The e-Astronomer (Andy Lawrence) visited Caltech last week, but I missed his talks since I was traveling myself. He posits an interesting comparison between young hopefuls in academia and The Industry — hanging around, trying to get noticed in notoriously competitive milieus:

Caltech is famous for being a tad competitive shall we say. I got entertained at lunch by various grad students and postdocs. They seemed relaxed, but with a pushy edge. At that stage, young scientists are desperate to get noticed, and are simultaneously confident and insecure - will the world decide you are a genius or a dullard?

The next morning I was doing LA tourism with my family. I found myself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine St, staring at the sidewalk-stars and trying hard to absorb the vibrations of Hollywood history. In the glory days, this was the spot where starry-eyed hopefuls would hang around, drinking coffee very very slowly, just waiting to be spotted and carried off to stardom.

In some significant ways, trying to make a career in artistic fields (movies, theater, art, music) is very similar to academia. Most obviously, the number of people who would like to have such jobs is much larger than the number of jobs. And that means competition, like it or not. Occasionally you will hear the claim that we should be producing fewer Ph.D.s, since there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for everyone who graduates. This is just a clumsy attempt to hide the problem by re-arranging the bottleneck to before grad school rather than after. We certainly need to be absolutely honest about job prospects — they are always bad, no matter what specialty one chooses! But there is no way around the fact that somewhere along the line, most people who would like to be employed as professional scientists or scholars more generally are going to be disappointed.

Still, the ways in which the academic pipeline differs from the road to Hollywood superstardom are equally significant — and we have it much better than young actors. Even though the numbers are discouraging, we do have a highly structured system, in which training is taken seriously and — equally importantly — there is a fairly clear point past which one recognizes that the chances for success are extremely slim. Unlike a struggling actor who hangs around doing local theater and occasional commercials, perpetually hoping for that big break, the up-or-out nature of academia tends to let you know with relative clarity that it’s time to look elsewhere. Really, it’s more like professional sports than it’s like Hollywood — we have a structured minor-league/intercollegiate-sports system, with explicit coaching and well-known paths to advancement.

Indeed, one could argue that in recent years the relentless up-or-out pressure has gotten soft, as more people take multiple postdocs and linger on for a while. (Or, in fields where they are common, adjunct professors and lecturers, which is generally a much worse gig.) From the point of view of the universities that are choosing new faculty members, years of postdoctoral experience provide a lot of data on which to base hiring decisions, which one could at least argue helps the meritocratic case. It’s no fun to be stuck in postdocs for years and years, but nor is it fun to be told that you have passed your sell-by date, no more jobs for you.

So to all those grad students hanging around in the lounge, trying to say clever things to impress the visiting speaker — it could be worse! You could be hanging around soda shops, hoping to be discovered by wandering tenured professors.

A few months ago I mentioned a rather large professional change - namely that in January I’ll be moving to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. In that post I referred to at least one further surprise to come later, and I’m now ready to announce two.

First, Penn is setting up a new Center for Particle Cosmology, launching January 1, 2009 (although, as you’ll see by clicking on the link, the web site is already up and running, in case potential students and postdocs, or just curious others wish to check us out.)

This is extremely exciting, and I’m very much looking forward to arriving in the Spring and getting involved (Bhuvnesh Jain and I will be co-directing the center.) A large part of my excitement is because of the second nice surprise - Justin Khoury has recently accepted a faculty position at Penn, and will also be joining the department and the new center in January. I’ve been a fan of Justin’s work for a while, and given the overlap of our research interests, we’ll hopefully have a lot to talk about.

All this provides me with a handy excuse to mention that if you’re looking for a postdoc position, and you’re interested in what we’re up to, then you may want to look at our announcement of two postdoctoral fellowships for Fall 2009.

Also, be sure to look for an announcement of our inaugural workshop.

It’s September, and a young person’s fancy naturally turns to applying to grad school/postdocs/faculty jobs. And in this day and age, questions inevitably arise: Are they going to google me? What will they find? Followed immediately by: Should I have my own web page (if I don’t already)? And what should be on it?

