Pre-MAP 2018

Welcome to Pre-MAP 2018, Cohort 14! Class takes place Monday/Wednesday/Friday from 11-12:20pm in the 3rd floor computer lab of the Physics and Astronomy building (B360; see floor map of the department here).

Instructor

I’m Margaret Lazzarini, the instructor for Pre-MAP 2018. I am a fourth year PhD student in the astronomy department. My research focuses on observational high energy astrophysics, I study black holes and neutron stars with X-ray telescopes.

Margaret’s office hours this quarter are Wednesdays 2-3pm and Thursdays 11am-12pm in her office B323.

Academic Mentor

The course Academic Mentor is Nicole Sanchez. Nicole is a third year PhD student in the astronomy department. Nicole’s research focuses on theoretical astrophysics. She does computer simulations of galaxies similar to the Milky Way to understand the evolution of the Circumglactic Medium (CGM), the gas surrounding galaxies.

The Academic Mentor is an additional resource for you to use throughout this entire academic year (including the winter and spring quarters, after the Pre-MAP class is over). Nicole will also have office hours to be available to help you with homework, research, selecting courses, and in-class assignments, and she will be present at many of the in-class exercises. The Academic Mentor is around to help you with anything you may want to talk about. Don’t wait to take advantage of this excellent resource!

Nicole’s office hours are Tuesdays 11am-12pm and Fridays 12:30-1:30 pm in her office B337.

Course Overview

Pre-MAP can roughly be broken up into two halves. In the first half, we’ll equip you with the skills you need to start working on an astronomical research project. These skills include programming in Python, and critical reading and writing of science literature. Then in the second half of the course, you’ll work in small groups with a research mentor and a class partner on a guided research project. There will also be professional development talks on Fridays, and social events and lab tours throughout the quarter.

Here is the course syllabus.

Course Materials

The Python lessons will be taught from instructional iPython Notebooks (no textbook required!) which can be found on our GitHub page. These notebooks will be saved there as a permanent programming reference for you.

There are also many freely available textbooks on programming in Python, which you could optionally use for Python help (no readings will be assigned from these books). Take a look at this webpage’s free Python texts labeled “beginner” for supplemental texts that might be useful programming references appropriate for this course. Three reference texts that I recommend include Learn Python the Hard Way (which isn’t actually hard!), A Byte of Python, and A Whirlwind Tour of Python (written by a former UW astro grad student).

Course Work

There are coding and writing assignments, designed to hone your coding and science communication skills, respectively. Coding assignments are byte-sized and meant to reinforce what you’ve learned in class. Writing assignments vary in length, and will focus on reading and understanding scientific research papers, writing a personal statement for applying to research internships, and creating a presentation on your research project at the end of the quarter.

How to turn in Assignments

Writing Assignments:

Writing assignments are share with you using your UW Google Drive account. Log on to your UW Google drive by going to drive.google.com and logging in using your UW email address (netID@uw.edu) and password. Then go to “Shared with me” and you should find writing assignments shared with you as they are assigned. Each will be named “Writing 1”, “Writing 2”, etc. which will match the way they are listed on the calendar at the bottom of this page. Please complete writing directly on the Google document. I am already shared on it so you will not need to do anything to turn it in.

Coding Assignments:

Coding assignments are meant to be straightforward practice of what we’ve learned in class. All assignments come from the online resource “Learn Python The Hard Way” (LPTHW). Since the service is pay-only, I have a PDF version of the online textbook that I have shared with you on your UW Google Drive.

To complete an assignment, please create a new Jupyter notebook in your home directory when you are logged in to an astrolab computer (see the first unix lesson for a refresher on how to remotely log in if you are doing this from your home computer). Follow the exercise, essentially copy-pasting the code into the notebook and running each cell to see what it produces. When you are finished, please copy your notebook into the premap2018 directory using the following command:

cp Lastname_codeX.ipynb /astro/store/gradscratch/tmp/premap2018/codeX

Where codeX will be code1, code2, code3, etc. depending on the assignment number.

Schedule

Lab tours – we will be taking tours of different labs on campus throughout the fall quarter. These tours are still being scheduled and will be posted ASAP!

The course schedule is listed below and will be updated as we go along: