 Good, I think we are live, okay. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Low Physics Colloquium. My name is Alejandro Cardenas Alendaño, and I'm going to be your host today. Today we're presenting Scientific Career Development, the Danger Roadmap by Izyar Arechag. She obtained a bachelor's in physics from Complutense de Madrid and then moved to Autonomada de Madrid for her master's and PhD. She is a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Assofística, Óptica y Electrónica in Mexico, and a member of the Mexican National Research System, as a level three, which is equivalent to full professor. Professor Arechaga is currently the director of the International Schools for Young Astronomers, which is the long tradition of the school program of the International Astronomical Union, which is now also co-sponsored by the Norigan Academy of Science and Letters. Although she's an specialist in galaxy formation and evolution, with more than 100 papers in very good journals, today she's going to talk about the typical career path of a researcher in physics. So remember that you can ask questions over email through our YouTube channel or Twitter, and then the questions will be read at the end of her talk. Now, without further ado, we will turn time over to Izyar. Izyar, thanks for joining us. Hello. Hello everybody. Thank you, Alejandro, for that introduction. I'm going to take the screen and start sharing a presentation that will help me just conduct some thoughts on this topic, this important topic on career development and what expectations and dangers there are ahead for you guys that are starting your careers. So before I do that, I would like to just mention Alejandro already said that these thoughts, I mean, this presentation really is first from some workshops that we have developed for the International School for Young Astronomers and the director of that program. This is a program that has had more than 50 years of existence within the realm of the International Astronomical Union that as many of you will know is the professional body, the international professional body of astronomy. And there are many, many students that have gone through the program and many lecturers that we basically draw from all over the world to lecture in this program. So within this program, we have a 10-hour workshop in different modules that we give on career development. Clearly we're not going to do that in the hour that we have allotted today, but I'm going to give you a flavor, at least of some of the initial thoughts on how to build your career. So this is just an elementary sketch of what a career in science might be. I imagine most of you are in these areas here, either you're a graduate university student or you are postdocs or maybe you have landed your first in your track job. And you already have, for those that are already advancing their careers, you already have a view of what lies ahead. Typically when you start graduate school, you believe on a very linear path and many, many PhD students and graduate students in general have in mind developing an academic career. And their track looks a little bit like this. You are a graduate university student, you graduate, you find a postdoc, you find a second postdoc, maybe a third postdoc until you have a tenure track type of job, you become an academic at a university, and then you just climb the ladder in that university until you become a full professor. And maybe because from the full professors, normally directors are selected, maybe you become the director of that institution. Now that's a very idealized track. And in reality, there are a lot of side tracks that you can take in order to advance your career. And this is very important to keep in mind so that you are not close to other options. Now in astronomy, we have the parallel academic track that is linked to the observatories for physicists that might be the very general infrastructure which is like a service to a larger community, could be certain, it could be just a big computer facility. And there also there are jobs that basically allow you to do research and keep on moving on your career, on your research career path. Now there is a lot of permeability between this first column that I have in my presentation, I cannot see my cursor, here it is. This first column that I have in my presentation and the second column that I have in my presentation which is basically linked to the service in the big facilities. In order to just keep advancing on these two columns and you probably already know this, I know many of you are not working in your own countries. You have to be very prepared to move, prepared to just take a job in another country to take everything with you, your family, your photos, all your personal belongings and just go somewhere else in order to boost your career forward. And that not always is possible. And so it is also important to keep in mind that there is a third column of career development that goes outside of academia and that it is always there and that your skills that you are creating through your academic development actually are skills that will be used and actually are very well received elsewhere. So apart from the academic career you can think of a career in industry, you can think of creating your own company, maybe actually just going into teaching a university that does not require to do research or even working for governmental bodies that employ PhDs. So again, this is something that it is important always to keep in mind because our dreams are not always realized and our ideal career path might not be there for us to take and we might have to just take side tracks and that's actually something good because from there you will get new experiences and sometimes you actually will go back into the standard academic career path. There is a lot of permeability between the first and the second column. There is a lot of permeability going from the first and the second column into the third column and there are times when people just find a way back into the academic world. That's not easy, but it is something that it has been done. But first you need to finish a PhD if you're a PhD student and so as a student you must learn, research, grow, learn English if English isn't your first language it is not mine. Deliver a thesis and then as a professor if you are already in a tenure track job well you have the enormous responsibility of seeing the starting scientists grow and become already independent people like this very well-developed tree that I have in the