Roughly speaking, as you climb up the academic ladder, the scrutiny one undergoes becomes increasingly close. If you are in high school and applying to colleges, I would be extremely surprised if any admissions committee googled you — there are just too many of you, frankly. Mostly this also holds for undergrads applying to grad school. At least, that’s the situation among theorists; for experimentalists, who might be joining a specific lab on day one, the number might be smaller and the individual attention correspondingly greater. By the time you apply for faculty jobs, the numbers are very small, and nobody gets an offer without being poked and prodded in person, and having their CV examined under a microscope. In that case, the web page is (almost) beside the point, as they’ve seen you up close and personal.

It’s for postdoc applications, then, that the googling question becomes most relevant. Remember that most research groups have relatively few postdocs, so they take the selection process very seriously — mistakes can be costly. But in many cases the decision-making timescale is sufficiently short that they don’t have the luxury of seeing each candidate in person. So I would say: yes, at many places where you apply for postdocs, they will be googling you to glean information that might not show up on a formal application. That is especially true if you’re applying to individual professors or groups (rather than wider-ranging fellowships), and also if the relevant decision-makers are younger.

So: if they do google you, what will they find? You can see how it might make sense to put up your own web page: that way you have some influence over their first impressions of you. There is a systematic issue, of course, that some names are more easily googleable than others, but we won’t address that here. If you do have a web page, you can simply include the URL in your CV, so they will have it in front of them.

If you do decide to have a web page, what should it look like? There is an overarching principle at work here: the Web is World-Wide. That is, everything you put on your page can be viewed (ordinarily) by everyone. You can’t put stuff up that “is only meant for your friends,” and then be surprised when it is examined by prospective employers. If you have pictures or stories that are in any way private — keep them private!

Continue reading ‘Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page?’

Questions for the Day:

1. Why is this paper to referee in my inbox?
2. Why can’t I safely assume that if I’ve refereed a paper, and haven’t seen a revised version in more than year, that the paper is actually dead?
3. Why, in spite of my polite-but-scathing review in 2007, have they revised nothing but the discussion?!?!?!?

The paper. It should be dead, but it lives. It walks among us. It’s trying to eat my brain. And if it makes it to the literature, it will try to eat yours.

As it seems to by symmetry week here at CV, I thought I’d touch upon something related to one of the many events that happened during a recent vortex of unbloggability (i.e., when everything that I wanted to write about would only be publishable on a pseudonymous blog).

Astronomer Fritz Zwicky frequently employed the term “spherical bastard” to describe a group of rival astronomers, since in Zwicky’s view, they were bastards any way you looked at them. While Zwicky had no patience for this group, I would argue that fully-symmetric bastards are the easiest of assholes to deal with. No one is surprised when a known, calibrated asshole acts up. We all just adjust the gain on our emotional response and carry on. I’ve been quite fond of many assholes through the years, and when I look back, the one trait they shared was that while they may have been ornery, they were at least predictable.

In contrast, I cannot abide asymmetric assholes. These are the people who stroke those who are of use to them, and claw those they deem inferior. They ignore you before you win a fancy fellowship, but suddenly talk to you when you do. They flatter established faculty, but don’t hesitate to sabotage the same professor’s students.

Let me warn you, o asymmetric asshole — people talk to each other. That person you’re actively trying to sabotage? They have mentors. Who are sometimes the people whose behinds you’re trying to kiss.

You may think you’re getting away with it. But trust me. You’re not. Or at least not for long.

The Volokh Conspiracy is ruminating over why so many academics are hostile to some religions rather than others. Todd Zywicki cites data:

According to a study by the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, 53% of professors have an unfavorable view of Evangelical Christians but only 3% have an unfavorable view of Jews. A summary of the study is here. 33% have unfavorable views of Mormons. Muslims, Atheists, and Catholics all score in double-digits.

He goes on to express his astonishment…

It is almost impossible to imagine any identifiable group of Americans today who would hold such a reflexively negative view of other groups of Americans. I can’t imagine that any degree of racial bigotry by any group toward any other group would even approximate this degree of bigotry and prejudice.

