Academia

The Message That Is Sent

Rob Knop is blogging about the difficulties in getting tenure — his difficulties in particular, not the issue in some vague degree of abstraction. Very worth reading for a candid look at the kind of thing that goes on.

On a meta level, it’s interesting to contemplate how hiring and tenuring will ultimately be effected by blogs. Scott Aaronson is blogging at least some occasional facts about his job search. The proliferation of online rumor mills has already taken a lot of what used to be quasi-private information, shared among the old-boy network but invisible to outsiders, and put it out there for everyone to see. I can imagine a similar kind of effect if we ever get to the point that a critical mass of job- and tenure-seekers are blogging about their progress.

In the short term, I worry that the most obvious effect will be a deleterious one for the bloggers. For the most part, I don’t think that hiring/tenure committees care if you have a blog, occasional anonymous scare-mongering notwithstanding. (It might even help.) But blogging about the process might be the kind of thing that makes committees nervous. Personally, I would never blog about a major occupational transition while it was going on; when it’s all set up and the ink is drying, it makes sense to let people know, but in the middle of the process I would be (with good reason) worried about stepping on people’s toes. (Same thing with getting engaged.)

So, blogging about tenure and job searches: crazy or courageous? Or is there a difference? I guess we’ll see.

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Homework Solutions Online

Does everyone in the world but me know about Cramster.com? Basically it’s a website that includes as many answers to textbook homework problems as they can possibly put together. As far as I can tell it works on a Wiki system, where members submit the various solutions, although there are apparently also “expert” solutions. Odd-numbered solutions are available for free, but you have to pay to see the even numbers. Nothing there for my GR book, although there were some for Jackson’s E+M book, and plenty for Halliday/Resnick etc.

Not really sure what to think about sites like this. Part of me (a big part, actually) couldn’t care less about whether students do their homework, and for that matter thinks that grading is a complete waste of time. What matters is whether or not the students have learned the material, not how they perform on some formalized exercises. If they get perfect grades but don’t learn anything, ultimately they’re the ones who will suffer; even if they get into a better grad school thereby, they’ll just find that their fellow students are much better prepared than they are.

But then there is the whole “fairness” thing, which sadly does matter. There is a set of rewards — like good jobs and/or grad-school admissions — that we base on grades, and they should go to the most deserving students. So, unpleasant as it might be, we have to evaluate them somehow. But in this brave new world, it would probably be wise to make up original problems rather than using the ones from the back of the book.

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How Nice Should We Be to Students?

At Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns passes along an email she received from an undergraduate student she doesn’t know. It’s a list of seven essay-type questions about the work and impact of economist Amartya Sen, along the lines of “How has Sen’s thought changed traditional development?” (Tyler Cowen, playing the straight man, actually answers the questions.)

A long discussion follows: What is the duty of professors, when it comes to answering questions from students? Heated arguments from different sides, largely for good reasons, and largely talking past each other. Students are complaining that they come to school to wrestle with great and challenging ideas, work hard and become passionate about what they’re being exposed to, only to find that professors are too busy to talk to them outside of class. Professors are shaking their heads in sympathy with the original post, amazed that a student who wasn’t even in a class with someone would feel justified in essentially asking them to do their homework for them.

So where is the line exactly to be drawn? I don’t know, but it’s a really good question, to which we give very little systematic attention, preferring instead to let every professor work things out according to their own preferences. Professors hold a privileged role in our culture; in return for years of hard work and devotion to an esoteric academic pursuit, society gives them jobs with lifetime tenure (ultimately, one hopes) and no heavy lifting, thinking about ideas at the edge of our understanding. In return, they are asked to assist in the production and dissemination of knowledge — doing original research, teaching students, and talking to the wider public. But what is an appropriate portfolio of these very different activities?

At the extremes, it’s not so hard. If a professor is teaching a class, there should be some time set aside for real-time interaction with the students outside of class. Traditionally these are “office hours” (a concept which, in my experience, undergraduates love and then completely forget about when they go to grad school). And at the other end, professors shouldn’t be expected to do students’ work for them. (I once got an email from a colleague, who was forwarding an inquiry from a student that he thought I’d know the answer to. Indeed I did know the answer, because I had just given that problem on a take-home exam that the student was supposed to be doing. More or less the definition of “busted.”)