in the buger. So who do you learn from? Typically students that are starting think that their professor, their supervisor the main development option the first person they have to learn from and that is true, I mean especially if your advisor has a lot of time to meet with you and look into what you have developed for your for progressing on your PhD but you are surrounded by a larger group than just your advisor. You are typically in a department where there are other professors but most of them you can actually ask them about what they think about the problem that you are trying to solve and not only just the PhDs and professors in your department you will have technicians that are very skillful that have a lot of resources that they can share with you and show you how to do things you can learn from students I certainly learn from my own students I reject the the abilities and the experience of the people around you you can learn from absolutely everybody so be humble and try to learn from them professors, students, technicians people that you might perceive even as having less skills than you will probably have something to show you you are doing a PhD and I imagine that you most of you are happy with your option with the option you have taken that you have taken a career in academics that is basically what more than 70% of people who start a PhD won't, they want to develop a career in that basically follows the academic track so these are some graphs taken from from a nature paper that was published a couple of years ago and basically measures the satisfaction and problems that PhD students have and this actually resembles all different disciplines not just physics so most people are satisfied with the option of having started a PhD but also on the second graph it shows that more than half feel less happy than when they started so they are confronted with all the difficulties of making a career in the academic world and their perception of satisfaction has decreased since the start of their PhDs that is also linked with the perception that most PhD students think that they want to do a career in academics 60%, 56% have that as a first option actually because this resembles the whole spectrum of PhDs in all areas probably is a lower limit of what PhDs in physics and astronomy feel because this is a much more basic science type of topic so again this was my introduction keep in mind that there are other options and I'm going to show you some very satisfactory career paths that people who have done PhDs in astronomy because that's my area of expertise have taken this is a person Claudia Rola I met when I was a postdoc she did her PhD in France she did a first postdoc at the University of Cambridge which is where I met her and shortly after her PhD she decided that the academic world was not for her so much moving around in the world was basically something she didn't want to sustain and so she moved into the private sector and she works now in the Deutsche Bank developing valuation model risks she is an expert on the finance and on basically evaluating what things will work and will not work for the bank this is an extract from an interview that she gave and basically what she says is that she couldn't do what she's doing without a PhD in astronomy or physics because just having gone through the experience of developing a PhD and doing research she now can take those skills and basically not be scared to confront new problems try to synthesize the problem in a few concepts and then work from there to find the solution the second person who would like to present you is Ignace Wonders again this is a student that I met when I was a student myself we did our postdocs, different tracks he actually took two different postdocs in the USA and the UK he is Dutch originally PhD in Sweden again you can see all this mobility and after his second postdoc he said I have three kids and a wife I don't want to come around any longer and he basically started working in the private sector and then he founded his own company so now he is a data scientist and he has all sorts of very cool type of development programs for the government and for different private agencies like the Siferin Doctor's handwriting so that the pharmaceuticals can really deliver the goods more quickly really very very interesting things that he does and he employs more than 16 people in his company and again he has a very good recommendation of completing a PhD in astronomy or in physics in order to be able to do what he does, he couldn't be able to do it without having had that experience now you first need to complete a PhD you first need to just develop your research tool so your plans as a student should be specialized in an area that you like you already have chosen one you should increase the knowledge in your area and in similar areas you have to create your own research projects and be known for your own work you have to learn how to publish you have to attain your degree you have to make your to create your network of contacts both national and internationally and you have to enjoy your career and be happy and I'm going to stay on this concept of enjoy your career and be happy and stay positive about the road that you have taken okay and why I'm saying that because the most dangerous part of doing a PhD is your own mind and is the psychological blocks that you will encounter is not the difficulty of the concept that you are trying to learn is not the difficulty of the skills you have to develop that's not the most important danger that you are going to encounter the most important danger that you're going to encounter is your own mind because what you are doing is basically going beyond what other people have gone and that's unsafe territory and our minds are trained through my linea of evolution to keep us safe and keep us safe means just not getting exposed to something which is unknown this is what psychologists say I'm not a psychologist but I have read a lot of books and on that and I know also from experience that when I am confronted with doing something new I am excited but at the same time I am afraid of taking the job because I don't want to fail because I don't want to suffer and I don't want to be eaten by the lion which is out there so doing a PhD confronts us with different problems and this is just a chart that I like to present that basically synthesizes some of the problems that we confront when we do research especially when we start doing research when we suffer from the imposter syndrome we will go into that a little