Toronto

It had been a hard week for all sorts of reasons.

To top it off, early on Thu morning I flew to Toronto, to give a seminar at the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control on “Non-monotonicity in the quantum-classical transition” and then turned around and flew back on Friday evening for a net of about 24 hours in the U of T neighborhood. It was my first time back on campus since I left for Rice University over a decade ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting my favorite city, seeing how spiffy the new digs are for the Chemical Physics Theory Group, catching up and talking physics with my old boss and friend Paul Brumer (and one of his postdocs), and some of the many others in the city I’ve known for varying degrees of time. This included my host Aephraim Steinberg (and his students), Shohini Ghose (at Wilfrid Laurier and the Perimeter Institute), my collaborator Arie Kapulkin, and Danny Gruner. I also got time to chat with Daniel James (and one of his students), Greg Scholes, and Lindsey LeBlanc.

This talk is one of my favorite ones ever. It is a substantially expanded version of stuff I’d been talking about for a couple of years. I made the commitment to telling this new story/presenting this new set of results knowing that I didn’t have everything wrapped up yet. My students (Andrew McClung, Qi Li, and Ryan Babbush did most/all of the work) and I raced to get results in presentable form. The experience of relevant results/figures rolling in the last couple of days before the talk again brought home the value of well-chosen deadline-driven commitments when it comes to research: I promised a good new story to people I admire, respect, and like, and my group did its best to get me what I thought I needed.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself both days, and learned a bit, just enough to make me wish I could spend more time there, about the remarkable work that’s going on there. My talk seemed to go over well, and I got good interested and interesting feedback overall, with some pointing at future directions or collaborations.

I’m glad I went, and glad to be back, with a couple more big on-campus commitments and projects to tackle before the end of the term. For now, getting caught up, taking a breath.

Sticking with science: continuity and community

Eric Jolly, president of the Science Museum of Minnesota, was on campus a couple of weeks ago as a Headley House visitor. One of the events during his residence was a public lecture on science literacy. Jolly noted that many efforts aimed at increasing interest in science follow the “pure of heart” model, namely if the intentions of the program are good, the results will follow, but assessment shows this is not the case. Jolly discussed a report he authored about five years ago with Pat Campbell of Fairer Science and Lesley Perlman. The report found that students needed an ecosystem throughout their school years that had three elements to ensure student success in quantitative disciplines and the sciences. Namely the ecosystem had to provide engagement (building interest), capacity (gaining skills for success), and continuity (finding an ongoing series of opportunities and support to be able to continue) — the ECC triology. While a single program might not address all three elements, the ecosystem had to offer overlapping opportunities that covered all three aspects of the ECC trilogy in order to have a positive, sustaining influence on students.

The continuity element caught my attention because that’s the theme for this month’s Scientiae.  For anyone who has received a science degree, I think engagement and capacity can be taken for granted, but continuing in science is not a given. Jolly’s talk made me think about the elements that lead individuals to stick with science once they have gotten their degree.

What has been the ECC trilogy of my ecosystem– the three elements whose presence or absence has led me to stick with, or consider walking away from, a science career? In my journey since receiving my bachelor’s degree, those three elements have been enthusiasm, confidence, and community. The times I’ve thought about leaving science have been when any one of these elements was missing for an extended period of time. Some of these elements, like enthusiasm and confidence can be controlled, at least partially, by my own outlook and actions. (For one look at the relative merits of being enthusiastic versus confident, check out this discussion at the Happiness Blog.) The element that I find missing most often is the community element. Isolation, politics, and a machismo culture sometimes swamp any personal enthusiasm I have for the science I’m doing. A friend who left physics once said, “I love physics, but I couldn’t take the physicists.”

Nevertheless, there are many levels of community, and one can often find microcosms that make continuing desirable. These supportive communities offer opportunities both for professional development and connections, as well as personal development and connections. I was particularly interested by Sharvell Becton’s discussion of workplace community at the AAUW blog earlier this week. In her post, Becton quotes from the paper “Work-Life Programs and Organizational Culture: The Essence of Workplace Community” by Neal Chalofsky and Mary Gayle Griffin:

The concept of the workplace community represents the essence of work-life balance. Work-life balance is not about having equal time every day for work and personal time, as some critics have suggested. It’s about being in an environment that honors both needs and builds in consideration for meeting work and personal needs as appropriate. The western philosophical concept of balance is an either-or proposition; you are either on one side or the other. Rarely are the sides of equal value and in balance. The result of the struggle for balance is usually a win-lose situation. The eastern concept of balance is the yin-yang symbol, representing an acknowledged tension of opposing forces. It’s a both-and proposition rather than an either-or one. Both sides can “win” because day-to-day one or the other side will have greater needs. All this is to say that those organizations that are humane know that caring for employees means the employees will care for the organization. One day the situation may call for everyone pitching in on an important project, another day it may mean covering for a team member whose child is sick, and another day everyone may be going to a company picnic. In the long term, everyone wins.

