Tales from a Traveling Graduate Student

Forest Shrine, Asaina, Japan

Have you ever wanted to travel? To see the world? Me too. I just didn't think that my ticket to another continent or even another city would be through graduate school. This is likely because when I thought of graduate school, I thought of long nights toiling with long problem sets, grading, coding, debugging code, whiny undergraduates, writing more code, and just overall hopelessness that I will never get out of graduate school. 

Now, don't get me wrong, graduate school is a long arduous process which should take serious thought before deciding to do it (PhD Comics has a nice way to make the turmoil funny), I just want to point out one of the benefits (yes, there are benefits) of being a graduate student; traveling. 

Post climb of Mount Fuji, Japan.

Before I get into the details, I should tell you a little about myself since this is my first blog post. My name is Rachael Tomasino and I am a 3rd year Astrophysics graduate student at the University of Denver.  I enjoy running, knitting, and playing with my two dogs; a siberian husky and a border collie mix. While working, I study the circumstellar material around late stage evolved low mass stars. In short, I study dust. Check out this paper about one of my objects; the Cygnus Egg Nebula.

Back to the interesting part; traveling. Below is a picture of me in front to the SkyTree; the worlds tallest building located in Tokyo, Japan. How did I ever end up in Japan? Answer: graduate school.

SkyTree, Tokyo, Japan

As a graduate student, I was able to apply for an East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute Fellowship. With this fellowship, I was able to create an international collaboration with the Laboratory for Infrared Astrophysics (LIRA) group working at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara, Japan. I spent a total of 10 weeks living and working at ISAS. During that time, I was not only able to get a lot of work done but also had various opportunities to travel around and see different parts of Japan including spending a weekend at the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory while discussing work with the director, seeing a sumo tournament in Nagoya, and also climbing Mount Fuji.

Since my fellowship summer, I have traveled back to Japan two more times! I went back to continue working with my collaborators, give a talk, and to present a poster a conference.

I should note that extended traveling for a fellowship is not the most common way for a graduate student to leave the depths of their office. Most of the time, it will be to travel to a conference. Conferences are an amazing and exhausting experience and they are great way to travel because they are (usually) free. (Thank you grant money!)

Presenting at the APS-4CS in Denver

Since the start of graduate school, I have been to two international conferences (SPICA in Japan and APN VI in Mexico) and a handful of conferences within the United States. Including: AAS in Long Beach, APS-4CS in Socorro and Denver, and CUWip in Golden, CO. (If you are overwhelmed by the acronyms, welcome to astronomy.) Conferences are a great way to meet people and also have your work gain exposure which could lead to more collaborations and exciting new projects!

There are thousands of opportunities to participate in conferences all over the globe no matter your area of interest. If you are interested in finding one near (or far) from you, check out this website or ask your advisor/faculty in your department and enjoy!

Cheers and happy traveling,

Rachael