Until, of course, his commenters point out an inconvenient fact: this “prejudice” pales next to that against atheists.

Co-blogger Ilya Somin then chimes in with a theory — it’s all just bias against conservatives.

Overall, I think the data confirm my theory that most academics are not hostile to religion as such, but merely to those religious groups that they perceive (for the most part correctly) as politically conservative.

The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an “unfavorable” view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics’ views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct.

I have a different theory. What if academics had an unfavorable view of evangelicals and Mormons, and a generally favorable view of Catholics and Jews, because of how those groups view academia? Crazy, I know, but bear with me here. Catholicism and Judaism, whatever their other faults, have long traditions of valuing learning and scholarship, while Mormonism and evangelical Christianity … not so much. (Those are wild generalizations, of course, but the trends are clear.) Perhaps these unfavorable views are not actually prejudices at all, but informed opinions based on empirically verifiable realities?

Just a theory.

Paul Krugman puts into anecdote form what many of us frequently feel:

So, you get through grad school. You do research that gets lot of citations. You get tenure. You branch out into policy work, and into writing for a broader audience. You try to play a role in the important economic debates. And finally, you really hit the big time — you’re debating the economy on Larry King, with who knows how many people watching.

And then Larry King wraps it up: “Tomorrow, we’ll talk about psychic kids.”

I was still giggling uncontrollably ten minutes after I left the studio.

(Via Dynamics of Cats. We also serve who link and laugh.)

Today’s episode of lazy-bloggers-solicit-guests-to-fill-in features Joel Corbo, a graduate student in physics at Berkeley. Joel and friends were disappointed by some features of the graduate-school experience, and (unusually) decided to actually do something about it — they founded the Compass Project, which supports excellence in science education, especially for women and minorities.

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My name is Joel Corbo, I’m a physics Ph.D. student, and I’m a little frustrated.

My trajectory through the US educational system has been a great one. I have parents who care deeply about me and my future and who believe in the value of a strong education. Because they cared, I went to an elementary school that laid a good foundation and allowed me to attend a high school that was more academically rigorous than many colleges (both of these schools were private, although the latter was also free). I also majored in physics at MIT.

My story may sound typical, at least in certain circles, but there are a few more details to add to the story. My dad is a recent immigrant without a high school education who worked as a maintenance man in the NYC Housing Projects, and my mom is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and a lucky survivor of the NYC public school system. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. Statistically speaking, I shouldn’t have succeeded — but I did.

Looking back at my education, it’s obvious to me that a huge factor contributing to my success was the presence of people in my life who believed in me and supported me: my parents, my teachers, and my peers. Even at MIT, which is primarily recognized for the quality of its research (and rightly so), I found a physics department that openly cared about undergraduate education, where teaching was valued and done well and which fostered a community of undergrads who learned from and supported each other.

So, why the frustration? My relatively rosy view of physics education was shaken up not long after starting grad school at UC Berkeley (By the way, I don’t want to single out Berkeley as particularly flawed, as I’m sure its problems are shared by virtually every physics department in the US to one extent or another. However, I can only write about what I know and this is where I am). Back in the cocoon of the MIT undergrad experience, I came to believe that physics was awesome for two main reasons: (1) because it answers deep, fundamental questions about how the world works and (2) because it is a community driven, collaborative exercise that thrives on the effective sharing of knowledge among its practitioners. In my mind, grad school would build upon these dual pillars of awesomeness and help me become (1) a great researcher and (2) a great teacher.

The jury is still out on the great researcher thing, but it turns out that, in principle, grad school has precisely zero to do with becoming a good teacher. Oh, you can TA a class here and there, as long as that doesn’t get in the way of what grad school is “really” all about. The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture; perhaps this attitude appears to benefit physics in the short-term by weeding out all but the most “serious” students, but in the long run it does nothing but damage.

The damage done to grad students is fairly obvious. First of all, if they are not provided with encouragement and avenues to become better teachers, then they won’t improve their teaching skills as well as they could have. If you happen to believe that an essential part of being a physicist is the ability to pass physics on to future generations of students, to inspire them to follow in the footsteps of their intellectual ancestors, then it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability to do just that. Of course, this happens all the time.