bit next in the next view graph sometimes it's the first time that we fail at doing what we are giving us a task I mean we excel at university in problem solving but when we are given an open problem in doing a PhD then we start seeing our own failings there is this sense that you need to be present in your job you need to be present in the internet you need to be present replying to emails you need to deliver immediately when you are asked something this is the presentaism type of problem you develop a relationship with your supervisor and with your colleagues and relationships which last for years can be tough because we are human beings and relationships are not always easy there are no more tick boxes this is an open problem it's not like you have to go from A to B to C and your supervisor knows how to go from one to the other you know you want a new result but you don't know what result will be so again uncertainty comes into the equation most early career scientists have financial concerns because they are either on a grant or they are on a short job postdoc and we need to look for the next job and of course that is another stressor there is a very very heavy competitive landscape you all know it you are all looking into the paper boxes to see whether your paper has been published by somebody else before you do we are we are a community which is driven by the production of papers that's how we measure our success and this is something that we need to change but papers are an important part of the equation and you will probably feel the pressure to publish in order to find the next job you are doing a PhD it's your own research and therefore probably you feel isolated and you will feel the guilt that if you are not just working on solving your problem and just delivering that thesis well you should be doing it and there is the culture of acceptance that putting in a lot of hours is what the job takes and that's again something that we need to change the culture we are people and we also need our own personal time to do other things to take care of ourselves of our families and to do things that do not have to do with doing research and all that is important as human beings so let's go into the first concept which is imposter syndrome but for all these problems I would like to say that there are tools that you might not have been thought and maybe you haven't discovered by yourself but there are books that can help you develop those tools all these problems that we are presenting here create negative thoughts in our heads that sometimes we get just cycle into just in this deep pain that these problems create and we are not able to just click out of our circle of negative thoughts into looking into the problem from a different perspective and this is what psychologists specialize on and this is a couple of books that I really love and I would recommend they are books for everyday little dissatisfactions which can be some of the problems that you can confront when you develop a PhD nobody is denying that they are people with true illnesses psychological mental illnesses and those require the intervention of a professional but for everyday injuries as it is called the first book practical strategies for treating failure rejection guilt other everyday psychological injuries your paper gets rejected it's not a big deal your supervisor turns up telling you that all the work that you have done for a month is crap well so you learn from there and you move on it's very easy to say in that way but you need to learn from what creates those bad thoughts first in order to just surpass them and learn from the experience that you are having and the second book is a book that I really love the title in Spanish it's called el arte de no amargarse la vida which I feel it is a great great title is how I take the best positive look into a problem and I don't create problems for myself and in English the version in English has been published recently it's called build emotional strength for daily happiness so let's go into imposter syndrome because this is a feeling that we get it's not a condition it's not a medical condition it's called that way but this is just a train of thoughts that we all might be caught into when we are working on research and it is this deep sense that we don't belong that we are below the average that our peers are much better than our souls that anything that we have accomplished any prize, any compliment that people have given us is not deserved that we are working our asses off in order to just deliver the next step and just by chance we got it there but someday we are going to get discovered and we are going to get kicked out of the group and we are never going to finish the PhD well this sense is pretty universal it's so universal that it's almost everybody has had this type of thoughts some at some point in their careers so this is a testimony that I like to present this is a train of tweets that I read by chance a couple of years ago by this doctor Stephanie Hamilton she had just finished her PhD so she had this trimful type of of tweet he said I'm Stephanie and I suffer from major depressive disorder now major depressive disorder is not just a train of thoughts that's an illness it's something that needs to be treated by professionals and actually you might be surprised that the PhD population is six times more likely to develop depressive disorder than the general population of your age so the danger is there and getting there might be of course because there are some neurological imbalances which are difficult to control and again that needs to be assessed by professionals but if you let your bad thoughts just get caught on you systematically and chronically you can get there too so this person suffered from imposter syndrome from a deep believing that she didn't belong into doing her PhD her testimony can be read in Astrobytes is really very very eye-opening and soon after she sent this message in Twitter there were literally thousands of likes and hundreds of replies of people who were in academia and who identified with her testimony but people who suffer in silence because there is this stigma of not being meeting the criteria of what it takes to be a scientist now you might be surprised but again I have said this is pretty universal and this is Stephanie Hamilton she did her PhD she completed the task she is now a researcher she still suffers from imposter syndrome well guess what imposter syndrome thoughts are even found in the greatest of scientists people like Einstein made