Objects and stories

I’m going to litter this theorist’s blog with the thoughts of a condensed matter experimentalist for a moment. Among many of my favorite things about being a physicist at a liberal arts college is the opportunity to work closely with undergraduates on research. This summer I had three fantastic students working with me; I enjoyed the summer and appreciated the progress we made.

While I love working with undergraduates in the lab, there are aspects I find challenging. One of the challenges comes in deciding how to shape the research experience to maximize the learning experience of the students while continuing to move a project forward and address the relevant research objectives. I find it difficult to design research learning goals for my students in the same way I design classroom learning goals, in part because research lacks a tidy schedule and so much more is out of my control.

Some of the goals I have for my students are unsurprising: gaining an appreciation of how research is done, learning relevant laboratory skills and techniques, and exploring whether experimental physics is something they are interested in pursuing. For students having their first research experience, the gap between curricular lab work and genuine research can be large. Students must learn extreme patience—research is slow, things break, and often you must do things many different ways before you find a method that works. Things will go wrong and that is okay—you can’t be so afraid of making mistakes that you are paralyzed in your actions.

Recently, I’ve been considering the hands-on building, troubleshooting, and working with equipment aspect of experimental research. I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s book, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, which explores how objects (broadly interpreted) encountered in childhood or adolescence influence students’ paths into science. I find this book interesting because, as an experimentalist, I love playing with laboratory toys, and I clearly remember it was working with things in lab that pulled me through some rough patches and excited me the most as an undergraduate physics major. But thinking back to pre-college days, I was drawn to physics by compelling stories and storytellers (which I became acquainted with through outreach programs at Argonne National Lab and Fermilab), not by objects. I wasn’t a tinkerer, a builder, or a gadget kid, and I generally tried to avoid getting my hands dirty. I think one of my hopes for the summer research experience, in addition to moving a research agenda forward, is to allow students to experience physics through playing, exploring, and gaining confidence with equipment in the lab, while not losing sight of the bigger storylines. Balancing the “object work” with the physics stories in ten weeks is a challenge, and I’m still figuring out what is the right ratio of the two.

While Turkle’s book talks about how interacting with objects can make someone fall in love with science, it would be interesting to hear how others, who weren’t originally drawn to science by objects, became interested in them, whether positive and/or negative experiences working with objects in the early science career impacted decisions to participate in or avoid future experimental work, and how faculty members can shape research experiences to best integrate the object lessons with the research storylines.

Communication is key

The first time I ever wrote about being a physicist, rather than about some physics I had worked on, was when Carleton organized a writing community that lead to the publication of a book of essays about Carleton Faculty’s Reflections on Teaching. I wrote about the fact that I had journaled about teaching for years, and found it enormously useful.

This blog is, I guess, an example of that process: I find writing very useful in organizing broader directions of my thinking. Talking organizes more immediate things, which is why I spend so much time on skype with my colleagues when a project is moving briskly.

This week’s example of ‘writing’ being critical to knowledge formation: I told Bob Keating — one of my student collaborators this summer — that I thought we were ready to start writing our paper. He was delighted. I pointed out to him that this didn’t mean we were done, but just that once we write it up for publication, we will understand how convincing and compelling our result is, and in particular, what we still need to figure out.

This drafting of a paper long before I am ready for its publication was not how I thought papers were written. I learned this trick from Tristan Hubsch, who was a post-doc with the exended Weinberg Group, when I was a callow graduate student in Austin. And have used it happily since, since it teaches me what I do not know well enough to defend, what I find intriguing, and to look back to see what was, in retrospect, obvious.

Bob should be happy, irrespective, even if we are far from done. It’s a good result he has — running with stuff that Adam Steege started for me last year. He was grinning from ear to ear as he left my office. Melissa ran into him, and then me, and asked: So what did you say to Bob? I told her what we had found together, and that I thought we might be ready. She didn’t disagree.

Creating community: tightly knit or loosely woven?

