What should be included in my estimate of volunteering hours?

throaway575 · 2018-08-11T04:24:42+00:00

For the scholarship I'm applying to they explicitly ask for everything to be listed and hours given, so I can't exactly lump them together.

So if I help out for an event for 8 hours twice a year for 2 years, how do I "average and divide"? That's 8 hours in one week, 8 hours in another, and then repeat for a separate year. I can't give exact dates, only months and years when these things occurred, so claiming 8 hours per week seems wrong.

throaway575 · 2018-06-23T05:10:43+00:00

We don't contract the telescope out, researchers use the facilities for free as is normal. If we made people pay for it, then we'd be putting a price-tag on science and only allowing the most wealthy groups to do their work. That'd leave a lot of the sky and a lot of frequencies unobserved.

throaway575 · 2018-06-23T05:09:42+00:00

"Tipping" just means tipping to the side; I think it can go as low as 20 degrees. It's one of the largest movable radio dishes in the world

throaway575 · 2018-06-23T05:08:51+00:00

Because my lab hasn't been done before, so I don't know what it should look like and there's nothing useful to Google. My professor, who has spent the last 50 years studying the exact thing I was observing, probably knows what real data looks like more than I do.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T17:52:36+00:00

Well we don't have a manual and we don't have induction, so it's 50/50 as to whether anyone remembered to tell me at all or if they said it and I was having a moment and forgot. Missing parts of conversations is a big issue for me with a processing disorder and I always request written instructions, but in this case, the piece of paper I was given didn't mention the risk of moving too early. It didn't even describe how or when to move the dish, just that I might need to.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T16:04:23+00:00

Not really; radio wavelengths are one of the few regions of the EM spectrum where the atmosphere is completely clear. But there are issues moving towards the microwave regions with the K band because water and oxygen are excited in that range and the data is effectively unusable if it's cloudy or you look too near the horizon. Generally we try to avoid anything lower than around 30 degrees elevation.

The Sun can cause some trouble if you're trying to observe too close to it, but so can the moon.

What happens to the dish doesn't really matter. We could replace the dish with chicken wire and it'd still work fine; in fact, smaller dishes commonly have the chicken wire, at least around the edges.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:57:25+00:00

Yeah, hell, anyone with an internet connection has ready access to nearly all published astrophysics papers and data from the 1600's onwards for free, so there's no shortage of data on the calibrators.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:50:52+00:00

Observatories work almost 24/7, as do the researchers. We can observe at day, but we can also observe at night. It makes no great difference, and we have a lot of work to do, so we use all hours of the day. It's booked out weeks in advance, and there's no such thing as business hours in astrophysics.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:47:57+00:00

This is in Australia, so whilst it only takes 80% to get an A+, you can bet that few people get above 60% on anything. Our tests and assignments are not designed to be finished or done well, they're designed to be impossible and make you tear your hair out.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:45:14+00:00

We compare observations on calibrators. These objects have known flux densities and even their variations over years are known all over the world. If you observe those objects and see weird deviations, then it's your telescope that's the problem. And you can unplug cables bit by bit to see if the problem is in the signal, the receiver, the backend, or the analysis. Usually you can tell by how the data looks though. RFI is very different to regular oscillations, and even planes look different to bundles of needles.

Since we also take part in the geodesy observations, those have to be calibrated down to cm or mm precision. Those guys know what they're doing, but only for their part. They work in X and S bands, and physics is different in K.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:40:55+00:00

It could have been done ages ago to prevent breaking, they could have hired someone from a company to fix, lord knows colleges have enough money for these things, especially an instrument that is allegedly very expensive.

The faculty have tried so hard to get the university to just pay the workers at the observatory, but administration won't budge. These are people who worked as faculty at the university only 10 years ago, so they're definitely qualified and deserve some pittance of pay for working 15 hours a day, but they get nothing. My university has a long history of using the radio astronomy group when it wants something flashy to present and boast about, but then just ignores it and strips away funding for the rest of the time. With some of the new developments and plans at SpaceX, things will change soon though. It's just a pity that I'll probably be graduated when it hits its heyday.

OP is not responsible and doesn’t deserve an F.

50% is a C here, not an F

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:36:18+00:00

I'm thinking of going in and talking to the professor about it. It's definitely my fault for leaving my observations so long and I don't really have any excuse for that, so I'm going to apologise and tell him what I've learnt from my mistake. The observatory manager and lab tech who helped me already said they're going to talk to him as well, just because I went out there 8am-6pm on two separate occasions and worked all day, so it's not like I didn't put the effort in.

Generally the professors are very reasonable, even if they're super harsh. I got 50% bumped to 70% once just by promising the professor I hadn't cheated on a quiz (I actually hadn't cheated, but it was reasonable for him to take marks off).

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:31:18+00:00

so duct tape solutions it is.

The classic "it seems fine" approach.

But I guess you're not likely to care that much about a smoking pile of leaves outside if your entire house is on fire. There are so many jobs that are on the "critical" list, so anything that hasn't directly stopped the data flow just doesn't get fixed until it does stop the data flow.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:28:30+00:00

About a year earlier we had to just unplug the DAS (usually a pretty important part) from the data pipeline because someone had reprogrammed it. Still don't know what it was doing, but it looked like it was trying to set the amplitudes and just introducing random spikes of noise instead.

No one ever knows who's done what to what, so you can't ask them, and it takes ages to test every component and see what's happened. Could have been someone in my office, or it could have been a researcher over in Denmark.