But in between the extremes it’s harder, and there are few firm guidelines. And the invention of email has lowered a great deal of barriers, for better and for worse. What emails should we answer, and in how much detail? You don’t want to be a jerk, but you do want to get work done.

Crucially important is the relationship between the emailer and the recipient. In the original example, the fact that it was an unknown student was extremely relevant; if the student had been taking a class with the professor in which they were talking about Amartya Sen, there would have been some context to evaluate whether a straightforward answer should be given, or simply some pointers about where to look. But equally important is the form of the questions. In this case, they were so vague and essay-like that there was almost no simple answer that could have been of any use; the temptation to respond with a map to the library or instructions on how to use the internet must have been overwhelming. A good rule of thumb is: the less time it would take to respond, the more likely it is that a response will be forthcoming. And if it’s pretty clear that the original emailer has done next to no work themselves, they shouldn’t get their hopes up.

I get a lot of email, as well as occasional phone calls and regular mail. And I’m happy to admit, I don’t answer all of them. If they are technical questions about general relativity (about which I’ve written a book, don’t forget), I generally do not answer, but rather point to some promising resource — exactly because I’ve written that book, and if I answered all the questions about GR that I get I would do nothing else. If they are inquiries from students or sincerely interested people on the street about the state of physics or cosmology or whatever, I try to respond with short but substantive answers. If, as is often the case, they are from crackpots who say “I dare you to refute my theory!”, I generally don’t take the dare. (An exception is a letter I recently received from a state prison in New York. The writer is not a crackpot himself, but is stuck in prison with another guy who is convinced that special relativity is internally inconsistent, and he would like to know how to respond. In that case, I’ll definitely answer.)

The answering-email issue is just part of the much larger question of how much time professors should devote to students. The paradox is that what often draws students to a university — the place’s academic reputation, which rests on the research accomplishments of the faculty — can be an obstacle to fruitful interactions once they get there. Imagine how many physics students came to Caltech because of Richard Feynman. Undoubtedly they could have had some interesting interactions with him while they were here. But undergraduates would have found that he taught graduate seminars almost exclusively, while graduates would have found that he almost never took on any Ph.D. students. Too much worry and responsibility — he wouldn’t feel right giving a student a problem that he hadn’t already solved himself. While to me this seems like a scandalous abdication of duty (where would he have been if John Wheeler and others at Princeton had felt the same way?), the motivation is perfectly understandable.

What this calculation leaves out, of course, is that it can be extremely rewarding to advise students, or more generally to help people to understand things. But that sometimes gets lost amidst the feelings of being burdened and distracted from what we’re “really” here for.

Advising graduate students is a terrifying prospect, if you take it seriously; you’re wielding an extraordinary amount of influence over a young person’s life. Answering questions by email is a much smaller burden. But multiplied by dozens or hundreds of examples, and you can quickly get swamped. I suspect that most of us try to be reasonable, but walking the line between having individual chats with every interested person in the world and actually producing the research that made us experts in the first place is a delicate operation.

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Maharishi Mathematics

It’s that time of year when eager young students are deciding where to embark on, or to continue, their higher educations. You can see our advice-giving posts on choosing an undergraduate school and choosing a graduate school.

But there are a lot of options out there, and it would be a shame to overlook any of them. So we’d be remiss not to mention the unique opportunities offered by the Maharishi University of Management. Founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual advisor to the Beatles, and led by John Hagelin, highly-cited theoretical physicist and occasional Presidential candidate, the MUM offers a — did I already mention “unique”? — set of experiences to the enthusiastic student. And that’s not even counting the Yogic Flying!

Here, for example, are some of the course descriptions for the undergraduate major in mathematics.