Secondly, there are always some grad students, including me, who have a deep interest in teaching (I remember deciding in high school that the only way to know if I really understood something was to try teaching it to someone else — so I can genuinely say that education has been on my mind for a long time). When people with such a passion are met with disinterest or even disdain by the people they want to emulate (successful physicists), the blow to their motivation can be severe. After all, who wants to stick around when their interests and talents aren’t valued or supported? I’ve heard it implied (and sometimes even said outright) that such students aren’t “serious enough” about physics and therefore aren’t worth keeping around, but without a crystal ball, who can really say which student will end up making important contributions to the field?

Let’s put the grad students aside for now (didn’t we just talk about that?), and spend some time looking at how undergrads are damaged by this attitude. Teaching is the single most fundamental service an academic department provides to undergraduates, and if, on average, a department is not interested in teaching well, the implication is that it’s not interested in serving undergrads in any way. But serving undergrads is vital to the survival of an academic discipline, because some of those undergrads are that discipline’s future experts. As I stated above, I was fortunate enough to attend schools that did serve their students well, but I can talk about the opposite through my observations as a TA.

Many students arrive at their undergraduate institution with a substantial number of long-held academic “bad habits”, especially in the sciences. High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug. Still, popular science books and NOVA specials have kept them interested enough that many intend to pursue the physical sciences as undergrads. Once they get to college, however, their passion for physics is quickly squelched by a number of factors:

1. Because they don’t have the skills necessary to problem-solve, model-build, and generally think like physicists, these students actually don’t know how to effectively learn physics as it is typically presented in a large lecture-based class. This doesn’t mean that these students are stupid, or somehow not worth teaching. It simply means that there are things they need to be taught other than “the material” in order to help them become better learners. Unfortunately, many of them come away feeling like they don’t have what it takes to be physicists (as though there is some intrinsic “physicsness” that they are lacking) and so they leave the field.
2. The typical introductory physics sequence, at least at Berkeley, is very isolating for potential physics majors. The vast majority of people in those classes are engineering students who are there because their departments require that they take physics; they have largely no interest in physics for its own sake. This makes it very difficult for potential physics majors to identify each other — they are like needles in an apathetic haystack. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that even the physics department cannot identify these potential majors. So, these students end up isolated from the department, from upperclassmen physics majors, and from each other – that is to say, from the physics community – for the three semesters it takes them to get through introductory physics. However, an important part of the excitement of physics is the collaboration with peers, the shared goal of building knowledge through interaction and discussion and asking “What if”. Without that, it’s incredibly difficult to paint physics as an interesting field, to really sell the idea of being physicists to these students beyond the level that NOVA can, and so they leave the field.
3. The problems of interaction and perceived lack of “physicsness” are magnified for a certain set of students: women and underrepresented minorities. At this point, so much has been said about the lack of women and minorities in all levels of physics due to the “leaky pipeline” that I don’t have much to add to the subject. For this discussion, the important point to note is that in addition to the issues that their well-represented peers also face, they have to face majoring in a field where they don’t see people like themselves. They arrive at the seemingly logical but erroneous conclusion that success in physics is unattainable unless you are a white male, and so they leave the field.

So, here are three of many reasons why undergrads might leave the field of physics – notice that none of these reasons have anything to do with these students’ ability to be good physicists. If the physics community wants to recruit the best minds into its ranks, it stands to reason that these impediments must be removed, but not enough people seem interested in doing so. Hence, my frustration.

[More below the fold...] Continue reading ‘Guest Post: Joel Corbo on Graduate School and Teaching’

Harvard University’s endowment is $35 billion, and some people aren’t happy about it. Massachusetts legislators see money that could be theirs, and are contemplating new taxes. Social activists see money that could be going to charity, and want to divert it. Distinguished alumni who have landed at public universities wonder why, with all that cash, Harvard graduates such a tiny number of students.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I won’t be suggesting the ideal policy compromise. But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.

Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.