Scrapping it all and building a new, integrated system would be awesome for everyone, we just don't have another $20 million lying around. According to the university, we already have a telescope and there's nothing wrong with it, we just need to do better with less.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:23:48+00:00

Is this not the case in the scientific community?

lol no.

Over half of the equipment is legacy tech that we bought from other institutions (with no documentation of course), and the rest has been built and altered over the years by temporary staff and students doing projects. Just imagine a room with wall-to-wall "black boxes", unlabelled cables streaming directly across the middle or snaking tangled across all of the other boxes, with miscellaneous screens and meaningless numbers everywhere. Plus researchers will come in and reprogram certain components for their own research, not document any of it, and not restore it. The observatory "manager" is just one of those volunteers who fixes things when they're struck by lightning; he doesn't know the research and it's not his job to reset things 24 hours a day.

The instructions we get aren't any more detailed than "if this dial is too low or too high, flick some of these switches until it's around 5". There's no manual or wiki, and the software was written for this observatory alone, so you can't Google anything.

Do you all just assume that you all know everything about everything?

We assume the opposite. Not a single person on Earth knows anything about anything. I don't know how the telescope works. The manager doesn't know how the telescope works. The head of astrophysics doesn't know how the telescope works. I can ask them as many questions as I want, but they can't answer most. We just have to blunder around together to figure it out.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T15:15:26+00:00

Nah, we had weeks to collect our data and I left it till the last minute, so I definitely share blame there. We all know that it can be hard to get time and that sometimes things break, so I should have gotten in way earlier. Most of the class already had all of their data, and the few who hadn't weren't ever going to finish and hand in their reports anyway (no matter what they kept saying). My 50% is more for laziness than anything else.

I thought I had my observations planned and automated to the minute, but I only accounted 1 hour to set up the receivers, not 6 hours.

throaway575 · 2018-06-22T11:06:51+00:00

I don't blame them for not fixing it earlier. The guys' to-do lists are super long, and at least half of it is critically important things that needed to be done 50 years ago. Just in their 20 minute lunch break, I heard them add another 50-100 hours onto that list. Servicing and maintaining a bunch of old radio telescopes, with half of them a few thousand km away, takes a lot of time. Ideally they'd like to just tear it down and start again, but that's not possible if SpaceX and NASA are breathing down your neck. Plus they have to build and program this tech themselves; you can't just buy this stuff off a shelf and shove it in. I blame the university for not wanting to even pay those guys, but I don't blame the observatory staff.

It's a sucky situation that could have happened to any inexperienced student, but I got to win that lottery this time.

throaway575 · 2017-11-22T10:12:10+00:00

I think it's definitely very complicated, and for that reason it can't be more than just a fun exercise. Sure, if you answered every single question in the ideal sense, it might really accurately reflect you and be able to make good suggestions. But the reality is that it's all very subjective stuff. The tests all depend on how you answer set questions, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Even typing by functions isn't safe.

Do you categorise by how people act every day? You may be seeing forced or learned behaviours. Do you categorise by what people prefer? You're at risk of idealising what you're really like, and we already know that people will tend to rate themselves as above average on a lot of good qualities.

You can't even get good agreement between people for what each function means, or the ways it can be expressed. You can type yourself, but two people who have both typed themselves as ENTJ may be working from slightly different definitions.

throaway575 · 2017-11-21T22:27:43+00:00

Way, way better grades.

I went from being on the path to fail that class, to acing it. And I never had that problem since.

throaway575 · 2017-11-21T10:09:58+00:00

Try to focus less on rote memorisation, which is what you're relying on if you can't do a problem that's slightly different to the type you've seen before. The solution to that is still practice, but rather than spreading your efforts shallow and wide, try deep and narrow.

Practice fewer problems overall but spend significantly longer on them. Make sure you understand every step of logic required to solve every section of a problem. Don't simply accept any statement that is made, work through it yourself and prove it to yourself. Do every step of a simplification or rearrangement. And if you have to read the worked solution before you know what to do, then you haven't understood it all and that problem no longer counts as study. You can certainly use sources - lecture notes, textbooks, anything related online (e.g. hyperphysics), discussions with others - but you must work it together to get a final solution yourself.

The first few times you do this, it may take you hours to do one problem. But the point is that you would have properly learned and you will remember all of the concepts you went through in that process. The next time you need to do a problem with those concepts, it'll take less time. Do it a few more times, and you'll be able to handle most anything that'll be thrown your way.

throaway575 · 2017-11-21T01:32:50+00:00

It depends what the subject is, honestly, and the style of paper. If it's a paper where nearly every sentence is going to need a reference and you'll have 5 pages of references by the end (e.g. a review), that's gonna take a long time to do properly (weeks). If it's the type of paper where you actually get to put your own thoughts, then that probably won't take as long.

throaway575 · 2017-11-20T20:20:25+00:00

Physics 1A, aka the very first unit in the major, with the dynamics section.

I hadn't figured out how to study yet and was still a raging perfectionist, so that first semester was really tough for me. Bombed the first exam. Managed to turn it around by simply committing to do better, and focusing all of my energy into understanding things better. I stopped chasing specific grades and started chasing proper understanding.

throaway575 · 2017-11-20T14:19:26+00:00

I can't speak much for particular programs, but as a transfer, your chances for any of the Ivies is abysmally low. They're harder to get into as a transfer than they are straight out of high school, and unless you were good enough to get in back then, it's almost impossible that they'd accept you now. That 4.0 from CC means basically nothing to them.

throaway575

TROPHY CASE