Infinity: From the Empty Set to the Boundless Universe of All Sets — Exploring the Full Range of Mathematics and Seeing its Source in Your Self (MATH 148)

Functions and Graphs 1: Name and Form — Locating the Patterns of Orderliness that Connect a Function with its Graph and Describe Numerical Relationships (MATH 161)

Maharishi Vedic Mathematics: Mathematical Structure and the Transcendental Source of Natural Law (MATH 205)

Geometry: From Point to Infinity — Using Properties of Shape and Form to Handle Visual and Spatial Data (MATH 267)

Calculus 1: Derivatives as the Mathematics of Transcending, Used to Handle Changing Quantities (MATH 281)

Calculus 2: Integrals as the Mathematics of Unification, Used to Handle Wholeness (MATH 282)

Calculus 3: Unified Management of Change in All Possible Directions (MATH 283)

Linear Algebra 1: Linearity as the Simplest Form of a Quantitative Relationship (MATH 286)

Calculus 4: Locating Silence within Dynamism (MATH 304)

Complex Analysis: Transcending the Real Numbers to a Simpler and More Unified Numbering System (MATH 318)

Probability: Locating Orderly Patterns in Random Events to Predict Future Outcomes (MATH 351)

Real Analysis 1: Locating the Finest Impulses of Dynamism within the Continuum of Real Numbers (MATH 423)

Set Theory: Mathematics Unfolding the Path to the Unified Field — the Most Fundamental Field of Natural Law (MATH 434)

Foundations of Mathematics: The Unified Field as the Basis of All of Mathematics and All Laws of Nature (MATH 436)

Now, sure, any old university will be offering courses in real analysis and set theory. But will they learn about the unified field, and locate the finest impulses of dynamism? “Vector calculus” sounds kind if dry, but “Unified Management of Change in All Possible Directions”? Sign me up!

Nobody ever said the Maharishi wasn’t a good salesman.

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Undergraduate Theory Institute

Sadly, I’m not here to announce that applications are now being accepted for students who would like to participate in this year’s Undergraduate Theory Institute. That’s because there is no such thing as the Undergraduate Theory Institute, at least as far as I know. (Google doesn’t know of one either.) But I think it would be a great idea — maybe if I post it here on the blog someone will start it.

It’s increasingly common for physics students to particpate in some kind of research during their undergraduate years. The NSF has a very successful Research Experience for Undergraduates program, for example, that funds students to do summer research, typically at an institution other than their own. Getting involved in research as early as possible is a great idea for students, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the flavor of doing real research, where the answers aren’t in the back of the book, is utterly different from almost any classroom experience or even self-study, where you are trying to learn material that someone else has already mastered. The move from following a course of study to striking out into the unknown is one of the hardest transitions to make during graduate school, and getting a head start is an enormous help. On a more prosaic level, it’s useful to work closely with an advisor who can end up writing letters of recommendation. And let’s not forget that it can be a lot of fun!

Unfortunately, the prospects are very different for students who want to do theory vs. experiment. It’s often true that, on an experimental project, a student with just a hand on the basics of introductory physics can come in and learn something about the particular experiment being undertaken, and after a brief learning period can soon be contributing seriously to the work. On the theoretical side, the learning curve is much less steep, and a lot more background knowledge is required before a student can do something interesting. In my field, until you’ve at least taken courses in quantum field theory and general relativity, it’s hard to do original work.

Nevertheless, like many other theoretical physicists, I get a lot of requests from undergrads who would like to do research. I very much enjoy doing research and having students, but to be honest it’s often very difficult to find things for them to do, since the background just isn’t there. I’ve done it, quite a few times — I’ve supervised four Bachelor’s theses, and three summer research students. Sometimes everything falls into place, and it ends up with an interesting publishable paper. More often it’s an excuse to let the students learn a bit GR or QFT, and maybe get started on the very basics of a problem, before they grow up and graduate.

There’s a perfectly good response to this situation, which is: even if you eventually want to become a theorist, it’s a great idea to do experimental research as an undergrad. Maybe you won’t be immersed in the kind of work you ultimately want to pursue, but (1) understanding something about how experiments work is an unambiguously good thing, and (2) the important lesson is not in the details of the particular field, but in what it’s like to do research, which is almost independent of the type of research you’re doing. That’s what I did, when at Villanova I did work on photometry of eclipsing variable stars; I got a nice paper out of that. (And my favorite star, Epsilon Aurigae, will be going into eclipse again in another couple of years, at which point I expect our model to be spectacularly confirmed, and fame and fortune to follow.)

