It's Away!

Things got a bit hectic when the website for submitting the proposal went down 15 minutes before the deadline, but it magically came back online five minutes before the deadline, and so I managed to submit the proposal with one whole minute to spare.

Proposals are a huge part of being an astronomer, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about them. On the one hand, they're kind of fun because you get to think about your research in new ways, but on the other hand, you have to think about your research in terms of "how can I sell this to someone else"? People are bound to say "congratulations" when you've submitted a proposal, just because you typically spend so much time on it, but the truth is it's sort of like taking an exam, in the sense that you don't know how a committee will react upon reading it. You might get a good grade or you might get a bad grade. With proposals (and often with exams as well), it even comes down to plain old luck a lot of the time. In some ways it seems like being an astronomer is more about writing proposals than doing research, especially as you get older. Is that something that I want? Maybe, we'll see...