Last Dec. 9th, 2023, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space in the Philippines (SEDSPH) held its Upskill Groups Culminating Activity at Adamson University. It was an event to recognize all the mentees who joined the Upskill Groups offered by SEDSPH, which provided avenues for learning new skills related to astronomy and space science.
As I wrote in my previous blog post, I have been leading the Computational Astrophysics and Astronomical Data Processing Upskill Group since April 2023. For almost 8 months, I taught the students skills in coding that are vital in analyzing astronomical datasets; from solving complicated systems of equations to creating important statistical plots that describe large data of galaxies and other astronomical objects. Unfortunately, many students did not push through, and in the end, only four of my students persevered. Despite that, all four of them displayed great interest in astrophysics, especially in doing their final projects, which involved doing a small research project where they could utilize all the skills they had learned in my class. Of course, I had to guide them with their projects. It was a challenging time for me as it was my first time "supervising" students' research work, and I need to supervise not just one, but four students.
Last October 2023, as a final requirement for the Upskill Group, my students presented their work in front of experts. I invited two postdoctoral researchers: Dr. Seong Jin Kim from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan, and Dr. Jinyi Shangguan from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). Dr. Kim was one of the postdocs I worked very closely with back in my Masters at NTHU, and his work focuses on infrared galaxies and fast radio bursts. Dr. Shangguan, on the other hand, is one of the postdocs I work very closely with now as I take my PhD at MPE, and his work focuses on AGNs and observations with GRAVITY. Thankfully, they were impressed with my students' work.
Afterwards, I asked my students to prepare a poster presentation to showcase their works on the upcoming Culminating Activity. It was good timing that last July 2023, I invited Dr. Alvina On from NTHU to give a talk about how to give good oral and poster presentations. Dr. On was one of my closest colleagues back at NTHU, and her expertise has been a great help for my students in preparing their oral and poster presentations.
Although I was not able to join the culminating activity, I gave a pre-recorded talk about black hole observations. I also learned from the people who joined the event that my students gave wonderful presentations, and I could not be any more proud of them. The fact that they were able to produce quality research akin to a master's thesis in just a short span of time is impressive, and if they have more time, they can publish papers based on their work.
It was also a learning experience for me. It was my first time teaching astrophysics to a group of students, and some of them had not even taken any astronomy-related courses before. I also had to teach coding to them, not to mention that my classes were held on Zoom. Despite all these constraints, I was able to deliver. I hope my students learned a thing or two from my class.
Visit https://www.facebook.com/SEDSPH for more pictures of SEDSPH Upskill Groups Culminating Activity.
Picture credits to Trixie Sacyten, Bea Marie Cajandig, and SEDSPH.
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