And I tell this to people all the time, but still the students want to do theory! Impatient little buggers. But I can hardly blame them — we lure them into the field with elaborate tales of black holes and supersymmetry and dark energy, and it only eventually becomes clear that they won’t really learn about that stuff until they’re well into grad school, if then.

So I had the idea for an undergraduate theory institute. The amount of theoretical background you need to do useful work is quite substantial, much larger than one could squeeze into one summer, it’s true. On the other hand, six weeks of fairly intensive study between the junior and senior year could serve to introduce enthusiastic students to many of the basic ideas they will eventually be encountering as theorists. If nothing else, they could become familiar with a bunch of buzzwords they’ll be hearing for years. That sounds superficial, but could potentially be of great use — it means that they can immediately start going to seminars and chatting with professors when they get to grad school, and have a much better grasp on the kinds of ideas that are being thrown around.

So, a six-week summer course for undergrads. Much self-study, but regular lectures by faculty and perhaps postdocs. A couple of seminars on sexy stuff of current research interest, as a reward, but mostly focusing on the basic tools of theoretical research in field theory and gravitation. (Since that what I know about — other specialties are welcome to chime in!) Here’s what I imagine the syllabus to basically be like:

  1. Special relativity, index notation, vectors, tensors.
  2. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics.
  3. Classical scalar field theory.
  4. Gauge theories and electromagnetism.
  5. Basics of Lie groups, SU(n).
  6. Non-abelian symmetries.
  7. Spontaneous symmetry breakdown, the Higgs mechanism.
  8. Topological defects.
  9. Spacetime curvature and Einstein’s equation.
  10. Schwarzschild and Robertson-Walker spacetimes.
  11. Basics of field quantization and Feynman diagrams.

Something like that, anyway. It seems like a tremendous amount to cover, but it would all be fairly brisk, and there are benefits to be gained by seeing it all at once in the same place, surrounded by a group of other bright students studying the same material. Wouldn’t you have loved to have such an introduction as an undergrad? If we put together some nice lecture notes, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to get them published as a cheap reference book.

All I need now is a substantial (and reliable) source of funding, someone to write the lectures and deliver them, a host institution, and an organizational wizard to take care of logistics. I will look over the whole operation as a benevolent, if somewhat disconnected, father figure, whose main role will be to shoot the breeze with the students at the late-night coffee and whisky hours. Any takers?

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The Real World

The Real World In her post below, JoAnne refers to “the real world” in the literally accurate sense — the physical reality that exists independently of our understanding, in contrast to the tentative frameworks put forward by theorists as hypothetical models of that reality. But there’s a more metaphorical sense in which physicists (and academics more broadly) use the phrase “the real world” — to refer to the socio-economic milieu peopled by those outside the academy. We say things like “she spent a couple of years in the real world before going to grad school,” or “most of the time I hang out with physicists, but I do have some friends in the real world.”

I figure we can’t be the only people who talk this way. Professional actors or musicians (I’m guessing, and would love to hear confirmation/refutation) might think of themselves as being distinct from “the real world,” as might people serving in the military, or working in politics. We have the idea that certain kinds of lifestyles are stereotypically “real,” while others are somehow in a separate zone. And it’s generally a point of pride to consider one’s self and colleagues as non-real — we are privileged enough to operate outside the petty concerns of conventional reality, concentrating our powers on esoteric specialties with petty concerns of our own.

So, is there a flipside to this, with a corresponding feeling of pride? That is, are there occupations or milieux that think of themselves as quintessentially “real,” and wouldn’t have it any other way? (Presumably ones where people don’t babble on about “milieux.”) My many non-physicists friends are generally happily cocooned in lifestyles that are just as non-real-world as mine, so I don’t have much data here.

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Economics vs. Physics Love-Off

Who gets more love, economists or physicists? Robin Hanson stamps his foot in frustration at the lack of respect economists receive, in a nicely self-undermining blurb (via Ezra Klein):

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying “Isn’t that cool!” But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to “balance” their story.