This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. (Note that Caltech has over 1200 faculty members and fewer than 900 undergraduate students.) And it is not a statement about universities in general; many large public universities, and smaller liberal-arts schools, take education very seriously as a primary mission. This is by no means incompatible with being a top-notch research institution — the physics departments at places like Berkeley or UC Santa Barbara would be the envy of almost any private research university. But those places also take their educational mission very seriously, which Harvard, honestly, does not.

Of course, certain individual faculty members at Harvard might be great teachers and care deeply about their students; but that’s a bonus, not a feature of the institution. (Harvey Mansfield, to a visiting colleague: “You should close your door. If you don’t, undergraduates may wander in.”)

None of this is necessarily good or bad; it’s just a recognition of the state of affairs. Harvard et al. judge themselves by the research and scholarship they produce. Students will always keep applying to those places and trying to get in, because the aura of intellectual attainment produced by precisely those scholarly accomplishments will always act as a powerful draw. Such students are by no means making a mistake; the intellectual atmosphere at such places truly is intoxicating, and if nothing else the interaction with your fellow talented students can be a life-changing experience. But to try your best to get into Harvard and then complain once you are there that the professors seem interested in their own work rather than in teaching is to utterly miss the point. And to complain that Harvard has a giant endowment that it chooses to use for purposes other than educating more students is equally misguided.

Today Steinn followed up a nice little post on the role of luck in science (is “lucky” an insult?) with a spot-on description of how being ahead of the curve can damn you in grant proposals:

selected referee comments on “A bold proposal to do something new and interesting”, years 1-3, with added bonus translation

1. very speculative, no track record in this area, would be helped by showing preliminary results proving methodology and showing that results will be forthcoming [trans: come on, first do the research then ask for funding, don't you know anything?]

   trans: - huh, I never heard of this! Some new stuff. Speculative.
   Oy! He wants full postdoc for three years?
   Who does this guy think he is?

(Years 2 and 3 are equally good).

I think the reaction that Steinn describes can be summarized in Dalcanton’s Lemma of Proposal Writing: “It is nearly impossible to change a referee’s mind about something they think they already know“. If the reviewer comes to the problem with no preconceived notions (i.e. they’ve never read a single paper in your field), you can really make progress in educating them. Same deal if you’re moving forward on well-trodden ground (say, pushing SN Type Ia surveys to larger distances). However, if the reviewer knows something about your topic and thinks the problem is already solved, or uninteresting, or technically unfeasible, or crazy, 10 pages of perfectly formatted prose and elegant figures may still not be enough to change their minds, even if you are 100% completely and totally correct.

Shifting a referee’s frame requires that you first realize that most readers aren’t going to believe you if you’re talking about something that no one else is. Jumping into a bunch of details that seem sensible to you gets you nowhere, when the referee still can’t figure out why you’d bother even thinking about the question. You’ve got to knock down their frame before you stand a chance of getting anywhere. For example: “Although everyone assumes that stars form from gas, here’s a series of three plots demonstrating that that’s completely false when looked at in detail.” Or, “It may seem that the velocity requirements for measuring doppler shifts to detect extrasolar planets are beyond current technical capabilities, but here’s a series of plots where I show that current detection limits are indeed at a level where a monitoring campaign could detect shifts due to Jupiter-mass planets.” Or, “While the theoretical idea that the moon could indeed be made of cheese does not initially seem compelling, here are three analytical calculations suggesting that the properties of cheese could indeed be superior to rock in explaining the observed lunar properties, and thus that further work on the lunar cheese model (LCM) is warranted.” The frame breaking can’t be just a throwaway line, but must be direct acknowldegement of and attack on the paradigm that a likely reviewer would bring to the proposal.

Under the above Lemma, Steinn got shafted in Year 1 because the reviewer came with a frame that said “This can’t possibly work”, and, by not completing enough of the work before submitting the proposal, Steinn didn’t have enough ammo to break the frame. He’s also right in the “Who does this guy think he is?” comment, since the other way you can break a frame is to have enough of a rep that people know never to bet against you. The whole business is another example of Aspects of the Running of Science That Are True, Probably Unavoidable, But Not Necessarily Fair or Optimal.

