Expectations and the end of summer

In Nature earlier this month, Rachel Ivie reviewed the book “Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers” by Joseph C. Hermanowicz. Hermanowicz has traced the careers of physicists at different types of universities and compared their levels of satisfaction as they progress throughout their careers. I’ll admit I don’t think I’ll pick up the book myself, as Ivie notes that Hermanowicz assumes “that research is the highest form of scholarly endeavour. He refers to teaching as an undesirable activity–as ‘acceptable unproductivity.’” As someone for whom teaching is central to what I do, I doubt I can stomach a book by an author whose fundamental assumptions define what I do as unproductive. Nevertheless, there were several things in the book review that caught my attention. Hermanowicz describes faculty members as victims of a ‘con game’ in academia where graduate students “all start out expecting to achieve greatness; but few do so.” There is analysis of the disappointment that faculty members must face at different points in their careers as they realize that the recognition their scientific achievements will bring them does not match their expectations. As someone who had no aspirations to scientific fame in grad school, I wonder, do most graduate students really start their careers expecting they will achieve greatness?

The review did make me think about what my expectations were when I started grad school (definitely no aspirations of becoming a physics big shot). I went to grad school because I enjoyed physics, and I did expect getting a PhD would allow me to contribute to physics, but in my mind, contributing to physics encompassed many possibilities–contributing to the creation of new knowledge (research), to the development of new physicists (teaching), to the support of the physics community by society at large (policy and/or outreach), to the application of physics to products and services (industry).

At this point in my career, it’s not dashed expectations that frustrate me, but rather too many competing expectations–institutional expectations, the expectations of colleagues and collaborators, student expectations, and the expectations I have for myself. As a woman in physics, I also find myself facing challenges related to expectations that arise from societal gender schemas. As the summer draws to a close and I take stock of what I had hoped to accomplish and what I actually accomplished, I find the landscape of expectations to be particularly harsh and I’m trying to figure out how to balance various expectations in a sustainable and satisfying way for the coming academic year.

Grumpy about referee comments

(Recycling from my facebook wall, apologies for those who are fb friends as well)

In the spirit of this being a true ‘journal’ and my principle of transparency: Yesterday I got referee reports on a recent paper that have rendered me grumpy. It amounted to a pretty much outright rejection of a paper that I actually like a lot, and think has plenty valid in it.

Over the years, I’ve had the full range of reactions to referee comments, ranging from shock and incredulity to elation and pleasure. This time it’s a resigned grumpiness associated with (1) some valid observations in the comments, (2) coupled with the usual remarkable blindness to that which is already stated, (3) time of year: Who wants to deal with this when the school year is coming screeching down the pike? and most importantly (4) I think I am paying the price finally for the last few years of being distracted by college-wide and other administrative duties, and/or life. It’s horribly difficult to sustain productivity at the highest level (and in science, particularly without grad students/post-docs/others who can also see the big picture) if you can’t bring full attention to bear.[Don't get me wrong, in the last 18 months, I've published twice in Physical Review Letters, and have traded comments there as well, and once in Phys. Rev. E., a very respectable rate of publication; but the near future looks a little slower].

So. I brought it on myself, but I reserve the right to grump for a while.

A senior colleague (not in the sciences) at Carleton assures me that “apparently the post-tenure phase is a little like the first couple of years on the job, where you’re getting used to a lot of new (or expanded) duties and don’t have much time for pure research. But it [gets] better.”

And then I sat down and tried to be a fair referee for an article that had been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks. So it goes.

Persistent Patterns and Multifractality in Fluid Mixing

Huh, seems I forgot to plug my most recently published paper on this blog. Sheesh. Here’s the abstract:

Persistent patterns in periodically driven dynamics have been reported in a wide variety of contexts ranging from table-top and ocean-scale fluid mixing systems to the weak quantum-classical transition in open Hamiltonian systems. We illustrate a common framework for the emergence of these patterns by considering a simple measure of structure maintenance provided by the average radius of the scalar distribution in transform space. Within this framework, scaling laws related to both the formation and persistence of patterns in phase space are presented. Further, preliminary results linking the scaling exponents associated with the persistent patterns to the multifractal nature of the advective phase-space geometry are shown.

And of course there’s a  back story, as well.

Reading Schlosshauer

I don’t get to read textbooks or monographs much nowadays. To be honest, I think physicists don’t read their way through textbooks and/or monographs much, anyway, unless it’s part of a course (either one they’re teaching or one they’re taking; in the latter case, they might not read anyway). I remember wondering if my Profs in grad school had actually read all the books lining their walls and slowly realized that few had truly read most of the books. The tendency — as far as I could tell  — is to skim the book, and put it away, and then, in the middle of a conversation/argument or a calculation or something, to jump up and retrieve it to look up one specific idea. And I’m no different at this stage of my life.

Summers are the only time for background work for me, however, when I can manage to focus long enough (I haven’t whined much on this blog, but I have to my IRL friends, so suffice to say that this summer I’ve come to the conclusion that I spend far too many hours in meetings — all, or most, in the service of good causes, mind you. I am looking forward to not being as involved in college-wide stuff at the end of the academic year). So I ordered a few books recently that I’ve been meaning to look into, and started working my way through them.

The find of the summer was Maximilian Schlosshauer’s “Decoherence and the quantum-to-classical transition”. I plowed my way through the bulk of the book in a long weekend, and enjoyed it tremendously. Most monographs have to walk the line between two extremes:  Conveying enough of the details of all the calculations from the papers they are summarizing, and conveying the ideas verbally and/or conceptually. Typical monographs are either too verbose or too technical or sometimes both in alternation, and I usually groan to myself, start skimming, and then put it away on the shelf for later reference. Every once in a while I stumble across a truly excellent one, and in this case, I’ve talked it up to my collaborators and colleagues, and hey, might as well give it my endorsement here as well. It turns out that Anton Zeilinger had given it something of a rave (Nature 451, 18 (3 January 2008)) so I won’t bother with a more detailed review, except to say, yeah, me too.