As Ezra and Kevin Drum point out, this is straightforwardly wrong on the merits: economists have a huge amount of influence over actual public policy, while admiration for physicists doesn’t get you too much beyond the “Isn’t that cool!” level, and occasional appearances on late-night radio. (It’s like conservatives complaining that most university professors are liberal, while they control the government, corporations, and the military.) Atrios and Echidne also point out that the single chosen example of economic wisdom, that the minimum wage raises unemployment, is wrong. And that physicists have quite the demonstrable track record of making statements about the universe that seem counterintuitive at first glance, but turn out to be right.

In fact, I think these three sentences point to a definite failure on the part of physicists to successfully get their message across. We physicists talk about crazy things all the time — extra dimensions, black holes, quark confinement, wavefunction collapse, conservation of momentum, the Earth moving around the Sun. Things that, on their face, seem to be incompatible with our everyday experience. But we don’t just throw these ideas out there randomly; they are hypotheses that we’re driven to by the constraints put upon us by the data. Some of these ideas may turn out to be wrong, and some may be right, and we have certain well-tested procedures for sorting them out. (In the wake of Milton Friedmann’s death, folks have been re-arguing his contention that successful predictions from an economic model are more important than correct assumptions underlying it. I would hope that both are important.) Unfortunately — and to a signficant extent this is our own fault — it’s not always clear to the person on the street which ideas are speculative and which have come to be accepted, nor is it clear that we have good reasons even for the wildest speculations.

But the idea that three dimensions are purple and two are twisted clockwise — that’s intriguing. I’ll have to look into it.

Update: Robin Hanson expands on what he meant about the minimum wage.

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Guest Post: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

I first met Chanda (briefly) when she was visiting the University of Chicago as a summer undergraduate research student. Since then we’ve corresponded occasionally about life as a physicist and which general relativity textbook is the best. She emailed me a thoughtful response to a couple of posts about string theory and the state of physics (here and here), and I thought it would be good to have those thoughts presented as a full-blown guest post rather than just a comment; happily, Chanda agreed.

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A few months ago, Sean posted an entry on this blog addressing his concerns about Dr. Lee Smolin’s (then forthcoming) book, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Dramatically titled and well-hyped, Lee’s book was sure to arouse strong emotions and plenty of debate on publication. However, it managed to do that even before it was out, and the commentary on Sean’s entry included correspondence from Lee as well as several other great contemporary thinkers in theoretical physics. The dialogue was inspired, passionate, argumentative, sometimes rude, and always exploratory.

But something was missing. I wondered how there could be a discourse about the marketplace of ideas and about who gets to participate in science without a component that addresses the obvious (at least for those of us with some relationship to the US academic system): the community of scientists in the United States is overwhelmingly homogeneous, white (of European descent) and male. That sounds like a pretty narrow marketplace to me, given that over half of the US population is either female or a member of an underrepresented minority group or both. Surely this must mean that we are under-utilizing our potential talent pool in our drive to better understand the physical world.

As a member of the National Society of Black Physicists’ (NSBP) Executive Committee and Editor of their newsletter, I like to stay on top of the statistics related to these issues, so let me mention a few to satisfy those who like to see data. (All stats are borrowed from the NSF unless otherwise noted.) At the moment, only about 12% of doctoral degrees in physics go to women. The number going to people identified as Black/African-American hovers around an average of 14 per year out of an average 738 total degrees. That’s 1.8% despite making up about 12% of the population. Further investigation uncovers the (to me) monumental tragedy that almost no other field in science and technology is doing worse at diversifying than ours, physics. (See Dr. Shirley Malcolm’s symposium paper from AIP’s 75th Anniversary celebration.)

Knowing all this, I want to share with you how shocking it is to me when I have regular conversations with my peers who express to me that they don’t see a problem. And if they do express concerns to me, a lot of the time it’s guys who want more women in the field because they want to find dates. Sorry guys, we’re here because we’re interested in physics, not you, and on top of that, some of us like women better! And yes, sometimes it’s just a joke, but sometimes it’s hard to tell, and believe me, we’ve heard that one many, many times before. On the topic of seeing more people of color (Blacks, Latina/os, etc.) most often I am met with disinterested silence or an insistence (the knowledge base this derives from is always hazy, in my opinion) that there’s nothing the physics community can do to resolve the issue because the problem is in the high schools and has nothing to do with post-secondary academe.