this remark about not believing that he had completed all the body of work and the recognition that he was he was being given for it so if people like Einstein have this type of thoughts how are we going not to have those thoughts we mere mortal beings so again this is something that you might find yourself having this type of thoughts and that they are techniques to just get out of them and just be more productive and not to suffer as much there is this great book by a PhD in psychology which is called the secret thoughts of successful women women are found in the general population to suffer more for imposter syndrome but in the book it also says that the academia is actually prone both men and women to have imposter syndrome equally so this is not a gender issue this is something although the title of the book is very catchy is something that it is found in both genders so this type of thoughts of not belonging can be can be conducted in a different way and there is a series of tricks that the book presents among them is break the silence understand that everybody has these feelings and that you are not the only person who feels like an imposter other people around you probably have those same type of feelings but they don't talk about them distinguish between facts and feelings change first your thoughts and behavior so you are given a compliment accepted say thank you believe that you deserve it your feelings will little by little follow and you will feel that you suffer less from those episodes of not believing in yourself okay I would like to go into the next concept which is developing the network we are in these seminars and this is a perfect example of what is a network a network is everybody that you encounter through your career and it will be colleagues in your institution it will be colleagues in a meeting in a conference it will be colleagues that are connected right now through these type of seminars all those are people that you can learn from it's also people that you will be able to work with in the future whether in a scientific collaboration or in a capacity as evaluators I mean many of the people who have come to help me and my institution are people I have met when I was a PhD student those people you will bump into time and time again and they you will keep on growing this network because you go to more and more events so make an effort to make the connection and to take care of that connection with time how do you do that if you are in this unconnected type of world we are living in through the pandemic well we have the social media Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, linking or our tools that basically allow us to network don't be shy I mean you have a lot to contribute you have your own work so be known by talking about your own work in fact during the workshops we go through through the exercise of asking students to build two small short talks, two flash talks one about their own work in just one minute summarize everything which is important about your work in the other flash talk is a flash talk about yourself how you present yourself to others so that when you are in an interactive type of meeting you basically can deliver your message in a short time which is basically conductive to just establishing that link so I encourage you to actually do that just think about your work summarize it in one minute and summarize your own path who you are and what you want in one minute those are short talks that will come very handy through time these are just some examples of how social media can be used either on the left column to basically publicize a paper that has just been produced in a very technical manner other people just use social media to do outreach outreach is also a very important part of our work is what connects us to society and what basically builds sympathy for what we are doing we are educators in the researchers are some other difficulties not all difficulties are internal some difficulties are external and some of the difficulties which are external we can do nothing about them so we shouldn't worry about them we have to basically push through some of those are funding the team that you are working with you chose it so now you have to just stick with it and just work with it equipment whether you have computers no computers access to telescopes to the infrastructure that is needed for your research the environment the collaborators competitors and referees that you might find is out of your hands whether you should work on something which is very fashionable or that they are priority topics which are basically at the base of the science that you are working on again is a choice that sometimes is made for you because you chose to work with somebody and that somebody gave you the topic and then there are problems which are outside of our realm and that basically we should be very aware of them and we shouldn't get influence we shouldn't get down when we are confronted with them and one of those is unconscious biases which I would like to touch on very quickly right now and it is how we are perceived by others and to be aware that that perception is not always objective more likely than not it will be non-objective in all of these external difficulties that we might find and we have no control over them we might be aware of them it's very good to be aware of our external difficulties but it is also aware to be it's also important to be aware that we have to push through them in order to become scientists others have done them and so can we so what do we do? We work hard very hard again the hard working environment is there and we need to deliver the work we have to work under a very strict ethical code I mean in science we have this fantastic atmosphere where people trust that your word is true and nobody asks for something to show that your word is true so do not work against that concept because you will suffer in the long run so work always under strict ethical code if some ideas are not yours acknowledge those that have given you those ideas and ask yourself what your biases are because you certainly will have biases you will not be able to fight against the biases against you but you can fight against the biases you have for other people and analyze if when they are at work whether you can do something about them and work against them so unconscious biases there are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside of their own conscious awareness everybody has them and there are biases attached to gender to age to sexuality to religion