Group Blog

The first few months

Hi!

My name is Adam Ciesielski and I started my PhD at University of Amsterdam a few months ago, in October. This was also a real personal change in my life – it was the first time I really moved to the different city, and country even. I am not an English native speaker, so I have to apologize for any grammar mistakes, typos and misuse of words – but I am working on it! I do research on Tidal Disruption Events – the aim of my project is to do a spectro-temporal analysis of such events. My supervisors are Sera Markoff and Ralph Wijers (who is also my promotor). The idea of me doing PhD in this topic is to combine fields of research from Sera and Ralph.

Of course the first thing I did when I came to Amsterdam was buying a good bike lock. Then I bought a bike as a substitute of the public transport, which is how it works here.

Thanks to Sera, who informed me just in time, I took part in great event NOVA Fall School at Dwingeloo (ASTRON). It was on the next week after my arrival! The NOVA School is a five day workshop-conference for new PhD candidates from the whole Netherlands, happening once a year. It reminded me some kind of team-building camps because of strong interaction between us. In general we have got lots of clues how to be a scientists, how to deal with (demanding) society which sometimes questions Astronomy “This science is useless and we should not spend money on it”. We attended lectures on the topic which is less related to our background knowledge, so I listened to detailed lectures about galaxies and cosmology. At the end every PhD had to present some short talk about his/her research. Mine was about possible Recurrent Novae and accretion DIM/SNIa relevance, which was the subject of my previous research, resulting in my master thesis.

I also attended group meeting in Nijmegen (the pronunciation of this city was a surprise for me, but now I am more used to Dutch than then) and I had to deliver a speech. I talked about the results from my paper about stability of accretion discs, which I can advertise here. But it was much more stressful than giving a talk on NOVA School, since the audience was much more serious and the paper was published some time ago so I had to recall many things. Moreover, the paper was a group work while there is no doubt that my thesis was rather an individual work.

After that, really soon, I had to be a Teaching Assistant for Phil’s Uttley course on High Energy Astrophysics: Accretion. It was great, because I like to teach. It was useful, since it forced me to interact with others (I found it important in moving to different university and country) and it was a good “refresher” of this subject. As they say, you can claim that you understand something only if you can explain it to somebody. However, it was really time-consuming and intense job.

In meanwhile I learned how this institute lives. I found some differences, some similarities. I enjoyed colloquia, lunch pizza talks, API parties. I red lots of papers related to TDEs, in order to prepare a “literature report”, which should be the first chapter of my PhD Thesis. I met the NOVA Inquisition – which is not as terrifying as it sounds. At least at this step of my PhD.

And then (February- March) I visited University of Texas at Austin. With Chiara, Riley and Theo we were accompanying Sera in her stay as a visiting professor. Her host was Pawan Kumar, the great GRB and MHD expert. But this trip is another story for my next post… There is something about it already on the blog!


If you are curious what was the way to convince someone why we should spend money on Astronomy, we performed a calculations what should be the annual income of imagined “Albert Einstein Corporation” if they would patent the Relativity Theory for use in Global Positioning System.

Leave a Reply