This attitude is disappointing, to say the least. First of all, the numbers contradict these sentiments. While it is true that there are deeply troubling issues facing the K-12 education system in the US, especially in low-income neighborhoods which are disproportionately populated by people of color, women and other underrepresented groups fall out of the pipeline at all stages, from the post-baccalaureate to the post-doctorate level, and they do so at a much higher rate than white men. Clearly something is happening. What is happening is far too full a topic to tackle here, but perhaps I will be invited to say more about it in the comments section. I invite readers to participate in a knowledge-based discourse about this issue.

On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time figuring out why you should care about diversity, the President of Princeton can offer you a helping hand. In the 2003 Killam Lecture at the University of British Columbia, Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman identified four reasons for why we should care about diversity in science. I paraphrase them here:

  1. If we aren’t looking at the entire talent pool available, scientific progress will be slower by default.
  2. It’s possible that women and other underrepresented minorities will identify unique scientific problems that their majority peers might not.
  3. Science will find it increasingly difficult to recruit the brightest minorities as other fields diversify and therefore look attractive to members of underrepresented groups. An attractive work environment is essential to competing on the job market for the best thinkers.
  4. The scientific establishment ought to pursue diversification as a matter of fairness and justice.
    In a small (statistically insignificant) survey of various scientists and leaders in scientific organizations, I found that the question of “why is diversity in science important?” is addressed in these four points. While point four is possibly closest to my heart, I think that points one and two are two of the strongest arguments out there. (An aside: As I am tidying up this essay, one professor writes me and says that he finds four to be most compelling! I hope that others will agree.)

I would like to reflect on point one in the context of work in theoretical physics, specifically in quantum gravity and cosmology. If we are to take seriously the concept that what we seek in physics is truth and a better understanding, don’t we want to have the broadest pool of talent available to participate in the process? I think this applies to people and ideas alike. Until we have a theory that pulls out ahead of the others, what are we doing arguing about whose theory is doing better? Right now, neither loops, nor strings, nor triangles, nor anything else has ANY data to back it up, so perhaps the best thing we can all do on that front is get back to work.

An aside to that last remark: It’s hard to get to work when no one will hire you. It remains true that even if I do good work in my field, if my field is not strings, I will have a difficult time finding a job in theoretical physics. Some might argue that this is fair because I have made the foolish error of working on a silly (let’s say loopy) theory. But honestly, to those who like to toe that line, I’d like to say that since you don’t have the LHC data in hand or anything else that proves/disproves strings/loops/anything else, at this stage we’re all in the same boat. And what if strings is wrong? Has the physics community gained anything by suppressing and/or ignoring the alternatives?

To speak in more general terms, I could ask the broader question: what has the scientific community gained by choosing not to pro-actively welcome a broad and diverse set of people and ideas into the fold? Well, again there isn’t enough space for the details, but there is increasing evidence from research in science education that supports the point that diversity of perspectives accelerates problem solving.

Moreover, a fellow grad student and active member of NSBP’s sister organization, the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP), pointed out to me that we can definitely be aware of what the scientific community potentially loses when people from different backgrounds aren’t allowed to participate in science. Laura noted that our society has thrived on the contributions of women like Marie Curie (discovered radioactivity) and Emmy Noether (Noether’s theorem) and African-Americans like Benjamin Banneker (early civil and mechanical engineer, self-taught astronomer and mathematician). At this point, I think it is easy to ask and answer, “what would our world be like without the Marie Curies and Benjamin Bannekers?” Most likely lacking.

But another, equally important question isn’t raised often enough: What are we missing by living in a world where only the Marie Curie’s make it through? A few women and underrepresented minorities have always found a way to challenge the status quo. Let’s face it: physics is hard for anyone. It’s not hard to imagine that it takes a certain type of determined personality to overcome barriers and make new discoveries. What of the rest? The people who didn’t find the right friends and family to help them? The ones who never had a chance to learn physics? The ones who thought that people who look like them don’t succeed at physics? (And yes, they are out there; I’ve met some of them.) Might we be further along in our understanding of dark matter? Perhaps, perhaps not, but until we push harder to integrate, we’ll never know.