The classic three pillars of an academic position are teaching, research, and service. While the University Administration sometimes seems to think of “service” as being synonymous with “sitting on committees”, many of us enjoy taking the broader view.

As part of my service activities, this weekend I had the pleasure to talk with a roomful of fantastic young scholars from the McNair program (officially known as the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program). The program was named after one of the astronauts who was killed in the Challenger disaster). He was also a physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT.

The McNair program identifies promising undergraduates who either are low-income, are first-generation college students, or are from an underrepresented minority group. It then provides extensive mentoring to encourage the students to continue on to graduate school. The mentoring takes the form of supporting the students in research projects in their own departments, guiding them through the steps involved in preparing a strong graduate application, providing an additional resource for academic and personal advising, and waiving application fees.

If you haven’t run across this program, keep an eye out for it. If you know a student who might be a candidate, encourage them to apply. Even more importantly, if you have a chance to work with a McNair scholar, jump at the chance. These kids are phenomenal. They’re interesting and driven, and a pleasure to know.

Via Eric Rauchway (of The Edge of the American West, but guest-blogging at Crooked Timber), here is a list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, as put together by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. (You can vote for your top five.) Here are the natural scientists they’ve chosen to include:

• Richard Dawkins, biologist, author
• Jared Diamond, biologist, historian
• Neil Gershenfeld, physicist, computer scientist
• James Lovelock, environmental scientist
• Lee Smolin, physicist
• Harold Varmus, medical scientist
• J. Craig Venter, biologist, entrepreneur
• E.O. Wilson, biologist

Bjørn Lomborg is also on the list, but I don’t count him as a natural scientist — Sunita Narain is also a close call, but seems to fall more on the activism side than pure environmental science. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker would also be there if you classified linguistics as a natural science. I also didn’t include economists, who are certainly social scientists in my classification. And V.S. Ramachandran I counted as more of a psychologist. This is a thankless task.

Note that the list is concerned with public intellectuals — people who have influenced the wide-ranging public discussion in some substantial way — so there’s no point in wondering why Lee Smolin is there but not Ed Witten. You are, however, allowed to wonder why there aren’t more physicists over all, and whether physicists should be blaming themselves or shaking impotent fists of rage at the selection committee. Either way, those biologists are kicking our butts.

Much of the April 15th angst that Sean described comes from student’s questioning “Will I be a success if I go to this particular graduate school?”. They place a tremendous weight on this decision (and rightly so, given the 5+ year duration of a typical PhD). The decision of where to go to school presents a clean well-defined juncture, where you can imagine two clear paths before you, one that leads to a happy land filled with unicorns and flowers and all night coffee shops and independent record stores, and another that leads to a sad grey land where you spend your time shuffling piles of paper for The Man. However, having been in the game from the faculty side for nearly a decade, I can say that much of what determines whether one is a “success” is largely independent from this decision. (An aside: for this discussion I’m going to assume “success” equals working as a research scientist, which is the typical goal of an entering grad student. I don’t mean this as a value judgement, since “success” is really “whatever career path you find fulfilling”, and I’m just as happy to train phenomenal future high school science teachers as future faculty at Harvard.)

I think the essence of what determines your long-term success as a scientist is your ability to influence the scientific discussion. When you’re at a point in your career when people pay attention to your work, and want to know “What does <your name > think about this?”, you are on a near certain path to a stable position as a research scientist. Instead, if no one is reading your papers (to the extent that you’ve published them at all), or wants to hear what you say at conferences, or calls you up to ask you about your area of expertise, then you’re in danger of drifting out of the field.

Now, the factors that lead to having scientific influence are many. Among the most important are:

• Writing lots of papers
• Writing interesting papers
• Writing papers using novel or superior data sets
• Writing papers on a timely topic
• Being recognized as leading the above papers, rather than being directed by others
• Communicating your ideas with clarity
• Being socially well-connected in your field
• Being really, really, really, unusually smart and/or creative
• Having influential mentors promoting you

To be scientifically successful, you don’t need to have all of these factors, or even most of these factors. You just need to have enough of them, or a long enough suit in one or two of them, that people can’t ignore what you’re doing.

