Dear friends,
After the busyness of the last few weeks, this past week was a quiet one. I was starting to catch up with life logistics and meeting up with family and friends here in Seoul. Since it was a quiet week, I figured I would keep this on the briefer side and share some photos from the week and a few announcements.
Remaining travel: Seoul —> Japan —> Hawaii —> California —> and then back to Chicago in time to recover and ring in 2025.
Updates
On this Substack, I have been primarily focused on sharing about this sabbatical season. Before I left the US, I did some reading about sabbaticals and one piece of advice was to try and focus on being present versus what was coming down the road. In light of this advice, after wrapping up my work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the end of July and returning from vacation, I spent the rest of August preparing my job materials and applying for positions with the intention of resuming this work when I got back to the States.
The search committee for one of the positions I applied for reached out for an interview and I interviewed from Iceland, the Netherlands, and Jordan. And to make a long story short, from January 1, 2025, I will back in the Chicagoland area as the Director of Operations and Outreach at the SkAI Institute, a joint NSF-Simons Foundation funded research institute focused on interdisciplinary research and engagement in AI and Astrophysics, convening people from Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, as well as others across the state of Illinois.
While the Institute is convening a whole network of partners and contributors, it is housed at Northwestern University. (We also have some post doctoral positions open, if folks want to share. :))
I am extremely excited to be joining such a diverse team engaging in both innovative work and contributing to STEM capacity building throughout Illinois’s educational eco-system.
While the past week was a bit quiet in terms of walking and activities, there was quite a ramp up in terms of starting to transition into post-sabbatical work life (and life back in Chicago). But after being able to take things slowly for the past couple of months, I must admit, this has not been without its challenges. Combined with the always affective aspects of connecting with family, the past week was a bit of an emotional roller coaster. (If you know anything about Korean families from K-drama, the principle of “there is always a grain of truth in storytelling” applies here.)
But I have one more week in Korea and regardless of the “hats” that are now going active, I remain thankful for this time. But also see the value of the aforementioned advice on sabbaticals, i.e., to be present. This is valuable in terms of not “donating” or ceding time related to future work now.
On that note, see you next week!
Wowza, Elise ... thanks for sharing the impressive vistas from your (serious!) hike! And insights about how you approached your sabattical. And, to top it off, the HUGE news about your next big adventure!
I know that you'll relish the remainder of your journey and hope you'll enjoy your next chapter, which sounds thrilling!
Freya