Fire Up Fridays
Welcome!
The goal for Physics and Astronomy Community Excellence (PACE) Fire Up Fridays is to provide regular meeting space and programming that is designed specifically in the interest of supporting and developing incoming graduate students in our department. This includes both structured and unstructured activities that will foster a sense of community and inspire resilience within our community of graduate students.
For resources and summaries of our past Fire Up Friday sessions, see below or click the corresponding link: Time & Goal Management, How Funding Works in Our Department, Working Out & Working In (Physical Health), Career Path Exploration, Demystifying the Qual Exam, Personal Wellness with Dr. Phong Luong, Building Your Mentor Map, Finding and Fostering Healthy Relationships with Advisors and Summer Professional Materials Development.
2019-20 FUF Sessions 2018-19 FUF Sessions See Our Syllabus HereTime & Goal Management Session
Description
This session served as a guided discussion/panel on balancing grad student responsibilities. In small group settings, senior students shared their experiences, including their successes and failures, as well as trips and tricks for studying, TAing, etc. Key take aways from this session were to know it's ok to ask for help and to do so often, that scheduling can be a life-saver, and that checking in with yourself is incredibly important!
Resources
- How to Align Your Time with Your Priorities (aka The Sunday Meeting to plan your week)
- Mastering Academic Time Management
- Every Semester Needs a Plan (this webinar walks you through step by step creating a quarterly plan and how to implement that on a weekly basis)
- UCI's Keeping the Balance Guide for Grads and PostDocs
- How Hard Do Professors Actually Work (some perspective)
- Research On the Overestimated Workweek (see fig/chart 1)
- Example of How a Physics Graduate Student Could Spend Their Time (see slide 10)
How Funding Works in Our Department
Description
In this session, our faculty leader Franklin Dollar presented information to PACE mentees regarding how funding works as a graduate student, departmental support and external fellowships. The objective of this session was to provide students with a space in which they could ask questions regarding how the department handles funding, how summer funding works
Resources
These serve as a repository of resources regarding funding in the Physics and Astronomy Department
- How to establish residency
- Google Drive of Some Resources/Solutions Ten things graduate students need to know
Working Out & Working In
Description
In the first session of this two-part series, we explored as a group some methods of stress reduction - or rather stress expression - to use for when times get rough. This included discussions that facilitated the normalization of our struggles. The key take aways from this session were effective stress management methods such as practicing discipline, exercise, outsourcing and multitasking (links below).
Resources
Please find the repository of resources shared at this (and past) sessions below