to race to anything that you can think about and I invite you all to just visit this this link in Harvard implicit because through some tests which are basically they will not ask you anything for you to say yes no about whether you are biased or not but they will measure whether you are biased or not for any of these topics that are here the bias that it is best understood and more studied is the gender bias and so I'm just going to give you an example of what I mean by that this is a paper sociology paper that analyzed 312 letters for recommendation letters for candidates PhD candidates that are trying to look for their first job the letters for women were shorter less focused on candidates record or accomplishment and the numbers you have them here at the bottom table they were twice as likely to have gender terms like intelligent young lady, insightful woman and not so much on the superlative adjectives that we like to just flavor those people that we admire like excellent superb outstanding those were much more likely to be found in the letters for men and the study suggests that women's success is more associated with effort whereas men's success is more associated with ability now this study that is just very focused on gender could have been done on race could have been done on precedence on place of birth on religion on whatever and there is always the prevalence that the dominant group within an activity is perceived as the person or as the people who deserve these credit for brilliance and the less dominant group the minority whether it is women in science I mean we are half of the population but we are a minority within scientists or it is a certain ethnical background is actually perceived as the hard workers but not necessarily as the brilliant people there are other studies there are many many studies about this issue and I invite you to just look at the literature there is this issue in nature just devoted to women's work and there are other studies that you will find in the academic agencies in your own countries because this is a problem that has been well studied and is still a problem and is still something that countries and agencies are trying to find a solution for it so this is a different study again a psychology CB sent for for evaluation for either entry level in a university as a professor or a ten year level and it is always the case with the same CB but different names one male one female clearly significantly more likely to hire Brian at entry level although it is exactly the same CB and a ten year level equally likely to hire any of them but more caution more cautionary remarks about the CB of the woman so this is the what it is out there what you will confront whether it is fair or not there are solutions that are being tried like these double blind searches that sometimes work sometimes don't work sometimes they cannot work because the way that we do searches for hiring cannot work with double blind searches in science but these are issues that you will confront whether you like it or not so I would like to just close my talk by the last concept which is keep dreaming and this is a couple of thoughts that have accompanied me through my career and I would like to leave you with that the first one is a statement by Confucius and it says it's about dreaming and dreaming big dreams because if you don't have big dreams you will go nowhere and it says if you aim high maybe you can get a general result if you aim at a general result maybe you get a lower grade result but if you aim at the lowest position I mean if you just don't have big dreams you may get nothing so keep on dreaming big but at the same time be aware that your mind can actually not help you in that path so this is another another quote from Epictetus a great philosopher of ancient Greece and it says we are not disturbed by what happens to us but by our thoughts about what happens to us and this is the my warning about keeping an eye on what you are telling to yourself and identify those loops of bad thoughts and identify that this is something your mind is doing to you that you can control and you have the key at your hand to unlock those bad thoughts that these things come through so thank you for for the attention and thank you for the invitation wonderful thank you very much we have a couple of questions in the chat but before moving there someone here in the session wants to ask a question while I get the okay let me start with a question from David he said he was considering working outside academia but he doesn't know where or how to do it that if you could comment on that and how to find different jobs I do not have much experience in looking for jobs outside of academia my impression is that people find their own solutions they certainly keep their eyes open for anything that is like other jobs that basically their skills can be used they look for companies for instance Ignace Wanderz that I just showed you he started working on technical solutions to problems and then he launched his own company because basically he decided I have all the experience for the industry now I can launch my own company and that was a process of a couple of years okay and then there is another question from from I just finished my masters degree and I don't feel good to talk to a professor I'm afraid maybe that person thinks that I mean to choose me as their PhD student and then as a follow up saying like I don't know how to advertise my work to my future possible supervisors any comments on that? Yes well you keep better at the job because you start with something and then you make it better when you confront how people react to what you have presented so again my advice just look at your work and try to summarize it in one minute this is a very tough exercise but it's something that you need to do and you will be able to use that tool for many different occasions to interview with somebody you don't have half an hour to explain to them everything that you have done in your masters you can summarize it very concisely and then if you catch their interest there will be a dialogue and you can expand on it but you have to start from something start from something short now you know professor sometimes we are not the best of people at being receptive because we are over work we have many things we have many students we have many people who want to talk to us so just try as many people as you can I mean you will find somebody who is receptive I mean the other thing is that we are aware you guys are the future and so you will