Celebrating what isn’t on the CV

The term is rapidly winding up here at Carleton, and graduation is less than two weeks away. Between honors convocation, senior dinners, and other end-of-the-year festivities, there are plenty of opportunities to celebrate what our students have accomplished this year. Scientiae this month is also asking people to celebrate because, unlike college life, with built in opportunities to recognize accomplishments, in the professional sphere successes can come and go without much acknowledgment.

What to celebrate? I feel like I’m in the thick of several things without any waypoints deserving recognition. Last week, I did turn in my record of scholarly activity, the packet that gets sent to external reviewers for the college’s tenure review process. That didn’t feel like much of a milestone as it is one of many deadlines in the tenure process, and the ultimate outcome is uncertain. Nevertheless, it did provide an opportunity to reflect, and in those reflections, I found both successes and setbacks.

At Carleton, the record of scholarly activity highlights what one has done outside of the classroom, and in the sciences, it provides a snapshot of how one’s research program is developing, grants received, results shared through presentations and publications, etc. However, compiling the report was a challenge because it reinforced the traditional research/teaching dichotomy of academia. As someone who particularly wanted to be at a liberal arts college so that I could work with undergraduates, remain close to the experimental work, and not be the PI/administrator of a lab that runs on the efforts of grad students and post-docs, I found it difficult to present a record of scholarly activities in a manner that fully acknowledged the teaching/learning involved in doing research with undergraduates. Jim Gentile, President of the Research Corporation, in a 2008 PKAL conversation, highlighted the interaction: “I think undergraduate research is one of the purest forms of student learning and faculty teaching that goes on at any college or university that is serious about science learning, teaching, or research.”

If one considers research output, science happens slowly in my lab compared to places where research is the central focus. Things would move faster if I didn’t emphasize having students contribute or if I used laboratory facilities elsewhere, but that’s not why I’m at a place like Carleton. One part of research that I enjoy the most is working with talented students, introducing them to the process of doing research, and getting them involved as colleagues on the research questions I find so exciting. Through these experiences, some students find that experimental research is not for them, and I consider that process of self-discovery to be just as valuable, and as much of a success, as when students fall in love with the lab work and decide to go on to graduate school. I’ll be the first to admit that shaping undergraduate research projects is an on-going learning process, and in that realm, I’ve had my share of setbacks as well as successes, completely independent of the scientific setbacks and successes. Knowing how to structure a project that is meaningful to a student in the short-term yet moves the larger agenda forward in the long term, fostering group dynamics yet encouraging independence, being accessible yet promoting self-reliance — it’s not an easy balancing act, and it’s a process that I’m still figuring out after five years. Student involvement is integral to my research, and, yet, those interactions are notoriously hard to capture in the cut-and-dry record of scholarly activity. They can’t be accounted for in the same manner as grants or publications.

A couple of weeks ago my alma mater sent out the link to this year’s graduation address, delivered by Rachel Maddow. I particularly liked one of her central points, “[T]hat personal triumphs are overrated.” Maddow encouraged graduates to “tak[e] as your baseline that you will not seek to reach your own goals by stepping on your community.” Given the option to celebrate, I’d prefer not to celebrate what I’ve done, but rather to celebrate the community to which I belong — a community of curious students and dedicated faculty, at an institution that supports meaningful interactions between these two groups through scholarly engagement. Yet on CVs and records of scholarly activity, the opportunity to appropriately recognize and celebrate these interactions is limited, so I do it here instead.

Day mopping

I just got back from DAMOP — the Annual Meeting of the Division of Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society. It was difficult to get to, as it often is, in terms of timing:  given the Carleton calendar, what falls ‘after school is out’ for the bulk of the nation is during the last hard stretch of the year for us. But it’s always worth it.

I started going to DAMOP when I was at Rice. I was a visiting faculty member there, with my primary responsibility being revamping their introductory physics classes. I also had complete and total freedom for the first time from working with a research supervisor. Half-way through my time there, when I had started wrapping up projects I had brought with me, I decided that it would be a really useful thing to learn about the great experiments that were going on there.

I got involved in two collaborations: With Randy Hulet during a satisfying little foray into understanding the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates and with Barry Dunning on a project on controlled formation of a wave-packet in Rydberg atom dynamics (I even have a paper with my name on it that, shockingly for those who know me, actually has experimental data in it).

