December 17, 2005
I am finding out that there is in fact life after the MINERvA Director's Review. I have been preparing for/worrying about this for easily a month or more, and now that it's over (and I've been told it was reasonably successful) I can't quite figure out why I don't feel more relieved.
The review started on Tuesday morning with Jorge and Kevin, the MINERvA spokespeople, giving talks about the physics motivation for the experiment and the detector description and performance. Then I gave a talk about how the detector is being built: who is going to be responsible for building what, and what the cost and schedule are. Then there were 10 more talks, each about a different piece of the experiment, each given by one of the "Level 2 managers" in charge of that subsystem. If that's not a long enough day, then we all (reviewers and reviewees) had drinks at the User's Center (see photo at left) and then dinner at Chez Leon on the evening of the first day.
Brief Aside: There is no way I could write for a year about the life of a physicist at Fermilab and not talk about Chez Leon. This is a gourmet restaurant on the laboratory site for Fermilab users and visitors, that has been around for decades: my earliest memory of going there is as a "starving graduate student" and having fantastic fresh-baked bread right before going on owl shift, and of chef Tita taking pity on me and giving me extra bread to give to my buddies on shift later that night.
Chez Leon is open for lunch on Wednesdays and dinner on Thursdays (assuming you're organized enough to get a reservation in advance before the seats fill up), but Tita and her crew also provide meals for most (maybe all) of the "official dinners" at the Laboratory. It is a true reward to be given such good food after all the preparations and stress of a review.
However, when I got home Tuesday evening I found out that my grandfather had suffered a "minor heart attack" (which sounds like an oxymoron if I ever heard one) and was in the hospital. I have spoken with him several times since then, and he sounds like his same witty self, but nevertheless I feel pretty shaken up, and I can only imagine how much more shaken he feels.
So the review continued on the next day, further punctuated by my daugher's coming down with a 24-hour stomach virus, and long "breakout sessions" where only a few of the reviewers ask you lots of detailed questions on the thing you're specifically leading. Although I am told things went well overall, I still feel like I have a ton to learn as far as management goes.
Now that the review is over I want to breathe this huge sigh of relief, but I am finding that really hard to do: the best part of this review was the fact that the reviewers were really good at constructive criticism, and now I really feel like I have my work cut out for me.
Luckily my long sigh of relief is not too far off: I will be flying to see my grandparents in Florida on Wednesday for 9 days...but until then it's high gear...
It was great reading your thoughts and about your work over the past 6 months. However it is sad that QD will put an end to this. So wishing you the very for the coming future and a great 2006.
Posted by: Balaji Shankar Venkatachari | December 27, 2005 at 12:43 AM