Galaxies to GitHub: Paula Boubel’s internship journey at ACCESS-NRI

Could you tell me a bit about yourself, about your career so far, why you decided to do a PhD in Australia and an internship here?

I am from Canada and when I was applying for a PhD, I thought it would be a good opportunity to go abroad, to live somewhere else. So, I applied all over the world and studying in Australia checked all my boxes.

I am now finalising a PhD in astrophysics at ANU. I am analysing data from large surveys of galaxies and measuring their motions and velocities to learn about the effect of gravity on those galaxies.

I love research, but during my academic path, I have been aware there is another trajectory for me that doesn’t have to be academia, and I wanted to explore alternative options. I really enjoy coding and working with data. So, when I saw this internship opportunity, I thought it would be perfect for me because I’d get a little taste of what it’s like to be exposed to a different field from astrophysics and it would also let me build some experience working as a research software engineer.

What did you do during your internship at ACCESS-NRI?

I joined the Modelling Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team. My project was based on the COSIMA cookbook, which has all these templates or recipes that people use to post-process and visualise the model outputs from ocean modelling. They wanted to come up with something similar for the ice sheet modelling group.

Recently, the Ice-sheet and Sea-ice level System Model (ISSM) was chosen to be integrated into ACCESS for the next version of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). The idea is to create some coherent recipes to get people started and to provide templates, which eventually will be put together in a cookbook.
The main outcome of the internship was to create four different recipes based on the Antarctic ice sheet projection paper’s figures that show forecasts for the sea level rise, using ISSM and other ice sheet models. In the cookbook, I tried to reproduce these figures and visualise them within the cookbook using all outputs and with the help of my supervisors, get the data into Gadi. So now you can go into the newly created ISSM Cookbook repository, access these datasets, run the code and see these nice plots.

What sort of skills did you develop that you didn’t anticipate needing?A nice skill I got from this experience is that it allowed me to participate in collaborative coding, contributing to some existing repository and having several reviewers and working together with people. It gave me more experience in conforming to a proper GitHub workflow, flag an issue and then doing everything in the right order. I think that was an extremely valuable experience, especially if I end up working as a software developer as part of an organisation, where I’ll have to work with other people.
Prior to this experience I was used to working on my own individual project, as in astrophysics there is not much collaborative coding going on.

What did you like the most about working in ACCESS-NRI?
My favorite thing was the people, how welcoming everybody was and how willing everyone was to help me out, if I ever asked for help. And then also, how curious everyone else was about the work that I was doing. It was just such a welcoming culture.

What was your biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge was to familiarise myself with code that other people have written and worked on for years, and to create code in a collaborative way efficiently and effectively. That was a big learning process, a steep learning curve. So, even if I was given what it looked like a minor task, I had to learn all this other stuff to be able to do it.

Did you think that it changed your perspective about your research in academia?

It made me realise that there are good tools outside of what people commonly use in astrophysics, which are things that we learn and are passed down from people that we learn from.
Sometimes it’s worth going outside of the field and seeing what other people have been using and what standards they adhere to, because I think there are some good lessons that can be learned by doing that.

What advice would you give to all the PhD students considering doing internship with ACCESS-NRI?

I think that if you want to get the most out of your internship, you should clearly identify what are the gaps that you’re looking to fill, what do you really want to get out of this internship. You need to ask questions like: Do you want to keep doing what you’re already good at doing just because you’re familiar and comfortable with it? Or do you want to try something new to challenge yourself? So, I would recommend embracing those unknown things because that’s what the point of the internship is.

How does the future look to you from here?

I’m submitting my PhD in one month. I’m starting a job at IPAC on the campus of Caltech in California, as a software developer working on data analysis and processing and ingestion for a satellite which will be launched in a couple years. It’s a nice mix between research software engineering, astronomy and astrophysics. I’ve already built up the skills that I gained at ACCESS-NRI. I used them even for the interview for this position, where I was referencing things that I was doing for ACCESS-NRI, so this experience helped me a lot to get there.