On the second of June we had the Career talk of the summer semester 2025. We were visited by Dr. Jolanta Zjupa of the FZJ (Research Center Juelich) who is part of the JSC (Juelich Supercomputing Center).
The day started with a lunch together at the Campo Mensa, followed by Dr. Zjupas career talk on the topic "Navigating physics, HPC, and life". The meeting concluded as an informal exchange between FLINTA* people in Physics at the Uni Bonn, where we discussed the topics Dr. Zjupa presented.
The talk was introduced by the short blurb:
Dr. Jolanta Zjupa is research staff at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in high-performance computing (HPC). She talks about her path and experiences in different scientific domains, how intertwined a scientific career is with private life, and how one impacts the other. Investing 10 years of academic life in computational astrophysics, working on large-scale cosmological galaxy formation simulations, for the last 3 years her path has continued in HPC and computational science with strong focus on user support and HPC education to ensure effective and sustainable use of supercomputing resources.
She shared with us her personal insights and experiences working in the different fields, as well as practical advice on how and where to look for good mentoring, what good mentoring even looks like, and how to consider timing and effort and energy invested when it comes to applying to PhD and PD positions. Her experiences specifically referred to the Astrophysics research area, but are applicable to other fields in Physics.
After her talk we ended up discussing personal experiences with PhD organization at different universities and exchanged some tips for how to balance personal prioritization in an academic context.
If this sounds interesting to you - you are welcome to join us for any of the next events we organize!
The career and diversity talk events are generally open to anyone who is interested!
The informal events are specifically aimed at FLINTA* physicists in early career stages!
See you there!