Of this list, there are at least half that are almost entirely under a student’s own control, no matter where they go to graduate school. You can pick inspiring mentors, write lots of papers on interesting, timely topics, and give riveting talks about them, no matter where you are. You can fail to write any papers (on topics boring or not) and give lousy talks, under the negative guidance of ineffective advisors, even if you go to a top-ranked school. Some of the other factors do probably have some correlation with top-ranked programs, in that such programs are more likely to have the luxury to admit only students with early evidence of brains and creativity, and they tend to have more of the resources that lead to superior data access, or a larger pool of productive theorists (postdocs & faculty). [However, in astronomy at least, there is sufficiently rich access to public resources (SDSS, NASA's Great Observatories, 2MASS, etc) that one can usually have sufficient access to create "novel or superior data sets" no matter where you are. For lab-based physics, this is likely less true.] In this list, the relative “prestige” of one’s graduate program has little direct impact on your eventual scientific impact. When I hire postdocs, or evaluate fellowship applications, I am drastically more impressed by what someone actually did, than where they went to school.

Besides the import for deciding where to attend school, the above elucidates why “climate” issues can have such a large impact on your eventual career success. If you’re at an institution that places obstacles in your path that make it difficult for you to write papers, to find good mentors, and to make scientific connections in your field, then you’ve got a problem. You’re going to be struggling uphill.

However, the same list also provides the recipe for climbing that hill, if you find that you’re on it. The number one thing you can do is to write papers (and preferably interesting and timely ones). People cannot ignore a large body of high quality work for long. Sometimes it takes a while before they notice, it’s true. But the more you publish, the more likely it is that people will begin to notice your work, and be influenced by it. As that happens, they will start noticing you as well, and will tend to deem you “someone worth having around”, whether as a postdoc, or at their conference, or as their next faculty colleague. This process is vastly easier with a good mentor behind you, but if you wound up without one (or gawd forbid with an anti-mentor), it’s going to be your only route out.

I think the clearest evidence of this is a relatively jaw-dropping preprint that was recently posted to the arXiv (h/t to Zuska). A former particle-physics postdoc (and current grad student in statistics) carried out a very detailed analysis of the productivity of postdocs on the Run II Dzero experiment, and how that translated into giving conference presentations, and being hired into faculty positions. The paper found that the postdocs’ success in eventually landing faculty jobs were highly correlated to productivity (as measured by internal papers), to conference presentations (which were awarded by the leadership of the project), and to the degree of “physics socialization”. These correlations are all what you would expect, and reinforce the above list of what leads to being scientifically influential.

The jaw-dropping aspect of the paper is that the awarding of conference presentations was grossly gender biased (as was the fraction of service work assigned to the women). The female postdocs had drastically higher levels of productivity (indeed, half the men were less productive than the least productive woman), but were allocated far fewer conference presentations than men with comparable productivity. (Note: this is a paper you actually have to read, rather than just flipping to the table at the end. It’s a very well-done piece of statistical analysis, and can’t be fully appreciated from just comparing two means in a table.)

In this exercise, we see the influence game writ large. You need to be productive and visible. If some sort of bias (against women, or shy people, or people from state schools, or whomever) is present that conspires to make you less visible, you’re going to have to be even more productive. It’s not fair, and people in positions to fight against the bias in their institution should do so. But, at least it’s something that you have a chance of controlling.

A: Hey, what’s up? You’re looking a little anxious these days.

B: I know. We’re getting close to the romance deadline.

A: The romance deadline?

B: Yeah, in a couple of days I have to decide who I’ll be going out with for the next five years or so.

A: Oh, right, I forgot. Have you decided between boyfriend and girlfriend?

B: I’ve thought about it a lot, and I definitely want a girlfriend.

A: That’s cool. But don’t you worry that the standards are higher if you say you want a girlfriend? I’ve heard that boyfriends are much easier.

B: I heard that, too. But girls are what I’m really passionate about.