At this stage, it occurs to me that many of you will look at my definition of diversity and think it is too narrow. I’ve left out all of the international collaboration that goes on in physics, and surely, isn’t that a wonderful kind of diversity which is plentiful in our world? Yes! One thing that endeared the Perimeter Institute to me almost immediately was the fact that my peer group hails from all over Europe and Asia, and at the lunch table, as many as five or more cultures may be represented. But to me this highlights the problem — if the North American physics community has been able to welcome an international populace with open arms, why can’t they do the same with the diversity that already exists at home?

In the end, perhaps this is not a fair way to raise the question. International members of the physics community also have to confront issues of racism and discrimination. Racism is not a uniquely American problem, nor do people of color suffer alone from it in the US. But I still have a question, then: if the academy is ready to bring those of us who earn Phds into the fold, why isn’t it doing more to encourage more of us to reach that far? Those of us who do make it that far are left wondering why it doesn’t bother anyone else that we are more likely to see a German in our graduate classes than another Black person.

The challenges we face in confronting these issues are not easy. First we must accept there is an issue, a problem. Then there must be open discussion about how we understand the problem. I realize that it is difficult to step into someone else’s shoes and understand where they are coming from. But to an extent, like Albert Einstein before us, we must rise to the challenge of the barriers placed before our understanding and transcend them.

For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to NSBP as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.

Furthermore, where I wish to understand other people’s choices of identification, there are those amongst my peers who have felt they had the right to make my choices for me. I find myself now terrified of mentioning my Blackness in any way, lest I become dehumanized, my personal identity reduced to an object of debate. These are examples of the way my background has been turned into a negative for me. I know others have similar and worse experiences, and surely, this is one major leak in the aforementioned pipeline. My hope is that physics will evolve not only in concept, but also in its sensibilities about who a physicist is and what she looks like. What if we came to value our heterogeneity, to see it as an advantage?

It is important to note that there are white men out there thinking about these issues. I know Sean Carroll is one of them. For me, Professor Henry Frisch at the University of Chicago has been an amazing mentor. His father, the late Professor David Frisch of MIT, was influential in the graduate career path of Dr. Jim Gates, now an accomplished African-American theorist at the University of Maryland. People who take the time to be concerned, therefore, do have an impact. A common complaint that I hear from interested people is that there aren’t enough people with diverse backgrounds in the talent pool when they are choosing grad students, postdocs, and faculty. I believe that this points to a fundamental problem that physicists can help with: somewhere a pool of talent is getting lost, and we need to push harder to find it again by taking a pro-active role in education policy, mentoring (studies show this makes a big difference in minority performance), and anti-discrimination activism.

I hope that many of you will take this to heart and realize that for the sake of science, if nothing else, diversity matters. There’s a lot to be done to change things, and I encourage you to support work that is being done in your community, whether it’s by contributing hours designing a website or giving a tour of your department to local students who wouldn’t normally be exposed to science. Moreover, I strongly urge you, especially those of you who are not from an underrepresented background, to take seriously the idea that not everyone experiences the physics community like you, not everyone has the same ideas, that some people face real barriers to academic progress, and that we’re all better off when we make a genuine effort to listen to and understand the other side.

Before I finish, I’ll make a last comment on the science. One of the ways I’ve seen these divisions hurt us is the way in which we seem completely stuck on some pretty major problems. As it stands, we have a standard model of cosmology where we don’t know what form 96% of the energy of the universe takes, and we only know the barest of details about the properties of dark energy and dark matter. The model is also still hazy on many of the details of the first 400,000 years or so. This is where the quantum gravity community should rise to the challenge of seeking new and unique ways of approaching the problem since the old ones clearly aren’t working. This means we have to encourage new ideas. Even if they turn out to be wrong, we’ll probably still learn something. So to partake in some near trademark infringement, it’s time to “Think Differently.”

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein earned her BA in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics (yes, it is gramatically incorrect on her diploma) from Harvard College in 2003. She went on to earn an MS in Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz (2005), where she studied black holes in higher dimensions. She is now beginning a Phd under Dr. Lee Smolin in Waterloo, Ontario, recently dubbed the Geek Capital of Canada. A product of the integrated public magnet schools of Los Angeles, she is proud to be both a Black woman and a physicist.

