Dr Philipp Boersch‑Supan

Quantitative Ecologist

Mapping one's academic career path

17 Feb 2018    Philipp Boersch-Supan    rstats    Tweet this!

Yesterday I came across Gordon Pennycook’s tweet about moving in academia:

So given that there’s a transatlantic move coming up for me to take up my first permanent research position at the British Trust for Ornithology, I thought, why not figure this out quickly using R.

library(ggmap)# for geocoding and plotting 
library(geosphere)# for distance calculations
library(knitr)# for making a nice table

I used ggmap::geocode to look up the coordinates of each station on my academic career path:

academic_places <- geocode(c(home = "Neustadt an der Weinstrasse",
                             undergrad = "Marburg an der Lahn",
                             masters_phd = "St Andrews, Fife",
                             phd = "Oxford, Oxfordshire",
                             postdoc1 = "Cambridge, UK",
                             postdoc2a = "Tampa, FL",
                             postdoc2b = "Gainesville, FL",
                             job = "Thetford"),
                           source = "dsk")

A quick plot to sanity check the locations

#make a map
qmplot(lon, lat, data = academic_places, maptype = "watercolor", color = I("red")) + geom_path(color = "red")

I then used the geosphere package to calculate sequential distance between stations

#calculate distances
distances_m <- distGeo(as.matrix(academic_places[,2:3]))

#transform units
distances_km <- distances_m/1000
distances_mi <- distances_m/1609

And lastly, I made a table to sum up everything.

#make a table
kable(data.frame(stage = c(academic_places[-1,1], "Total"),
                 distance_km = round(c(distances_km, sum(distances_km))),
                 distance_mi = round(c(distances_mi, sum(distances_mi)))))
stage distance_km distance_mi
undergrad 172 107
masters_phd 992 617
phd 516 321
postdoc1 107 67
postdoc2a 7121 4426
postdoc2b 185 115
job 7005 4354
Total 16099 10006