Back in the summer of 2012, while working at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and putting the finishing touches on my senior thesis, I was faced with a 3 week period without my advisors around. At the time I was studying the atmospheres of brown dwarfs (stars not massive enough to fuse hydrogen in their cores) with the group BDNYC, and studying specifically the absorption profile morphology of neutral potassium in their spectra. I had a few things to do while my advisors were away–I had to finish editing plots in my thesis, work on updating our brown dwarf database, and look into placing the brown dwarfs in my sample with Associations (groups of stars that move together and share the same rough age estimate). However, my productivity was less than stellar (much like my brown dwarfs, BAM!) due to the fact that it was summer and I came down with some illness I don’t remember. I kept a research journal that tracked my progress, and as such, needed to present said progress after the 3 week hiatus of my advisors at our group meeting. Determined to have a graph to bring to group meeting, I drew the following graph of my productivity:
The title is “Dan’s Productivity”, which is obscured by the tape holding it to my desk wall.
The x axis represents time in number of weeks ago (3 being when they left, 0 being present, i.e. the group meeting). The y-axis represents my productivity in terms of typical productivity language. As you can see, science research can have its ups and downs of research productivity.
