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...or at least it is in my home time-zone of Chicago. Here, in Malargue, it is nearly midnight.
There isn't all that much to talk about from today, actually. It was a pretty mellow day of rest between the end of the Auger Celebration (yesterday) and the start of the Auger Collaboration meeting (tomorrow). I slept in, I caught up on e-mail, I started reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Things like that. I sat outside for awhile this evening with the book, enjoying the outdoor Springtime air. That was rather nice.
The big news of the day was that I received my first job offer for my next position. Since my current job at Fermilab ends next September, I started job hunting last month. I'm in no rush -- I have over ten months left -- so I have only been applying for jobs that hold a particular interest to me. So far, I have applied for ten positions. Three have requested interviews, which will happen next month. One seems likely to request an interview soon. Three more have not gotten back to me yet; they were for highly competitive prestigious fellowships (at Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley lab), so I won't be terribly surprised if they never get back to me. Two more -- at the University of Chicago -- were just sent out yesterday, so of course I have not heard from them yet. And one of the applications has become a job offer... without even a request for an interview.
This offer, from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is from one of my Auger collaborators. His current post-doc is leaving New Mexico to take a tenure-track position at the University of Utah. Since I know the professor who is hiring -- and I know he likes both me and my work -- I had figured that I was highly likely to be offered this job. However, I was expecting to go through the usual process of interviewing for it first. Getting offered the job outright was a bit of a surprise. The New Mexico position is appealing, for several reasons. It would allow me to continue working on the Auger Observatory, where I feel that my work is not nearly done, and it would mean a move back to the SouthWest, which I love. On the other hand, I do not feel ready to leave Chicago yet... especially since![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cheshcat just moved here in July! So it remains to be seen whether I will take this position. I need a little time to see what other offers I get, cheshcat needs to visit Albuquerque with me, and she and I need to discuss this in detail... both with each other and with anyone else in our extended clan who might consider moving with us. But now that I do have an offer, it means that I can start to ease off on sending out new applications. I had another fourteen job openings that I was planning to apply for; now I will only send out a handful more applications and then stop. Which, in a way, is a relief. The damn things take a long time and are not particularly interesting to put together.
Finally, on a completely unrelated note, I posted a poll in my journal last month, asking about people's high school experiences. Thirty-one people responded to the poll, and I just decided to do a quick numerical analysis of the data. I assigned a number to each of the possible answers to the poll, as follows:
+2 = "Best years of my life!"
+1 = "They were pretty good."
0 = "I got through them okay."
-1 = "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over."
-2 = "Worst years of my life!!!"
0 = "I didn't go to high school"
The numbers were assigned so that a positive number corresponds to a positive high school experience, while a negative number corresponds to a negative experience. Using this scheme, I worked out the mean and the standard deviation for the answers that I received.
The average high school experience of my friends who answered the poll is: -0.74 +/- 1.01.
Not surprisingly, the standard deviation is high because the number of people who responded is small. However, the mean indicates that, by and large, most of the people I know had a negative experience of high school. Actually, this just verified what I already expected. And, for what it is worth, both the mode and the median answer was -1, or "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over." Any statistics geeks in the audience are now free to make sneering remarks about when it is ever appropriate to use the mode...
There isn't all that much to talk about from today, actually. It was a pretty mellow day of rest between the end of the Auger Celebration (yesterday) and the start of the Auger Collaboration meeting (tomorrow). I slept in, I caught up on e-mail, I started reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Things like that. I sat outside for awhile this evening with the book, enjoying the outdoor Springtime air. That was rather nice.
The big news of the day was that I received my first job offer for my next position. Since my current job at Fermilab ends next September, I started job hunting last month. I'm in no rush -- I have over ten months left -- so I have only been applying for jobs that hold a particular interest to me. So far, I have applied for ten positions. Three have requested interviews, which will happen next month. One seems likely to request an interview soon. Three more have not gotten back to me yet; they were for highly competitive prestigious fellowships (at Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley lab), so I won't be terribly surprised if they never get back to me. Two more -- at the University of Chicago -- were just sent out yesterday, so of course I have not heard from them yet. And one of the applications has become a job offer... without even a request for an interview.
This offer, from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is from one of my Auger collaborators. His current post-doc is leaving New Mexico to take a tenure-track position at the University of Utah. Since I know the professor who is hiring -- and I know he likes both me and my work -- I had figured that I was highly likely to be offered this job. However, I was expecting to go through the usual process of interviewing for it first. Getting offered the job outright was a bit of a surprise. The New Mexico position is appealing, for several reasons. It would allow me to continue working on the Auger Observatory, where I feel that my work is not nearly done, and it would mean a move back to the SouthWest, which I love. On the other hand, I do not feel ready to leave Chicago yet... especially since
cheshcat just moved here in July! So it remains to be seen whether I will take this position. I need a little time to see what other offers I get, cheshcat needs to visit Albuquerque with me, and she and I need to discuss this in detail... both with each other and with anyone else in our extended clan who might consider moving with us. But now that I do have an offer, it means that I can start to ease off on sending out new applications. I had another fourteen job openings that I was planning to apply for; now I will only send out a handful more applications and then stop. Which, in a way, is a relief. The damn things take a long time and are not particularly interesting to put together.Finally, on a completely unrelated note, I posted a poll in my journal last month, asking about people's high school experiences. Thirty-one people responded to the poll, and I just decided to do a quick numerical analysis of the data. I assigned a number to each of the possible answers to the poll, as follows:
+2 = "Best years of my life!"
+1 = "They were pretty good."
0 = "I got through them okay."
-1 = "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over."
-2 = "Worst years of my life!!!"
0 = "I didn't go to high school"
The numbers were assigned so that a positive number corresponds to a positive high school experience, while a negative number corresponds to a negative experience. Using this scheme, I worked out the mean and the standard deviation for the answers that I received.
The average high school experience of my friends who answered the poll is: -0.74 +/- 1.01.
Not surprisingly, the standard deviation is high because the number of people who responded is small. However, the mean indicates that, by and large, most of the people I know had a negative experience of high school. Actually, this just verified what I already expected. And, for what it is worth, both the mode and the median answer was -1, or "They were pretty difficult; I was glad when it was over." Any statistics geeks in the audience are now free to make sneering remarks about when it is ever appropriate to use the mode...
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