I began last year with a post explaining how I'd learned in December that my job at Gemini wasn't going to end up being extended beyond October, and that I didn't know where I'd be in a year. This year I find myself in a somewhat curious mirror to that situation, though in this case the good news is that I've accepted a job offer and it doesn't require moving.
Back in November I applied for a job with a company called Battelle, working with a program called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a set of observation sites scattered across the U.S. with the goal of providing a standardized, long-term, open-access database of ecological observations. In December I was contacted for an interview, and then got a job offer the next day. I dithered a bit, since it's a seasonal position running from April through November (when I'd rather have a more stable position), but since I hadn't heard back from any of the other astronomy jobs I'd applied to and it would allow me to stick around in Hilo for another year I ended up accepting.
It's rather different from anything I've previously done, so I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but from what I've learned it involves conducting observations generally having to do with biodiversity or population sampling (with roughly a 75/25 split of field work to lab work). The site here in Hawaii is located on the slopes of Mauna Loa (some 3,000–4,000 feet up, I was told), but with the access road close to Hilo, and I think the company's base facility is actually just across the road from the Gemini offices where I was working.
The irony that this is now the second time in the last decade that I've
- had a desk job in astronomy for about three years,
- been let go because of funding issues,
- taken a job on the slopes of Mauna Loa,
- which lasted/will last for less than a year,
With the recent wildfires in Los Angeles county, I've also realized that I may have dodged a bullet; I had an interview with IPAC, the astronomy center at UCLA, back in August, and while nothing ultimately came of it there's an alternative timeline where I might have moved to L.A. around this time and been affected. (I've heard that several IPAC developers have lost houses to the fires, so…) I'd rather not move, but if I had gotten a job offer I'd probably have taken it, so it's probably for the best that that didn't go anywhere.
Anyway, as mentioned, the job doesn't start until April so I've got some months of downtime until then. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it once it starts, and maybe some more post ideas in the meantime. A hui hou!