advising

Hibernating

I don’t really like winter. Actually, most of the time I really really hate it; I can’t wait for the spring, and I am grumpy and whiny on account of weather for months on end. If you meet me in real life, and the topic of weather comes up as it invariably does, I am one of those obnoxious people who will take this opportunity to tell you all about how her husband doesn’t mind the winter but she would prefer moving someplace warm instead, and then proceeds to tell you all about how much she really really does not like winter. Really.

This winter, the weather sucked quite fiercely. Yet, surprisingly, I didn’t particularly mind. Perhaps I am finally getting used to the weather. Perhaps I am both getting used to the weather and am generally more relaxed on account of finally having internalized the bliss that is a secure, well-paid job.

But what I think really helped is that, this winter, I planned to not travel anywhere for work December through April. I would have made an exception for federal funding agencies that give me money or I hope will someday give me money because, as a senior colleague says, all scientists wear fishnet stockings, but otherwise I have not been available to travel and it has been glorious.

Travel for work stresses me out during the best of times. There is a lot to do beforehand and then when I come back I am backlogged anyway. The logistics of travel when classes are in session is really difficult, if you care about your students, that is — I have colleagues who travel so much I have no idea how they cover their classes; whatever they do cannot be too convenient for the students. And then you add the bad winter weather to the mix, with flight delays and cancellations, and germy fellow passengers sneezing and coughing all over you…

Over the past decade, I have always had a lot of travel during winter, and I think the travel has added considerably to my baseline grumpiness. So this year I decided to hibernate, and I am very, very glad I did: I stayed here, doing my job, snuggling with family, and keeping warm. I have done a lot of work with students, and we will have several new manuscript submissions in the next couple of months; this year should be great in terms of group’s publications. Sometimes I think we should all stay put  more often, just do our work with students and postdocs, and avoid burning kerosene, sleeping in hotels, and generally exhausting both ourselves and our funds.

Bimodal

I talked with a senior colleague a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that grade distributions have become increasingly bimodal. There are kids who have high scores and kids with very low scores, and very few students in between. The colleague said it didn’t use to be like that, that the students 20-30 years ago used to simply be better on average, and grade distributions used to be the beloved normal (Gaussian) distributions.

I don’t know how students used to be, but I can attest that the bimodal distribution is the norm rather than the exception in many of my courses. There are students who are obviously getting the material and who could probably take on even more challenge. And there are the kids who are so far behind and who have so many deficiencies from lower-level courses that it’s unclear what it is that they are actually getting from the class, if anything.

The problem with this profile is that you don’t know whom to aim your lectures at. My best-ever teacher in grad school said “20% of the students will do great no matter how poorly you teach, 20% will do poorly no matter how well you teach, but there are 60% of students where how you teach really affects what they learn and how well they do; you want to tailor your lectures towards the 60%.” The thing I see is that there are 40% who are doing well and 40% who are doing really poorly, and 20% who are doing so-so. The people who are consistently doing really poorly likely shouldn’t even be in this major, but I am not sure what to do about it. On account of them, I can’t do what I could do in class with the students who are doing really well. Rather than a near-continuum of abilities, we have a pretty big chasm, such that most of the class is either really bored or really lost. It seems that there are very few people near the average, for whom the middle-centric teaching approach of my former teacher would work.

What I do is try to assign extra homework with some brain teasers for additional credit, and I already give 2-3 extra problems per exam that require a little non-trivial thinking. But the lectures do still get dragged towards the lowest common denominator, which leaves some kids really bored. I am not sure how to teach to a class with such a wide range of skills. Ideally, the students at the very bottom of the curve would get sent back to take some remedial courses, but I can’t see that being a widely acceptable practice as college costs money and everyone is interested in funneling the students all the way through to a degree, somehow. We as teachers are discouraged from failing students, but then the value of a BS degree of good students drops with every poor students graduating despite having learned squat.

Who is the one who tells a student “Maybe this is not a major for you” or “You need to go back and learn some calculus and then re-take the class”? The thing is that what’s best for the student may not be the best for enrollment numbers on which department budgets hinge. Consequently, we go soft on the people who really should not be getting our degrees. I try to mind my own business and am no rebel, but this issue makes me wish I were. It makes me sick that everything is always only about money, and that even our core mission — educating students — has to deteriorate for this reason.