A: Couldn’t you just get a boyfriend first, and then switch if you don’t like it?

B: Some people try that, but it can be awkward. Better to just be honest about your intentions from the start.

A: Fair enough. So did you get any acceptances?

B: Yeah, two different women have agreed to date me. Cindy and Alyssa. But I have to choose one.

A: Hey, that’s great that you go two offers. Have you made a choice yet?

B: Well, I had coffee with Alyssa, and we really hit it off — she’s beautiful, and charming, and laughed at my jokes. I definitely think we would get along well over the next few years. I met Cindy, too; she’s a knockout, and clearly very talented, but there wasn’t as much of a spark there.

A: That can happen. So are you going to choose Alyssa?

B: I’m tempted, but the thing is — Cindy’s US News ranking is much higher.

A: Her what?

B: Every year, US News puts out rankings of boyfriends and girlfriends. Now, Alyssa is a solid top-20 girlfriend, but Cindy is top five! I’m really worried I’d be making a mistake by passing up the opportunity to go out with Cindy. Everyone has heard of her.

A: That sounds a little weird to me. How do they come up with these rankings?

B: Nobody knows, really. But everyone takes them very seriously. Still, I keep hoping that the NRC will update their boyfriend/girlfriend rankings soon. Those are supposed to be much more scientific.

A: NRC?

B: The National Romance Council.

A: But look, you seem to have really hit it off with Alyssa. Who cares that US News ranks Cindy higher? The concept of a “boyfriend/girlfriend ranking” just doesn’t make sense — what matters is how well you personally get along with them, not some pseudo-objective measure of excellence.

B: It’s easy to say that, but this is a big decision. I’m really worried that, ten years from now when I’m ready to get married, my prospective spouse is not going to be nearly as impressed that I went out with Alyssa than if I had gone out with Cindy.

A: Come on, it’s five years of your life that we’re talking about here. Your chances of eventually being happily married would seem to be a lot better if you choose someone you’re likely to be happy with right now.

B: You’re right, I know. Well, I hope Cindy won’t be disappointed. I don’t think she’s used to being turned down.

A: Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure she’ll get over it.

One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

Fortunately, being a relatively clueless 20-year old, I was only dimly aware of these things. I was interested in gravity and cosmology, and I had heard Wheeler knew a thing or two about such topics. So I waltzed in, and asked if he had any projects I could work on. I staggered out of his office four hours later, laden with books, a clearly defined project in my hands. For the ensuing two years I spent essentially every weekday with Wheeler. Each morning I would rush over to his office, always to be greeted the same way: “What’s new?” I would have been up late the night before, desperately trying to find something interesting with which to answer that question. We would then spend hours working together, going over my results, scrutinizing my calculations, poring through the literature, brainstorming new ideas. Wheeler gave me a direct and personal introduction to the joys of research. We would break for lunch, and walk up to the faculty club. I often had trouble keeping up with him. He would always take the stairs (”No time to wait for an elevator!”). He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 79 years old.

We would often work all afternoon (with the occasional interruption, the nuisance of having to leave for my class lectures). Every evening I would walk with him from Jadwin up across the full length of campus, to catch his bus. We would pass the corner of Ivy lane and Washington road, where he had scratched 137 into the concrete when they were pouring the sidewalk. We would pass Jones Hall, where he used to discuss relativity with Einstein. We would continue on through campus, crossing in front of Nassau Hall. Wheeler would insist we walk diagonally to the far gate, instead of exiting through the more convenient FitzRandolph Gate. An Undergraduate was not meant to exit FitzRandolph Gate until graduation, and Wheeler didn’t want to be responsible for what might occur were I to break tradition.

For two years I sat at the feet of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry. Over the ensuing years we kept in touch. We collaborated together on Wheeler’s last published paper.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at Wheeler’s bedside. I tried to say thank you. But it was impossible to convey how much he means to me, and how grateful I am to him. In that moment when I crossed the threshold to his office, I was embarking on a new path. I am still on that path, and every day I am grateful to him for showing me the way.

John Wheeler died this morning.