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Unsolicited Advice, Part Three: Choosing an Undergraduate School

In comments, JMG3Y asks, “Where should a smart science-oriented high school student with a breadth of interests go to college?” This deserves a much more careful answer, but time is precious, so consider this a rough draft of an answer, which people are welcome to amplify in the comments. (Past installments here and here. At some future date there will be an installment on “How to be a good graduate student.”)

In reality, colleges and universities are very different from each other, and each should be considered separately. Also in reality, any such institution is huge and multifaceted, and two people can have wildly divergent experiences at the same place. Furthermore, sticking again to reality, this is a question that depends mostly on the individual student, and for which there is no right answer. Being all that as it may, for purposes of exposition let’s lump the possibilities into four categories:

  1. Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Swarthmore or Amherst.
  2. Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
  3. Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
  4. Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.

These are fuzzy and incomplete categories, of course, but hopefully the ideas will come across clearly enough.

At an LAC or STS, you will be forced to learn a lot, like it or not. I’m a big fan of LAC’s; the professors are typically talented and dedicated to teaching, and students get invaluable up-close-and-personal time with the faculty. But for people who want to go to grad school, they face something of a disadvantage because the these schools typically won’t have graduate programs. That means (1) you can’t take any grad classes, and (2) you can’t buttonhole grad students about advice for the next step. I went to one, and received a great education, but keenly felt those disadvantages.

The STS’s are also great (I work at one now). Your fellow students will be interested in similar things, and the coursework will challenge you. There will be plenty of opportunities for research experience, rubbing elbows with grad students and postdocs doing work at the forefront of science. Both MIT and Caltech have a feeling at being at the center of the scientific universe. Of course, they generally won’t give you a broader academic experience, if that’s what you’re after. For me personally, one of the best parts of being an undergraduate was being exposed to ideas in the arts and humanities (and people, both faculty and students, in those areas) that I never would have experienced otherwise.

At an EPU or LSS, it’s generally much easier to slide by without stretching yourself, if that’s your thing; on the other hand, the resources are tremendous, and if you have the initiative to take advantage of them, you can have a great experience.

The best thing about an EPU is the other students. So much so, that at a place like Harvard it’s generally acknowledged that a large fraction of your education comes from extracurricular activities. You’ll meet people, in your field and out, who will be running the world a few years down the line. The professors will be great researchers who may or may not be interested in teaching; there will likely be some opportunities for research and individual contact, but not all that much.

An LSS will also have great resources, in terms of faculty and research opportunities. There might be more close contact with professors than at an EPU, but that’s quite a generalization. Your fellow students will be more of a mixed bag; some will be geniuses and future world-changers, while many will be there to tread water for four years to get a degree. Of all the choices, the education you get at a large state school will depend the most on your own initiative; the school will almost certainly have more to offer than you possibly have time to take advantage of, but nobody will force you to do any of it.

For the particular goal of advancing to grad school, there are certain specialized factors to keep in mind. Having grad students around to ask questions to is certainly helpful. The choice of undergrad advisor is also important, I suppose, but depends much more on individuals than on schools, so I don’t know what to say there. It’s important to get some research experience, but this can often be done off-campus at other places during the summer (see the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates and similar programs). Getting good letters of recommendation is certainly helpful — for that, it’s less important where you are, and more important that people there know you well enough to write sensible letters. When it comes to actually applying to grad schools and making choices, it’s nice to get advice from people who know what they’re talking about; don’t be afraid to ask around.

Perhaps my own perspective on this kind of question is coming through clearly enough: wherever you go, your educational experience can vary wildly depending on how much you put into it. If you stick to what’s required, slide through with just enough work to get whatever GPA you’re aiming for, and spend the rest of your time playing video games, you’ll manage not to get much out of it no matter where you are. If you seek out new and challenging courses and activities, spend your summers doing research or interesting off-campus activities, and make an effort to talk individually to your best professors and hang out with other students who enjoy ideas, it will be an invaluable experience.

If you ask most 40-something professors what they would think of going back to school for four years, to do nothing but take interesting courses and discuss deep ideas with their friends, their eyes would light up with unvarnished pleasure at the prospect. Whatever you’re studying, college is a unique opportunity to stretch your mind; make the most of it.

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