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The other day I happened to look at my RateMyProfessor.com page. I have nothing to complain about, the comments are all largely positive. But there was a recent entry that ticked me off probably more than it should have and I am not entirely sure why. Namely, the entry says that I am a decent…
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I loved the show Breaking Bad. Walter White teaches high-school chemistry and discovers he has lung cancer. Walter is a brilliant chemist, who made some financially imprudent moves in his early days and got cheated out of the subsequently multibillion-dollar company he had founded with two peers. Out of money and fearing for his family’s…
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Over the past few weeks I have been looking at tenure-track faculty applications. Most candidates are on their first postdoc, with some who are about to finish graduate school and some on their second postdoc, or even further in their career. As I have written before, most applications are unfortunately not competitive and will be…
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Academia is often referred to as ‘the ivory tower’, where ‘ivory’ presumably conveys nobility while ‘tower’ hints at unattainability. This moniker is not helping the view of academia in today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-elitist US. By many, the concept of tenure and the job security it implies are viewed as an undeserved perk that nobody else…
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A colleague once remarked that, past a certain point in one’s career, one could easily spend all of one’s time just reviewing other people’s papers. Truer words have seldom been spoken. There are several venues where I like to publish and, as a rule, I will accept referral requests from them as long as the manuscripts…
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Google Scholar is a wonderful service that tracks citations of individual artricles around the web. In contrast to the ISI Thompson Web of Science Citation Index, Google Scholar is not only free, but it collects citations from a much wider variety of journals, as well as from sources like books, arXiv, PhD and MS theses,…
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Dear colleague on sabbatical, I hope you are enjoying the time with some relief from teaching. For many of us with small kids or working spouses, traveling for extended periods of time is not an option. But even an at-home sabbatical is more than welcome, as it helps us catch up on all the papers…
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The powers that be have recently started “encouraging” us to adopt “novel paradigm-shifting teaching strategies” (doesn’t the bullshit syntagma make your skin crawl?), specifically the flipped classroom. While I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea, the zeal with which the concept is being pushed is making me want to dig my heels in, in protest,…
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This is a cute movie on the famous double-slit experiment, featuring a caped and bespectacled superhero Dr Quantum. I show it in class to my undergrads as they first get exposed to quantum mechanics. Enjoy!
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I am on a faculty search committee again this year. It’s a lot of work, but as far as faculty service obligations go, this one is really worth it because you have an influence over who your future colleagues will be and where the department will go in the long run. Here, I will be…
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