It's been a couple months since I last wrote: life is overwhelmingly full! I can think of two people who have told me that the end of their PhD was the most intense work period of their life, and it is shaping up similarly for me.
I'm in my final semester of the PhD now, a long cry from when I first committed. Most of my time is spent trying to push research along, but I am also the TA for an undergraduate hydrology course, with Dr Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi as lead instructor, getting to revisit lots of basic hydrology concepts I'd forgotten about. Solar radiation fluxes. Soil infiltration. Snowpack measurements. Etc.
Teaching is a joy for me, and despite all of the dysfunction of the modern-day university, I'm curious what's still possible. In this vein, I've accepted a short (1.5 year... or more?) postdoc position with a large teaching component at a teaching-focused university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo ("SLO").
Thanks to an aunt who moved to San Luis Obispo decades ago, I have a long-standing relationship with California's Central Coast and I am excited to deepen it. Growing up and visiting her (and my cousins) gave me my first sense of what California "is..." The Central Coast is a little bit mystical to me, a place I feel both bewildered by and comfortable in; the surf can be both fantastic and fickle. My arrangement will allow me to keep dipping my toes into the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in this big weird state. I'll move to SLO sometime in the middle third of 2024; please come visit. I really want to get a cat.
The postdoc is a bit of a stepping stone. The research project within it is extremely applied—I will essentially be working as an engineer. This appealed to me as I am trying to figure out how to scaffold the next moves in my career. Part of me wants to get a jobby job (likely as an engineer in the public sector), granting some financial stability to life and hopefully capacity to spend my extra time watering the garden of ideas I've neglected for years (environmental philosophy, degrowth organizing, and other new hobbies). Part of me wants to stay in academia, for the teaching opportunities and conflagration of work and intellectual pleasure (or at least more time on ocean-going research vessels?). We shall see what opportunities bubble up in the near future, I'm trying to embrace one step at a time.
My first paper/chapter was published in late 2022; my second paper/chapter was just submitted to a journal. (It's about seasonality of marsh-edge erosion in San Francisco Bay!) In the next two months I need to squeeze out a third chapter: I'll have to submit it to a journal, too, but that will come later. I'm proud of my papers, but scientific publishing is such a small, weird form of a publication practice. If you are in the Bay Area and want to hear my PhD Exit Talk—where I'll actually talk about the ideas that motivate my research around restoration and environmental science and exploration of myself—please come to UC Berkeley campus on Friday, November 17th. (Text me for the exact details!)
In the meantime, I've been swimming a lot, and in about a week and a half I'll be swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco as a group swim, with friends, to raise money for gastric cancer research. It's a Bay Area bucket list item, I suppose. If you can, please consider donating to fuel me across the cold, shark-infested waters of SF Bay!!!
Getting in the water has been a great respite during a punishingly busy period of work, as always. I have been missing more reading and writing time and am really excited for some months to refill my head after I wrap up in December.
Off till then,
Lukas
I'm in my final semester of the PhD now, a long cry from when I first committed. Most of my time is spent trying to push research along, but I am also the TA for an undergraduate hydrology course, with Dr Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi as lead instructor, getting to revisit lots of basic hydrology concepts I'd forgotten about. Solar radiation fluxes. Soil infiltration. Snowpack measurements. Etc.
Teaching is a joy for me, and despite all of the dysfunction of the modern-day university, I'm curious what's still possible. In this vein, I've accepted a short (1.5 year... or more?) postdoc position with a large teaching component at a teaching-focused university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo ("SLO").
Thanks to an aunt who moved to San Luis Obispo decades ago, I have a long-standing relationship with California's Central Coast and I am excited to deepen it. Growing up and visiting her (and my cousins) gave me my first sense of what California "is..." The Central Coast is a little bit mystical to me, a place I feel both bewildered by and comfortable in; the surf can be both fantastic and fickle. My arrangement will allow me to keep dipping my toes into the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in this big weird state. I'll move to SLO sometime in the middle third of 2024; please come visit. I really want to get a cat.
The postdoc is a bit of a stepping stone. The research project within it is extremely applied—I will essentially be working as an engineer. This appealed to me as I am trying to figure out how to scaffold the next moves in my career. Part of me wants to get a jobby job (likely as an engineer in the public sector), granting some financial stability to life and hopefully capacity to spend my extra time watering the garden of ideas I've neglected for years (environmental philosophy, degrowth organizing, and other new hobbies). Part of me wants to stay in academia, for the teaching opportunities and conflagration of work and intellectual pleasure (or at least more time on ocean-going research vessels?). We shall see what opportunities bubble up in the near future, I'm trying to embrace one step at a time.
My first paper/chapter was published in late 2022; my second paper/chapter was just submitted to a journal. (It's about seasonality of marsh-edge erosion in San Francisco Bay!) In the next two months I need to squeeze out a third chapter: I'll have to submit it to a journal, too, but that will come later. I'm proud of my papers, but scientific publishing is such a small, weird form of a publication practice. If you are in the Bay Area and want to hear my PhD Exit Talk—where I'll actually talk about the ideas that motivate my research around restoration and environmental science and exploration of myself—please come to UC Berkeley campus on Friday, November 17th. (Text me for the exact details!)
In the meantime, I've been swimming a lot, and in about a week and a half I'll be swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco as a group swim, with friends, to raise money for gastric cancer research. It's a Bay Area bucket list item, I suppose. If you can, please consider donating to fuel me across the cold, shark-infested waters of SF Bay!!!
Getting in the water has been a great respite during a punishingly busy period of work, as always. I have been missing more reading and writing time and am really excited for some months to refill my head after I wrap up in December.
Off till then,
Lukas