find a professor who is the future it might not be the first one in your list don't think badly about them either I mean we are not God I mean we are dealing with the stress as well so just keep trying thank you there is another question saying like how much does the grad school where we study could shape our career what happened we started in a low rank university and then pursue a positive position in a high level place well you know when you are in PHD school certainly choosing the best PHD school you can go to is a good thing you have a better starting point but we all know people that have gone to PHD schools which are not so well known but they have built their own career because your career basically starts at your postdoc I mean your PHD is a very important training point but part of your success is your supervisors actions and your supervisors opportunities as a PHD student sometimes you cannot build those opportunities those opportunities come at your hand building them, building new ideas building new networks and building new collaborations when you are a postdoc so don't feel because you have come out of a very small university you cannot basically have a successful academic career we all have done that I came from a university where there were only three astronomy professors you just build your career with what you have at hand that will be integrated in your path but it depends on you mostly after you have finished your PHD thank you and I think Nicolás Garabito has a question I do you can turn on the camera if you want sure, yeah, can you see me? yes, thanks it's here for your talk I really relate with many of the things that you said I'm a finishing graduate student and the question is do you think in the departments we can talk more about these issues solve these issues you gave many resources for us of course you have to be the first one to read about this but maybe in the departments sometimes we don't talk much about these issues and it really affects all of us so maybe you have advice of what can we do about that I don't know whether in your university you have a student's meeting where no professors are yes, the students they talk to all people in all departments they create your own meeting point whether you talk about research like these seminars, these are great these are early career scientists getting together to talk about science to talk about issues that relate to their careers you can do exactly the same in your university not everybody you talk to will be receptive not everybody will have gone through these issues and just feel that they can freely talk about them because of the perception that if we talk about issues which basically talk about our suffering or about how do we balance private life and professional life we will be perceived as a weaker player in the team and that's wrong I mean it's very very wrong it's something which we should fight the culture that is already established in our universities and in the international arena we are people and so I would recommend you find a support group with your peers first and then if there is a representative for the students and for the academia yes to take care of the students normally there is somebody who basically is in charge of the program of the PhD program then talk to them and say you know I have read this piece in nature, read the paper very eye-opening very very eye-opening most PhD students around the world feel their departments do not take care of their well-being and knowing right now that they didn't mention that about 40% of PhD students seek professional help for their mental problems for trying to deal with the pressure with the anxiety with the depression that comes from failing so it is an important issue and I think more and more people in universities are taking it seriously but the first thing is to build the support group students are a good start then talk to the representatives of your institution tell them that you would like to have some seminars about this and also normally in universities there is a psychology cabinet fortunately this has evolved from my time and so people who are suffering can go there privately as to talk to somebody who is a professional and who can help them confront whatever they are confronting that they cannot deal with personally in a positive manner is not good when you suffer for months about anything certainly not about a paper that a referee has not been receptive to so just discover where you are suffering and try not to suffer along the way thank you very much I like creating a journal club for diversity and these issues would be great thank you people on the youtube channel are saying excellent talk thank you and I also received a question if you could comment a little bit on the international schools for young astronomers about that program and how can people get involved well so the schools is a program more than 50 years old and right now the director we are we are halted because of the pandemic because our target population of the students are students who are in areas of the world where they do not have the full spectrum of astronomy education and so we focus on countries that although they might have some astronomy community is not fully developed or on countries where they do not have any astronomy community so we don't pull students from all over the world equally we actually do preference these type of countries and so it is a three week intensive graduate school students come physically to the school lecturers are brought from all over the world they are experts on their areas this is basically targeted to entry graduated students so masters or first few years of PhDs and we give them three weeks of very intensive work I am well known for being just another worker despite everything that I have said in this presentation but it is our three weeks of just being able to interact it's not all academic courses we have activities and we have practice and we use telescopes and we give them problems then they have to solve them but it is long hours work and so people who come through this program they have a different flavor afterwards of what it is to do research and also they have created a network of important things of the program we just become like a family both lecturers and students although for a very short time very intensive work and then the links last so there is a call for students typically we do one or two schools per year again last year we didn't do any this year we don't know if we will be able to do one at the end of the year we are