JOB

I had to turn in my briefing memo on which I will be evaluated for that Science Defense Interview in D.C. It was due today (Friday the 27th). Hopefully it's too their liking.

Well, it WAS to their liking because the interview in D.C. in March went very well and they passed me on to the Round 4 interview in April in D.C.!!! Thank you very much! :D We’ll see what happens. I’ve tried to explain this many times to many people. And I find that if I spend the time writing the details of how this process works, people who receive this e-mail end up asking me again. So I won’t bother writing it again since I did write it once. So those of you who are actually reading this paragraph, let me say that if you followed what I read a month ago, AAAS has finished selected their group of science advisors. At this stage (having passed Stage 3 and moving to Stage 4), I am now called a finalist. The next task is to find placement within the government. Remember, I’m a Defense Fellow, so I would be a science advisor to an executive branch defense agency under the president, like the FBI or Homeland Security (DHS) (I’m not sure if CIA and NSA are taking placements) or Department of Defense (DoD). So we’ll see what happens. I wanted to be a diplomacy (Department of State or USAID, for instance) advisor, but this is still an honor, so we’ll see what happens. Now in this stage I must go back to D.C. for a week’s worth of interviews in government agencies trying to find my specific government placement. So the job is not achieved, yet. AAAS keeps reminding us in bold print that actually being offered the job is contingent upon finding a government placement (this Round 4 part) and availability of funding. I don’t know if it’s just an attempt to cover themselves in the small chance that you do not find a placement or if actually a considerable percentage of people who go to Round 4 do not get jobs. I am not sure. We’ll see. I will give you the links one more time for you to peruse.
http://fellowships.aaas.org/
http://fellowships.aaas.org/02_Areas/02_index.shtml
On Monday (23rd of Feb 2009), I received a rejection for a submitted journal paper (I was not rejected, the paper was; this is important for identity). What was surprising is that it was provisionally accepted. 2 reviewers recommended it for publication; a third reviewer did not. So the head editor asked me to implement their revisions and resubmit. Some of the revisions I could not do because they required me not only to rewrite but to actually do some new research and I do not have access to the data anymore (long story). So I could only do the ones that asked for better explanations, more clarity, reorganization of content, etc. Well, you are allowed to put it on your resume when it's at this stage because they are usually accepted. The head editor sent it out to only 2 reviewers this time—the one who rejected and another (I cannot tell if it was one of the original two who said yes), and again it was split. The one reviewer still rejected, and the other accepted it. The editor followed the recommendation of the rejecter. So I actually had misinformation on my resume. Funny! :-) Anyway, I have resubmitted that paper to another journal, but those 4 published papers are down to 2/3. Two have been finally accepted for publication and both have just finished the copy editing and typesetting process. The third was just now provisionally accepted (they said they would have an answer in 3 weeks. It took 6 months).
Secondly, on Tuesday (when I'm writing this paragraph—24th of Feb 2009) I was able to get my blood flow experiments working and get some results! Yayyy! Now, it's not just implemented, but it works and shows us something. So I just need to get it working properly to predict the points of highest temperature and pressure in the blood vessel, but it’s giving results now. So that’s great! So we'll see what happens. But it means I'll be able to wrap up this project as well before leaving.