Margaret Mayall was the Director of the AAVSO from 1949-1973, and was the leader of the organization when computerization of the database began. Upon her retirement, the organization created an assistantship fund in her honor.

On an irregular basis, the AAVSO awards summer assistantships to students interested in learning about astronomy and data processing. Qualified high school or college students with a background in math, physics, astronomy or computer science are encouraged to apply for one of these assistantships. Tasks may include data entry, writing software, creating documentation, processing data, performing scientific analysis, etc.

Salary is negotiable, depending on experience. Normally, you will be required to work at the AAVSO headquarters for a minimum of 2 months sometime during the summer.

To apply for a Margaret Mayall Assistantship, send a letter no later than April 30 to:

Director
AAVSO
25 Birch Street
Cambridge MA 02138

Enclose your most recent resume and transcript of grades. You should include the names and email addresses/phone numbers of 3 people who are familiar with you or your work whom we can contact for reference.

Donate to the Margaret Mayall Assistantship today.

Previous recipients of the Assistantship:

2005 — Erin Snyder (Boston University). Erin is a graduate student, pursuing a PhD in English Literature. She obtained a joint undergraduate degree in English and Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. Erin helped Aaron Price in moving the membership information into a MySQL relational database, writing the Java interface programs used by the HQ staff to interrogate the membership database, and writing documentation.

2005 — Yelena Synkova (Harvard Extension School and Stanford University Continuing Educational Program). Yelena is entering nearly 100,000 eclipsing binary and RR Lyrae observations that were submitted to the EB/RR committee between 1966 and 1975, but which were never made computer readable. This data is in a multitude of formats, from standardized magnitudes to step sequences, and by a variety of instrumentation. Yelena has written an Excel spreadsheet to hold the data.

1999 — Michael Gutner (Yale University). Michael worked as a personal assistant to Janet Mattei, performing multiple tasks at her request. His main task for the organization was to digitize, perform quality-control checks on, and prepare electronic files for over 900 variable-star charts. He also was in charge of the incoming nightly observations from observers worldwide.

1998 — Emily Lu (Wesleyan University). Emily worked on various administration tasks at headquarters in addition to a personal research project on the mira star AY Aur. Under the advisement of Janet Mattei and Grant Foster she did a preliminary analysis of the period of AY Aur, the results of which were incorporated into a later paper.