if you have a group of students or a collaboration that would benefit from sharing a repository of references.

PDF Viewer/Annotator

Zotero’s capabilities extend beyond just storing the articles, as it also possesses an internal PDF viewer. The viewer is sleek and minimalist, and it affords rapid access to your articles.  The viewer supports annotations through highlighting, underlining, and even digital scribbles—perfectly suited for those who like to markup articles. Typed comments and color-coded tags add to your annotations, neatly organized within the “annotations” column for easy retrieval. I use Zotero’s PDF viewer to read articles, and I use my iPad to highlight important information.  The system of annotation I have crafted using Zotero is as follows:

• Yellow – Interesting, but not crucial information
• Red – Information I do not understand and should look up or ask an advisor
• Green – Fundamental information about research topic that I should know
• Blue – Main ideas of the article
• Purple – Main results of the article
• Orange – Assumptions that the authors have made
• Gray – Points of doubt that I have about the article

For each highlight, I write an associated note that clearly explains why I found that particular text interesting.  Once I am finished with an article, I make a task for myself in GCal to research the points of confusion I highlighted in red. Cloud synchronization ensures your PDFs, references, and annotations remain accessible from anywhere, and secure even in the face of unforeseen technical mishaps

Additional Features

Third-party developers have crafted various add-ons that integrate into Zotero to enhance functionality. Dark mode, PDF preview, DOI manager, automatic PDF retrieval, and integrations with various research tools are just a few that exist for Zotero. I find the DOI manager and PDF retrieval add-ons particularly useful, as they are triggered automatically whenever a new reference is imported.  I rarely find myself scouring the internet for PDFs thanks to these features.

How do you manage your references and resources? Let us know in the comments.

The next part of this series will focus on the code development and version control tools: Git and GitHub.

Navigating the complexities of academic astronomy requires a deft balance of diverse tasks—writing articles, managing citations, writing code, creating plots, logging research, and creating project timelines. As I prepared for my first year in the PhD program at New Mexico State University’s Astronomy Department, it dawned on me that I lacked an elegant system to execute my tasks and manage all of the materials of my research. An abundance of tools exist to do many of the aforementioned tasks, yet what I needed was a unified system that wove a select few tools into a cohesive command center. This command center would house a repository of tasks, research logs, article notes, and project roadmaps. In this series of blog posts, I will discuss the potential of each tool in my academic toolkit. With each installment, I will discuss the capabilities that have been most helpful to me and my research as a graduate student. In the final post, I will direct the reader to instructions on how to integrate many of the tools mentioned in this series with each other and with Notion, a highly customizable project management tool . But first, we need to start with the calendar.

The most basic necessity of any productivity workflow is calendaring. I elect to use Google Calendar (GCal), a powerful tool for optimizing my daily and weekly events tasks. Its user-friendly interface and comprehensive set of features make it an indispensable asset in my academic toolkit. The platform’s versatility is apparent in its ability to generate tasks and recurring meetings effortlessly. I rely on GCal to time-block my days, allowing me to safeguard against my forgetful self. GCal’s intuitive interface makes modifying tasks a breeze. A simple drag-and-drop functionality adjusts dates and times, while task duration can be altered by resizing blocks in the dashboard.

A notable advantage of GCal is its capacity to create multiple calendars within a single profile. This facilitates task categorization, and I leverage it to maintain distinct calendars for various responsibilities. For instance, my Research calendar manages research-related tasks, while the Teaching/Mentorship calendar keeps me organized for those respective commitments. Why divide tasks into separate calendars, you might ask? The answer lies in enhanced visualization. Color-coding tasks within specific calendars offers a quick overview of the week. The toggle feature allows me to focus on particular calendars or view them collectively, aiding in tracking time distribution across research, writing, classes, etc.

The notification system is a neat feature as well. You can tailor notifications to your preferences, even receiving daily task agendas via email if desired. Collaborative projects benefit from GCal’s ability to grant others access to specific calendars and send invitations which facilitates  synchronized agendas for team efforts.  GCal also seamlessly intertwines with other applications which makes integrating it into your workflow easy as pie. In forthcoming posts, we will explore GCal’s integration with Notion, so that our weekly agenda may sync to our command center.