still considering it it is something that we have decided we cannot do online because the facilities for the countries we are targeting are not such that can be done and also we will fail to do the networking in the same way that we like to do it but you will see if you follow the IAU the International Astronomical Union on any of the networks you will see announcements for these type of schools and you are welcome to apply to them they are very selective turn out ratio of one to five so we select one out of five students because there are many people who like to come to the schools but we cannot have more than 30 to 50 students per school we are doing our best so just apply cool, thank you Roberto do you have a question yes I have a question for you it's here first of all it's super nice excellent talk I guess many of the audience of the physics will be very very impressed and very like to also watch it again the colloquium so my question is kind of related to because at some point you were mentioned that there are some external factors and some internal factors that everybody that is following a career in science will have to deal but is any way how to identify in a better way these two factors because yes many people will think that some internal factor is indeed external factors because I don't know if you can comment about that because after that let's say once followed already the path can identify but when one is forming it's very hard to distinguish these two aspects well look any suffering is in our minds this is what psychologists tell us I mean this is a discovery for me I was not born with this knowledge this is something that I have learned anything we suffer about is in our minds I mean external factors are there and we might change some of them and some others we might not be able to change but if we are suffering is because we let our minds just run wild and so how do we identify between the two I mean normally some mixture of the two you don't want your paper to be rejected I mean this is an external factor somebody has decided your research doesn't meet the standards and you need to work harder at replying to somebody who didn't understand what you already said in the first place that you are mad but being mad is your responsibility being mad is your responsibility being low because you fail at whatever task is your responsibility it's an internal factor the feelings are feelings I mean we certainly have them but just getting into a train of bad thoughts that basically pull us into inaction that's our responsibility and we all should be aware of that that if we suffer if we are in an immobility type of situation we can come out of it but we need to use tools to just get out of that and there are tools out there if we don't know them we can learn about them it's not too late just to start using them I don't know whether I reply to your to your question but this is my it's very yeah the aspect that I was trying to ask so just a very few questions or another question Alejandro if I may have the time so also you mentioned in your talk that there are many skills that the student has to build during their career that usually the university we try to focus only in the hard type of skill like learning and learn how to do stuff but not the soft skill type is there any way for a student to improve that part the soft skill because at the end we realize that after that soft skills are let's say a little bit more important than the hard skills can you give me a little bit of an example of what you talk about soft skills it's like presentation to learn how to address people how to present themselves how to interact with the peers it's a great collaboration because many students are very introvert usually in science like in physics they tend to be very introvert and they don't want to share for the same aspect that you said that if you share something that is internal of you you feel like you're weak with respect with your peers and at the end your peers are going to be your competitors the other thing is that when it is internal problems you have to learn who to rely on one cannot just go through the world with their heart open because certainly you're going to be a target but at the same time you need to just find your support group and those can be your family your very close friends your colleagues that are close and are going through the same experience that you are going to how can students improve you know if your university is not giving you the tools or giving you the workshops you need to develop that you can ask for that just go, go, just knock on doors just say we would like to learn more about how to write papers we would like to learn more about how to to make good presentations and even if the university doesn't provide them if you create a group of students that have the same type of problems maybe you can organize it you can say okay let's just organize we're going to give talks we're going to give ourselves feedback on what we like, what we didn't like how we will improve these maybe you can just call one or two sympathetic professors to just get into the room as well and give you feedback and you just learn by doing I mean some of these soft skills are just learned by doing it's not like I give you a lecture and I give you five points and off you go and now you're a master on giving talks no you have to practice how you do with what you have at hand we each are different, we express ourselves differently we like doing things differently as well there are people who practice a thousand times a talk I never practiced a talk, I mean I used to when I was a student but now I just go and give the talk, I mean however it comes out, right and I have learned that I have my tricks in order to do that but because I have a certain way of working and other people will work in a different way but if you're you are a professor so just think about that talk to your colleagues tell them I think that we should do more workshops to help our students develop soft skills your students will love it and certainly they will benefit from it both for doing research and for afterwards if they decide not to do research and take a different track a different professional track that will be very handy thank you ok thank you everyone for attending this wonderful colloquium stay tuned over social media and in our webpage do the following talks I want to thank also Luisa Caldona for being the link between us and this wonderful colloquium thank you everyone for attending see you in the next session bye we are not live