Rob’s Grad School Series, Part 3: From Grad Student to Professor

Rob‘s third post in his Grad School series is up, here. It highlights such stark truths as:

  • At the end of 6 years, if you haven’t published enough / gotten enough grants / done a good enough job teaching, you are fired.
  • Once you are “fired” by a university, no university of higher or equal rank will ever accept you for a job again.

As he comments on his list of what professors do all day:

Notice how “researching” or “planning science” isn’t on the list. If those things happen, they are squeezed in between all the other obligations. As a fellow student Tanya Crenshaw told me, “If research was like football, grad school would be a grueling boot camp that trains you to be the best quarterback you can be, and as soon as you graduate, you are hired into the position of head coach.”

Worth a read for grad students.

MareNostrum

Via Adventures in Applied Math, on Gizmodo, the world’s most gorgeous (possibly) supercomputer. It’s #9 in the world and #1 in Europe, and belongs to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Actually, the computer’s nice and all, but it’s really the “server room” that’s gorgeous. It’s installed in a glass enclosure, inside a former chapel.

See the photos at Gizmodo here.

Monday Linkblog

I’ve been accumulating various stories and other links for a while, meaning to write a post on each one. Normally these aren’t really worth a whole post, so I’m going to start combining them.

That’s it for now!