If GCal is not to your liking, Apple Calendar has many of the functionalities mentioned in this post, though it has less options for integration with other tools.  If you find it difficult to organize your tasks on your own, Reclaim AI is another option. Reclaim AI is a web application that uses artificial intelligence to schedule when you complete specific tasks.  It even has settings to customize the time-widows within which you wish to be scheduled for various types of tasks.

What are some of your best practices/hacks for calendaring?

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the platform has gotten much, much worse. There’s more hate speech, the familiar ‘blue check’ has been turned into a paid-for service to get your content seen, and Twitter (now renamed to X) is even going to remove the ability to block other users.

Twitter is no longer fit for purpose as a town square of academic discussion, and it’s clear that an alternative is needed. Enter Bluesky.

Bluesky is one of a number of viable Twitter alternatives that have popped up within the last few months. I won’t get into explaining which I think is best in this post, or advocating for one over another – as it stands, I feel like Bluesky has the most momentum right now, and as such I’d like to write up a post explaining how to get started on the app.

Topics in this post:

1. Getting an invite code
2. Signing up
3. Finding people to follow
4. Feeds, feeds, feeds
5. Settings & accessibility
6. Start interacting!
7. (bonus: set your domain name as your handle)

1. Getting an invite code

At the time of writing, Bluesky is still in private beta, meaning that you’ll need an invite code to sign up. Invite codes are given to every existing Bluesky user at a rate of about one every two weeks. Getting an invite code is the hardest step.

If you’re active on Twitter, then you may already know someone with a spare invite code. I recommend asking there! Otherwise, a few initiatives like this thread have been started to give out codes.

There’s also a waiting list for Bluesky invite codes that you can sign up to – although I doubt you’ll ever get one, as it has more than 2 million people on it…

2. Signing up

Once you have an invite code, Bluesky has both a web app and mobile apps – you can use either or both!

Go to one of the following and follow the instructions from there to make an account.

• Bluesky on the web
• Get the Android app
• Get the iOS app

3. Finding people to follow

Starting a social media account from scratch isn’t something most people do often. I think it’s actually quite annoying. You’ll start out with a very small/non-existent network of people, and it takes some deliberate effort to rebuild a list of followed accounts again on any new app.

I’d recommend setting aside around 20 minutes just to find people and rebuild your network.

Building your network

There are some ways to automate this a bit. To find people you know from Twitter, you can try using a tool like the Sky Follower Bridge extension for Chrome, which looks for links to Bluesky accounts in the Twitter bios of people you follow. This can be a slow process if you follow a lot of people on Twitter, due to Elon-Twitter’s rate limiting – but it’s definitely the most automated way to find people.

Next off, Kelly Truelove maintains a list of astronomy accounts on Bluesky. It’s a really useful list of accounts sorted by follower count, some of whom you’ll probably already recognize from Twitter.

Once you’re following at least a few people, the “Search” tab on the web/app will be able to give you a list of additional suggested people to follow. Under the subheading “In Your Network”, you’ll get 20 suggestions for people to follow based on who you already follow.

You can refresh the page (or swipe down on mobile) to refresh this list and get new suggestions. It’s probably worth doing this a few times!

Expanding your network

Finally, one of the most useful things I did was to look at who the people I follow are following. Find an account of someone you follow who’s active on the network and who posts content you like. Navigate to their profile and look at who they follow.

This can be a goldmine of hundreds and hundreds of suggestions for people to follow, which you can easily find by looking at people’s profiles.

I highly recommend following at least 200 people on Bluesky – but honestly, the more the merrier. Following more people will make your home tab more active, and will make the app a lot more enjoyable.

4. Feeds, feeds, feeds

A discussion about Bluesky wouldn’t be complete without talking about its best feature – feeds. On Bluesky, all components of the app are open source and will (eventually) be completely federated.

Because of this, a really awesome thing is that anyone can write and host their own algorithm for sorting posts, meaning that you’re not limited on Bluesky to just a “Following” and “For You” feed of posts. In fact, there are already over 10,000 feeds to choose from!