On Teaching & Research

In a comment thread on someone else’s blog, I can’t remember whose, a commenter said that they never understood how or why teaching and research were related.

The following is a truth universally acknowledged, but I am going to say it anyway:

You have no idea how much you don’t know about something

until it’s time to explain it to someone else.

It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn every time I teach an undergraduate course. The process to trying to convey something to the uninitiated is quite fascinating as well as useful. One comment that I get fairly often in official teaching evaluations is that the students appreciate that I can explain things several different ways. I take great pride in those comments, which mean that I am succeeding in doing what I think is extremely important. If you really, I mean really know something inside and out, you can come from several different directions and still reason your way to the central idea. You can approach it at many angles until you find one that clicks with your student. 

My undergrad degree was in theoretical physics and everyone’s teaching style was heavily mathematical; I loved it and I honestly thought that was the only way. When in doubt, write down the appropriate partial differential equations, take a deep breath and roll up your sleeves, then attack as formally as possible (often expanding in terms of various special functions/orthogonal polynomials) and see what happens. I had a professor in college who said he saw everything through equations, that diagrams and other visual aids were completely useless to him. I now know that am very visual, as are many people, but at that time I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a learning style, and not that anybody would care about what I preferred. Anyway, I got used to viewing everything through the lens of the formalism. Some would say this is a very European style of doing theoretical physics.

Then I came to the US and realized that you could and should go “intuition first.” You can  see/smell/taste/hear/touch the solution, or at least some of its salient features, before actually deriving it rigorously. I started seeing the concepts familiar from my undergrad studies in a new, playful, relaxed fashion. The concepts were no less true, but just became very very fun, and it was quite liberating. Some would say this is a very American style of doing physics.

I teach courses with a very heavy physics focus to young people who are not physics majors, but who really need to understand this stuff very well in order to be able to apply it to something practical. Much of the material can be understood qualitatively, but unless you can compute numbers, you can’t actually use any of it. Many students also don’t like math as much as they ideally should, and this unfortunate distaste is part of what prevents them from making connections between disparate subfields based on the common mathematics. So it is important to first teach them to feel the problems, and then, once they are empowered through their qualitative understanding, hit them with the math and show them how math translates into numbers what their gut is telling them to be true.

This experience in teaching students who have the background, interests, and ultimate career goals so different from mine has critically changed how I approach my job now with respect to my junior years. Teaching is of great importance for giving talks, writing proposals and papers. It  helps you perfect the art of presenting cogently and (hopefully) engagingly; how else would you make yourself practice several times a week just for the sake of practice? Ok, maybe the über-organized ones among us would anyway, but I know I just wouldn’t. 

One of my grad students  said “You advisor is there to give you intuition”; I will take it as a compliment. When you are not the person who did the experiments or wrote the code, realizing when things do or don’t make sense in ways that are not trivially obvious is an absolutely critical skill for doing science .

Today I had a group meeting and a student presented his research data in the context of the work of another group. A premise that the other group had used was fairly inconsistent with some basic features of the systems considered. Another student had some doubts and we ended up having a full-blown discussion on the board on some of the key elements of quantum statistical physics as applied to the systems we study. I was able to basically give a succinct and clear (so says me) 10-min lecture to the group on the spot; while these are not the concepts I usually teach myself, I teach enough related material at very different levels that the whole skeleton of my knowledge has thereby been strengthened and these pieces have fallen into place without me even realizing it. Teaching is therefore not unlike milk — enjoyable and good for your intellectual “bones.” It helps your mind carry heavier loads  and run faster, which makes it better at research.  

How do you view the relationship between teaching and research?

Academic Job Search — Know Who Thy Friends Are

Professors are frequently asked to write letters of reference: recommendation letters for undergrads applying to grad school, graduate students and postdocs seeking postdocs or jobs; evaluation letters for tenure-track faculty who are being considered for tenure, as well as for faculty at various career stages who are being nominated for honors or awards. If I agree to write a letter for someone, I will not write a negative one. If I cannot in good conscience write one that is positive, then I will refuse to write a letter entirely. 