[This is a guest post by my colleague Melissa Eblen-Zayas, also of Carleton Physics and Astronomy]

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about community, and in particular the sense of community that develops among students in various academic programs. Two somewhat different things have triggered my thoughts— the first being an e-mail with a brief assessment of a cohort program in the sciences we piloted for this first time this past year at Carleton. This program aims to develop a cohort of students, all of whom are interested in math and science, but because of their backgrounds, these students may face additional challenges in their entry to science at Carleton. The goal is to create a supportive community that will help see these students through what can be a rocky transition and encourage them to successfully pursue their interests in math and science. The structure of the program is such that the entire cohort participates in a first year seminar their first term as well as a weekly colloquium that runs throughout the year. Students then chose to take additional science courses in both winter and spring terms, but because of diverse interests of the group, there is significant branching of the cohort after the first term.

I was involved in some of the early discussions about how to structure this program, and one of the challenges we considered was how to best support students when, after the first term, their interests lead them into a variety of different science classes. In particular, we don’t have large enough numbers to ensure that there are 10 students from the cohort in, for example, an introductory physics class. Rather there may only be two or three students. One of the things I feel is important is to make sure that the tightly knit cohort finds ways to connect into the other communities that exist in the sciences here at Carleton–the network of juniors and seniors who have already declared their majors, the informal groups that form during tutoring sessions, etc. Of course, these broader settings do not always provide a welcoming environment for students with particular backgrounds, and the cohort program is a response to some of these challenges. Providing tightly knit support for these students while still weaving them into the broader communities of science at the college is crucial, in my mind, for successful long-term community building.

The second moment that triggered my consideration of community came from reviewing data that my colleague Cindy Blaha received from the office of institutional research in conjunction with work on an institutional grant proposal. These figures showed the gender breakdown of various science majors since 1970. Needless to say, the data for physics, as usual, was discouraging. Sure, we do slightly better than the national average, but chemistry, geology, and biology are all nearly 50% women majors, while physics has averaged about 27% women majors over the past eight years. When these numbers come up, Cindy and I often talk about the students (both male and female, but perhaps more female) who walk away from the physics major stating frankly that they “want a life.” Of these students, some sub-group chooses instead to major in biology or chemistry. I am often puzzled by this sub-group because all of the sciences at Carleton are demanding, and I find it hard to believe that you can have any more or less of a life if you are a biology major than if you are a physics major. What is it about the physics community that is less than attractive? Wouldn’t being part of a close knit group of 15-20 majors be as attractive as being one of 50-60 majors in the biology department? As I’ve been thinking about it, I have begun to wonder if perhaps our physics community at Carleton is too tightly knit. Our majors (from my perspective) appear to enjoy working collaboratively with each other, spending time in Olin enthusiastically exploring physics, and also finding time for fun. But what if a student doesn’t want to wear as a badge of honor the number of all-nighters pulled in Olin or doesn’t want to cram his or her schedule with as many physics electives as possible? Is the biology department attractive because there isn’t a monolithic group of “biology majors”, but rather a larger, more loosely woven community?

I enjoy the tight knit community that we have developed amongst physics majors, faculty, and staff, but I want us to be more conscious of those who want to be loosely woven into our community. Tightly knit can imply insulation, while loosely woven implies breathability. In both cases, when a heavy weight must be borne by the fabric, the network of threads must share and carry the weight together. Both the tightly knit and loosely woven communities will come together when there is an especially difficult problem set to tackle, a challenging lab to complete, or comps presentations to practice, but when those weights are removed, not everyone wants or needs to remain so tightly knit within the community. This is a different challenge in developing a sense of community than the one that comes about with the cohort program.

As a faculty member, I can’t fully orchestrate the cohesiveness and communities that grow among students, but I can certainly do my part to make sure that loosely woven is still the fabric of a fulfilling community, albeit one that allows individuals more room to breathe and be themselves. After all, I don’t want to stand by while anyone feels like they are simply the frayed edges of the tight knit community. And hopefully, where students want to be included in the tightly knit community, but find it difficult to feel comfortable or successful for any number of reasons, individual faculty attention as well as organized efforts like the cohort program will help ensure a richly integrated community of science.