My feed recommendations

Assuming that you’re reading this blog post because you’re interested in astronomy/science, then you might be interested in the following feeds to get you started (small disclaimer – I’m the maintainer of the two astronomy feeds):

• Astronomy – posts about astronomy by astronomers on Bluesky
• Astrosky – all posts from everyone signed up to the Astronomy feed, whether about astronomy or not
• What’s Science – a very popular feed with posts about any science topic
• SciArt – posts at the intersection of science and art, containing some really cool things

The descriptions of the above four feeds also contain instructions if you’d like your posts to get included in them. There are also some popular feeds containing more general posts:

• Discover – Trending content from your personal network
• What’s Hot Classic – some of the most liked posts on the network
• Cat Pics – a feed containing pictures of cats from the whole network (CATS!!)

How to subscribe to feeds

After clicking the above links to the feeds, you can press “Add to My Feeds” to add the feed to your list of feeds. You can also press the icon to pin the feed to your home screen, for easy access. Finally, you can the feed to like it to show your support!

You can also search for more feeds by going to the “My Feeds” tab on the app and pressing “Discover New Feeds”. You can search for new feeds and view a list of all feeds sorted by how many likes they have.

As a final tip, you can press the (cog) icon on the “My Feeds” tab to rearrange which order feeds appear in on your home screen, as well as which feeds are pinned.

5. Settings & accessibility

There are a few settings that you also may want to tweak in the app. Navigate to the “Settings” tab on the web, or the “Settings” part of the menu on the top-left of the mobile app.

Settings: Accessibility: Require alt text on images

Firstly, let’s talk about alt text. Alt text on images is really important for improving the accessibility of the web. Most social media sites support it, but Bluesky has something uncommon: you can require it on images you post. I recommend turning it on: it makes it impossible to forget to add!

Settings: Appearance

Now is a great time to turn on dark mode if you’re also a vampire.

Settings: Advanced: Home feed preferences

There are some things you may want to tweak about your experience on the app here. The main thing is that you can change how many likes a reply to a post needs to have to be shown in your home feed.

By default, this is set to 2 – but you may prefer a lower number (like 0) if you want to see everything the people you’re following are interacting with. You will always see all replies to your own posts in your notifications.

In addition, you can also show/hide reposts and quote posts from this window.

Settings: Advanced: Content languages

The final setting worth mentioning to get you started is languages. Select which languages you’d like to see in feeds on the site.

6. Start interacting

Congratulations! You’re done getting set up on Bluesky. You should now be following a good number of people, and you should have a few feeds to look at for extra content. Now comes the fun part!

Go out there, read some great posts, and join in on discussions! You could also make an introduction post, talking about who you are and what you’ll be posting about.

And if you have any questions, just ask! I think the Bluesky community is nice, we don’t bite. You’re also always welcome to ask me – my handle is @emily.space.

Enjoy!

Bonus: set your domain name as your handle

Bluesky uses a unique system for verification. You can set your handle to be your personal website’s domain name! Long-term, this means that big organisations (like NPR) could use a handle like “@npr.org” to show who they are on the platform. Only people with control over the domain can allow the domain to be used for handles.

But it also means you can get yourself a fun handle! (This is how I have @emily.space). You will need a domain name and access to configure its DNS settings. There’s a great tutorial on how to do this on the Bluesky website.

The Rumor Mill ready for the new season is now up and running: Postdoc and Term and Faculty and Staff. The archives from previous years remain available.

As a reminder, here the AAS Policy on Postdoc positions:

The AAS Council has passed (1988) and reaffirmed (2003) a resolution stating that no postdoctoral position should require a candidate response prior to February 15 of each year. This policy applies to postdoctoral positions whose recruitment cycles follow the normal academic search timeline (offers in early spring to begin summer or fall of the same year). The text of this resolution is available on the Council Resolution webpage. Employers should take this policy into account in their recruitment process.

Prior experience shows that the rumor pages are not 100% accurate. If you need to make an important time-critical decision based on the status of a job opening, we strongly encourage you to get your information from the official search committee, not the Rumor Mill.

Finally, remember, even if you find disappointing news on the Rumor Mill, please remember that you still do good work and are probably absolutely crushing it in your current position. Your research is cool!