 I'm not sure what that Tarp is supposed to be doing, but it's definitely not doing it. Good morning. It is September 12th, 2018. It's basically fall. Like, I know fall doesn't start for another two weeks. I've made my move now down to the University of Washington. Some of you may have noticed that I was sort of on a hiatus. I didn't really publish any videos in August, and I was taking a little bit of time off, and I was also just kind of getting a little burned out. I did a lot of prep, getting ready for Cool Stars, which you saw on this channel, and then just trying to get a lot of work done and papers done as I was finishing up my NSF fellowship of a Western Washington University. One of those papers is still not quite done. It's almost done. I promise to my co-authors I promise I will get it done very soon. It is my top priority right now. So the University of Washington, or UDUB, as we call it, this is actually my third time back at UDUB. So I came to UDUB as an undergraduate when I was 18. I got my bachelor's degrees in physics and astronomy here, just down the hall. That way is where I did all my labs. By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to try going to grad school, but long story short, I didn't get in to any of the PhD programs that I wanted to get into. Now that we're sort of getting into the beginning of the academic year, I should probably do a longer video on this about my own career journey and how you live with failure in academia and how that's a normal part of the process. I should definitely do a longer video about this. My PhD went away for a few years as a NSF postdoctoral fellow, which is when I started this YouTube channel, and now I'm back as a research scientist. The group I'm working with here is called Dirac. See, we have stickers. This is a free water bottle I got somewhere. We should have water bottles made. That's a good idea. It's the data-intensive research in astrophysics and cosmology. The logo is cute. The background is actually supposed to be the LSST camera. The idea is we're getting together researchers. I consider myself sort of a classical observational astronomer. We're getting theorists. We're getting data-intensive astronomers of all sort of stripes. We're getting them all together and we're trying to build new collaborations, build new tools. It's a new institute. It's a new initiative, so it remains to be seen what exactly we'll become and what the sort of the personality of the institute will be. It's fun to be part of a new exciting initiative within a department. And there's also some important challenges about how we grow our community and how we grow our culture as we expand and bring in more people and more money. And we start having groups that are working on sort of really distinct projects. These are important challenges that our department's facing that I'm looking forward to. I'm optimistic about how we're going to meet them so that people stay happy. So it's September, it's fall, the beginning of the academic year. I'm very happy that I'm not on the job market this year because supplying for jobs is not that fun. It's the beginning of the academic year and so it has all these wonderful aspirational overtones of this is the year that I'm going to do X and Y and I'm finally going to try to do these things. I have a lot of personal goals about what I want to accomplish this year and a lot of them revolve around deciding where I want to go in my career. I have a stable place to be for the next few years, but that also means it's a good time to think about where am I going next and what am I doing after this. I can work on things that are maybe a little more speculative or dare I say even more fun because I know I have a job for the next few years. The other reason that I love fall at the university is seeing all of the freshmen who show up who are carrying around campus maps and looking around. It's the beginning of a new stage of life for both the parents and for the students who are coming to the university. I remember my mom helping me pack and the day my dad drove me over the three hours or whatever it took to get here. There's something just fun and exciting about starting off on this journey. When I first came to university I had no inclination that I wanted to be. I knew I liked outer space. I didn't know this I had no idea this is where I would end up. This became the place that I wanted to be. These were the people that I could talk to that I could relate to. You know I had somewhere I had somewhere that made sense and I had work that I was good at and that I enjoyed doing and that had meaning to me. My dad gave me this sextant when I started grad school. I think it's super cool. I don't know if academia is my forever job. The statistics would suggest that no of course it's not because most people don't end up spending their entire lives in academia because there just are too many people and not enough jobs and being soft money or living a research grant to research grant it's just not a guaranteed way of making a living and a lot of people can't. So I have no idea at this moment if this is my forever job but I know it's the beginning of what's going to be a really interesting year. This year will give me the most opportunity that I've ever had to grow my practice of astronomy in ways that are most meaningful to me. Finally I'm sort of interested in trying some new things with these videos. I'm not going to be traveling quite as much this year. The AAAS meeting is actually here in Seattle for example. It's coming January. I like the interview videos like the coffee time videos and things. If you have questions about life in academia or astronomy or if there's topics you'd like me to talk about if you'd like to see more sort of lectures and talks I'm giving if you're interested in some episodes being sort of a fly on the wall in the group meetings or the sort of research meetings that I have let me know drop me a comment down below hit me up on Twitter send me a carrier pigeon whatever. I'm enjoying making these videos as a way both of showing what my job is like what being an astronomer is like but it's also offering me the opportunity to kind of look back at my own at my own job and think about what are the interesting things what are the things that are worth sharing. I don't want to ever paint this as an overly rosy perfect life. There's a lot of uncertainty and failure involved in being a scientist but it's also a really cool job and so it's giving me an opportunity to reflect about what I do. So let me know what you think.