If someone gets a PhD degree in my group, I endorse that person and I vouch for them. Hey, PhD is thicker than water, right? It’s not without reason that a PhD advisor-advisee relationship constitutes a lifetime conflict of interest in the context of the NSF proposal review. I will write letters for students and postdocs as often and for as long as they need them, until one of us drops dead. I would never have a problem with any of my former students or postdocs seeing the letters that I have written for them.

In the context of evaluating tenure-track applications, the issue of the letters of reference comes up for candidates who have survived at least the first and often even the second cut.

For most faculty candidates, the PhD and postdoc advisors are at the top of the reference list, which indicates that the candidate considers them someone on whose enthusiastic support he or she counts. In the vast majority of cases, this trust is warranted: the PhD and postdoc advisors usually promptly respond to the requests for letters and send recommendations that are detailed, informative, and usually glowing. This expediency holds even for the busiest and most famous among former advisors, which goes to show that if something is important to a person, they will find the time to do it.

But then there are others…

For instance, I know a successful mid-career colleague who did not put the PhD advisor on the list of references at all back when he was first applying for tenure-track jobs. I don’t even think the two of them got along that poorly, I mean the colleague published a lot and well as a grad student, but I can imagine he might have been a handful on account of having a very strong personality. I really don’t think the advisor would have written a bad letter, but I suppose you never know. The colleague had decided he had stronger and more enthusiastic references elsewhere and, while he knows this conspicuous absence of the PhD advisor’s letter raised red flags with some hiring committees, he was ultimately able to land a good tenure-track position and is now very successful.

Then there is my favorite from a few years back, where the PhD advisor wrote a paragraph-long email basically saying the candidate was good and productive. Nothing bad, but a freakin’ paragraph. It raised all sorts of questions about the candidate and I think ultimately contributed to them not getting an offer.

I have seen cases where the PhD advisor or the postdoc advisor is near the bottom of  a lengthy list of references. Usually, from the CV, you can see a clear correlation  with the person not having published very well during the PhD/postdoc. In a few cases, the advisor had a reputation as being very difficult to work with. Unfortunately, all this does cast a shadow of doubt on the applicant, but it does also reveal that the applicant knew what was going on, knew that this advisor was not to be counted on. In my experience from the search committees, I am going to say that having a so-so relationship with the PhD advisor can be remedied by great postdoc experiences. I have, unfortunately, seen candidates with a great PhD but a ho-hum postdoc, or a good first but not a great second postdoc, and they usually don’t fare well on the market. It is a sad truth that a bad postdoc can totally tank your academic career, especially if it’s the most recent one.The unnerving part is that who you land with is luck to a great degree, so you may be in deep doodoo through very little fault of your own.

I also remember the case of an applicant from a few years ago, who looked great on paper, had a great record from his PhD,  and listed PhD advisor as first reference. The reference letter from the advisor never came, even after reminders. Before you wonder whether the advisor had died, became incapacitated, or was otherwise indisposed, I should tell you that the advisor did submit letters for other candidates in the same search. So the absence of a letter was definitely meant to convey a lack of endorsement. Whether or not this was a petty or a real issue, it hurt the candidate. What is most surprising to me is that the candidate was not aware that there was an issue, that the advisor would not be supportive. Maybe the advisor was sneaky and passive-aggressive, or even openly deceptive — all sweet on the outside but seething with rage and disappointment on the inside. Could it simply be delusion on the part of the candidate, refusing to believe that the advisor  would not provide support? Could it be that everyone’s egos were just a little too big for the candidate’s good?

But, there is no need to sink into the depths of despair at these unfortunate anecdotes. Most PhD and postdoc advisors are really, really supportive of their group alumni. However, some professors are not nice people. Some students are not nice people either. Sometimes there is just too much of a mismatch between what the two parties expect from one another. In an ideal world, the advising relationship would be dissolved in these cases and the junior person would go work for someone more supportive. In an ideal world, people would also talk openly, and the advisor, who holds considerable power over the student/postdoc, would be able to convey what they are unhappy about and what needs to change. But, this is not an ideal world, so you, the candidate, had better rely on your gut and common sense and try to be honest with yourself as to how much support you can realistically expect and from whom during the application process, because the competition is so fierce that committees will readily relegate you to the “do not interview” list if there are doubts cast upon your merit by the people who are supposed to know you best.