One example of the difference between community support and community marginalization can be seen in how organizations handle parental leave, a topic of personal interest to me recently. Here at Carleton, the college has a clearly stated parental leave policy for faculty members that can easily be found on the web and is regularly used. Taking parental leave follows a straight forward process. On the other hand, try to figure out how NSF deals with PIs who go on maternity leave and you will have a hard time finding any policy. Talking with others leads to a grapevine of gossip that contains stories, some heart-warming and some terrifying, about how individual situations have been handled. While NSF is a huge entity, dealing with a diverse constituency, failure to have an articulated, accessible plan about parental leave for PIs, post-docs, and grad students being funded by NSF grants contributes to the sense that members of the scientific community aren’t expected to have children.

While individuals can’t control community dynamics, community recognition that scientists are people with lives outside of science makes a big difference in whether individuals choose to continue.

Off-campus? Nope, the Olin immersion program

http://apps.carleton.edu/admissions/blogs/video/?story_id=609349

Building a physics identity

When physics is mentioned in social situations, I often hear the comment, “Oh, I’m just not a science person.” The question of how one develops a science identity is interesting and relevant to the discussions of increasing participation and retention of students in STEM fields. Thus, an article in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching by Zahra Hazari and colleagues about students’ physics identities caught my eye.

Of course, identification with physics is only one small part of an individual’s identity; it cannot be separated from personal identity (the characteristics and experiences by which individuals define themselves) and group identity (due to associations with family, religious, and cultural groups). Hazari builds a notion of physics identity that intersects with personal and group identity, and is primarily based on four elements: interest, performance, competence (belief in an ability to understand physics), and recognition by others (as being, or potentially able to be, a good physics student). Using this physics identity framework, Hazari and colleagues explored how physics identity is related to student goals and how teachers might influence students’ physics identities.

The result that surprised me most was what impacted the physics identity of female students. In particular, having female scientist guest speakers or discussing the work of women scientists had no impact on the physics identity of female students. However, explicit discussion of the under-representation of women in physics was found to positively impact female physics identity, while not having any impact on male physics identity. This suggests tackling issues about the status of women in physics directly is more effective than band-aid solutions that attempt to paint gender-balanced pictures of science.

Another interesting, though unsurprising, result was the correlation between student career outcome expectations (job characteristics deemed important for future career satisfaction) and physics identity. Namely, student desire for a career providing intrinsic fulfillment by working with knowledge and skills was the strongest predictor of a student’s physics identity. As is pointed out in the paper, this is both a blessing and curse for physics:

“Anyone who has a physics background or has worked with physicists knows that there is truth to the claim that the physics culture promotes ‘physics for the sake of physics.’ The benefit of this cultural standard is that those who end up participating usually love the theoretical basis of what they do….However, there is a fundamental imbalance in this norm because mainly those who come from backgrounds with the luxury of affording knowledge-based motivations will opt into physics. Others who have additional motivations, like socio-economic concerns, will need to have a passion for physics above and beyond the norm in order to disregard such concerns and opt into physics….Perhaps if the physics community promoted and supported more balanced motivations, physics would be more successful in attracting members of under-represented groups.”

The study also found a negative correlation between physics identity and career outcome expectations that include the availability of personal time and working with others. The stereotype of physicists working long hours, all alone, for the glory of science seems to impact student physics identity. To me, this is a cause for concern, particularly for efforts aimed at increasing the number of physics majors, as it suggests that individuals from privileged backgrounds with no burden of economic concerns or family/communal commitments are most likely to consider physics. How can we convince a broad range of students that a career in physics can be something other than an all-consuming research career for the sake of research? And how can we remind physicists that the beauty and universality of physics is not sufficient for selling the field to a wide audience?