ASTR710: PROFESSIONAL SEMINAR FALL 2004

Priya Natarajan

The professional seminar which is aimed at the graduate students in the department meets every Tuesday from 2 -3 pm in Rm 263 Gibbs. The format for this semester is as follows. For the first half of the semester, we have invited speakers who will lead the discussion on topics of relevance: applying for fellowships, jobs in and outside of academia, writing skills, the graduate program and applying for telescope time. The latter half of the semester will be run as a journal club. Department faculty have compiled a list of recently published, interesting papers in their sub-fields from which students can choose for their presentations. All graduate students (except for the incoming first years ) are required to make a presentation. Two students will make presentations of about 15 mts each at each session. All graduate students are required to attend. Postdoctoral fellows and faculty are welcome. For a list of suggested papers go to classes web page for the course which can be accessed by all registered students at http://classes.yale.edu and look for the ASTR710 web page.

Session 1: 7^th Sept. - Applying for graduate fellowships, NSF and beyond, Thomas Burns, Assistant Dean at the Graduate School, Bethany Cobb and Andy Cantrell will also answer questions.

Session 2: 14^th Sept. – Applying for Astronomy post-docs, led by Eric Gawiser and Ginny McSwain.

Session 3: 21^st Sept. – TBD.

Session 4: 28^th Sept. – Alfred Guy from the Writing Program on Effective writing.

Session 5: 5^th Oct. – Discussion of the graduate program, Jon Butler and Richard Sleight from the Graduate School.

Session 6: 12^th Oct. – Mary Johnson from Career Services will talk about job hunting in academia and beyond.

Session 7: 19^th Oct. – Journal Club.

Session 8: 26^th Oct. – Journal Club.

Session 9: 2^nd Nov. – Journal Club.

Session 10: 9^th Nov. – Journal Club.

Session 11: 16^th Nov. - Journal Club.

Session 12: 23^rd Nov. – Journal Club.

Session 13: 30^th Nov. – Journal Club.

Session 14: 7^th Dec. – Journal Club.