It was my first experience working closely with experimentalists, and I benefited greatly from learning how to translate their reality into my equations, and vice versa. The first couple of trips to DAMOP were to report on these results, and I quickly realized that even though I was not raised an AMO physicist and honestly will probably never really be one, I really enjoy the meeting and the community, so I’ve taken to going back frequently.

This trip was much like the last couple of times I’ve been there — plenty of physics, and even more catching up with physicists. And it’s never clear to me whether I benefit more from the formal or the informal aspects of these interactions. The ‘obvious’ or formal point of going to conferences is to learn physics from all the talks going on, as well as to present your own talks for feedback. I went to plenty of talks, and learned a bit (though not as much as I have at previous DAMOPs, for whatever reason of age, distraction, choice of talks, quality of presentations, luck of the draw you care to choose).

I didn’t make a presentation this time, but two of my students did. Qi Li, a rising senior, acquitted herself admirably during a special undergraduate research presentation session. This was possibly the only refereed session at DAMOP, and also one of the most useful for me, because sometimes I do need to hear about the physics in the most basic way possible, given what I say above about not quite being an AMO physicist.  Andrew McClung, who is about to graduate and head off on a Fulbright fellowship to work with Rainer Blatt’s group seemed to enjoy himself and certainly held his own with his poster.

Bu everything that happened above and beyond these formal reasons was equally, if not more valuable. A quick set of snapshots: (1) Many many 2-5 minute ‘elevator talk’ interactions about research with friends and (almost-)strangers, (2) a handful of more detailed and intense conversations where I got good feedback that is still brewing and will definitely influence future research directions, (3) one long (and fairly sweaty) walk to find food with fellow UT-Austin grads Kirk Madison and Dan Steck (and Dan’s students), trying to make up for being banished to parts of the world without good Tex-Mex (to my great pleasure, during that meal and the walks back and forth we also got pretty far on discussions about a possible experiment to look at signatures of non-monotonicity and the quantum-classical transition –  I am really looking forward to my follow-up visit in a few months to Dan’s lab).

And then (4,5,6, …) there was catching up with all the people I know from UT-Austin, from Toronto, from Rice, from other DAMOPs and other conferences — oh, and Chad, from the blogosphere — and of course, sighting or being hailed by Carls:  Adam Libson, Ben Luey, Tyler Green, Leigh Norris, Marty Ligare … we had a well-filled table at the banquet (since it included several non-Carls including Dave Nitz of St. Olaf let’s call it the Friends of Carleton table).

And now back home for the last stretch before the end of the year, and graduation, and my move to the Deanery. A question all my friends kept asking me: Will you be back here during your Deaning years? At this point, all I can say is that I hope (and more importantly plan, with specific details laid out) to keep the research-related part of me ticking, and to keep conferencing, and visiting folks, and DAMOP-ing …

Teaching and research: congruence or division

I just read Diane Auer Jones’ opinion piece in Nature this week and couldn’t be more disappointed at her suggestion that we leave research to select research universities. It’s a discouraging dismissal of the value of research opportunities provided by primarily undergraduate institutions, as well as the teacher-scholar model for faculty.  I’ve been reading David Lopatto’s “Science in Solution: The Impact of Undergraduate Research on Student Learning” published by the Research Corporation, and I suggest anyone who reads Jones’ piece take the time to read “Science in Solution” to gain a better perspective on the value of undergraduate research at all types of institutions.

Beer questions

I ask almost all my classes to email me questions about their pre-class reading; I read them during the morning before a class or the night before a class to help inform what I will do in class. I tell them that there are three types of questions: Google questions (facts, or a detail of some sort that Google could answer better than I could — “what is the mass of an electron ?” would be an extreme example thereof), beer questions (best discussed over a pint if the students are old enough — “how would the physics of the Universe change if hbar was imaginary?” would be an example) and the third category: actually useful to the class discussion, and that they should try to draw their questions from the third category. Sometime I have to remind students that the focus of these questions should be comprehension of the core of the material, because some of the questions are more ‘applied’ or detailed than we need to get into, but usually this serves wonderfully to prepare students’ minds for the class as well as to tell me the lay of the land.

On Monday night, there was the rare occasion — all the students in my Advanced E+M class are old enough that we could traipse down to the local pub for a couple of pitchers and some beer questions. Primary among these was a discussion, led by Ben Haynor, about the fact that there must be a special relativistic effect in gravitation because of length contraction which you can derive analogous to the argument that magnetism is actually a relativistic electrostatics effect. (Not to forget mass dilation effects, but we kept that off the table during the discussion). A real pleasure, and a wonderful way to wrap a long weekend.