Role models can be found in many places. One of the most influential people for me was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astronomer who revolutionized astrophysics and also had one hell of a work ethic. I could write an entire blog post on the things he did and how they’ve effected how I look at work […]

I’m going to start by stating that while there are exceptions, by and large, academia is a fairly broken place where people learn that failure is not an option, and being anything other than the very best is failure. (Where “best” means a PhD and tenure at a top research university). Many of us were indoctrinated […]

Tl;dr. Managing large academic projects requires skills we don’t all have. Teach others what you know, and ask others to teach you what you need to learn. By giving away our knowledge, we all do better (and if someone learns from you and then does better than you… Isn’t that kind of awesome?) Back a […]

With the start of a large project comes the rather harsh reality that you can’t just make s*** (by which I mean organizational structure) up as you go. This is the adventure of CosmoQuest’s management team. Assigned a five year cooperative agreement, the bold collaboration explores the excitement of strange new worlds, uncharted galaxies, and […]