Seen and heard

Some random things encountered yesterday, that I doubt I would have seen back home:

• A young child—certainly not more than 10 years old, and probably not even that old—walking around the neighborhood without any parental supervision. While not common in the US, it’s certainly quite common here; children barely bigger than their backpacks appear to walk to elementary school on their own (either individually or in gaggles) with startling regularity.
• Outside a store here, a dog was attached to a leash and sitting quite peacefully. However, what was bizarre about it was that the leash was not attached to anything; it was merely lying on the ground. It was an incredibly well-behaved dog not to react to its surroundings and all the passers-by.
• A Hungarian Mormon missionary. This I found to be incredibly amusing, although I can’t really say why. I guess I just find the concept intriguing. It’s not really a shock that there are Mormon missionaries going to Hungary (after all, I don’t think a Hungarian would spontaneously convert to Mormonism). On the other hand, what actually prompted such a conversion, and how it would lead to a Hungarian learning fairly passable English and German and tromping around the streets of Aachen to extol the virtues of the LDS is certainly worth considering. (The whole encounter was rather thought-provoking, actually; I’ll post more about it some other time.)

On finding good help

One of the challenges of academia in Europe appears to be the inverse of the problem in the US: how to support an army of minions graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In the US, finding good help is relatively easy compared to finding means of paying for them; in Europe, it appears it’s much easier to find the funding than to find the employees.

Or maybe I shouldn’t say it’s hard to find people—it’s just hard to find the right people. For a recent position I advertised, I’ve received applications from all sorts of people, including a bunch who would, on paper, appear to be entirely unsuitable for such a position. (For instance, why would someone working for more than two decades as a staff scientist want to accept a temporary post-doctoral position?) It rather boggles the mind.

As for who I ended up hiring, I’ve decided to take one post-doctoral fellow and one student. The search for a postdoc was fortunately quite easy; an extremely qualified candidate whose “degrees of separation” was only 1 applied relatively quickly, and no one else really compared well with that. (Experience as an experimentalist, and familiarity with the MD software we’re using, also helped.)

The graduate student search was much more involved, surprisingly. Most of the candidates came in with essentially no experience in the field. This is true of all the finalists, too, but they all had experience with computational science. Unfortunately, two of the candidates unintentionally hurt their chances during the application process, in rather different ways. leaving only one candidate without a serious black mark left in the running. It’s rather unfortunate that I had to make a decision through elimination rather than through a positive selection, but sometimes, you have to take what’s handed to you and make the most of it.

Oy. A long time it's been

Since last I gave this blog some attention. I have to admit that time has a way of sneaking by when I’m not paying active attention to what I’m doing; I definitely have a nasty tendency to let things slip by, and that’s not really my intention here. On the other hand, there is always the concern of sharing too much information: when exactly does my desire to share the details with my life interfere with my desire for privacy, as well as the rights of others to privacy? It’s a fine line to walk, but I figure I will find a way to bridge the gap.