As a faculty member, I am first struck by the perception that many students have about what a faculty member does during the summer. Their first instinct is to assume that you have the summer off. The second instinct is to recognize that you’re doing research (or teaching, depending on your track), but to fail to understand how draining that is. For instance, many students don’t seem to realize that to work on the LHC you have to spend time at CERN . . . away from your spouse . . . and home. It’s stressful, but necessary, and certainly not different from what hundreds of other physicists are doing at CERN this summer.

I’ve realized how non-existent my summer is, to the point where I can’t even plan for a summer side project this year. As soon as classes ended, I had a week to recover before the SMU Society of Physics Students trip to California, which I chaperoned (c.f. [1]). That drained me. It was fun – a LOT of fun, actually – but the irregular sleep schedule, plus constant driving and walking and planning . . . it took its toll. I had a few days with family, and one day with Jodi, before my latest travel: to Brookhaven National Lab for the Brookhaven Forum 2010 [2]. I’m speaking here, and while writing a talk for an invited parallel session presentation is a piece of cake at my age, it’s still time away from Jodi and home.

All of this is in the context of the next few months. In mid-June, I’ll be relocating to CERN until Aug. 1. Thanks to the generosity of my friends at CERN, I have a few places to call home for the summer (so as not to burden any one person). In addition, I’ll be starting my own effort on ATLAS with a post-doctoral researcher, also moving to CERN in June, and with a summer graduate student who will accompany me to CERN for the summer.

August will bring a few weeks of down time, including a MUCH NEEDED vacation (I haven’t even started the major summer work and yet I already know in my heart that I desperately need a vacation). It will also bring the need to prep for teaching next semester, which will be MUCH different than teaching was this past semester (pre-med students instead of engineers and physics majors/minors). I’ll be sneaking class prep work into the summer, so as to relieve the burden in August. But it’s a lot to think about.

Nobody said being faculty was easy, and it’s not. But it’s a metric shit-ton of fun, even if it’s exhausting. I just hope I survive to my vacation in August, and I hope I can get my batteries back to where they need to be in preparation for my 50 pre-meds, my post-doc, and my research students.

[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/goingupalleys/category/event/smu-sps-trip-to-slacsilicon-valley/

[2] https://indico.bnl.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=189

Share this post with your friends

Related posts:

1. Our little corner of the world Jodi and I went to SMU today to do some...
2. The message: “Women in science, prepare to be mistreated?!?!” As part of my faculty preparations, I have been required...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What are the perceptions of athletics from academics? As with any school with a visible athletics program, athletes are assumed to have less preparation before coming to college and are assumed to have been admitted not because they could prove a valuable scholar but because they can run, jump, or throw (or all of these). It’s also assumed  that a healthy athletics program draws money and attention into the university, and has the potential to benefit the entire university. As with anything involving a large, up-front investment of money and human capital, there is a tipping point that must be reached before the benefits outweigh the costs. I think it’s safe to say that it is also assumed that it is the duty of the academics to make sure any under-prepared athletes get the education they deserve.

Truth usually (but not always) lies somewhere in the tangled mess of common wisdom. We can begin simply by asking “What is a scholar?” Merriam-Webster keeps it simple: “2 a : a person who has done advanced study in a special field b : a learned person” It’s not really specific about what field, or what kind of study. I think we all assume that this means academics, but why must the scholar be divorced from athletics? Exercise of any kind, coupled with activities of the mind, improves both.

Speaking from personal experience, a little exercise every day keeps my own stress levels in check and gets my creativity moving. Without some exercise, I grow irritable, incapable of executing tasks and keeping things organized, and in extreme cases feel the effects of panic or indecision. In my own life, dividing the academic from the athlete (however amateur) is a fruitless choice.

Thinking more broadly  about the university, athletics clearly has a place. It serves to attract to the school individuals who might have never considered SMU, and in that way serves to enrich the diversity of both background and mentality present in the university population. Where research or humanities fail to draw large singular  crowds and attention to the university, athletics does so with ease. Athletics forms loyalty, which can last more than a lifetime. Media are more likely to latch onto athletics than to academics – it’s easier for the media to understand and communicate (and, to be fair, it really is easier to communicate athletics simply because of its visceral, human-scale drama).

Taking a lesson from CERN and “Angels and Demons”: all press is good press. Sure, Dan Brown decimated the science to tell his story, but CERN seized on this opportunity to educate the public about the real subatomic particle research at CERN. SMU has a similar opportunity. Faced with the goal of expanding the research profile of the university, having a visible athletics program draws attention (and money) to the university from segments of the population otherwise un-inclined to care about a university. That money should not only serve the athletics program . . .  but that’s for higher-paid people than I to decide and manage.

It is also, however, incumbent upon the athletics program to act like part of the scholarly mission of the university, and if it intends to recruit students with weaker academics it must pay for tutoring and other extra academic support. I want students to have the same opportunities, and if all an athlete needs it a little extra math tutoring to take a crack at cool science classes then by God let’s see money for tutors. Academics also have a responsibility in this. They must strive to do their best to support students who need a little extra work and encouragement. Students don’t come fully formed to university – otherwise, why are they paying us to teach? All students have a talent, a love, a passion – if sports is that passion, why not draw them into science with a “Sports Science” class? It can be fun, relevant, and teach principles of modern science in biology, chemistry, and physics.

I don’t see a dual role for SMU, or any other such university, in the coming decades. Wanting to become a better scholarly institution should never be at odds with having great athletes. We shouldn’t label people as “academic scholars” or “scholar athletes,” as if those people are divorced from one another. Rather, let us labor to produce scholars, young and talented people with a love of academics and athletics, and let us give them the value system to enjoy a lifetime full of both.

Share this post with your friends

Related posts:

1. A walk in the airport I am on my first trip to CERN as a...
2. Healthcare: birthday edition While attending my nephews’ birthday party this weekend, I was...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Students at SMU were, quite literally, frolicking in the snow. Snowball fights, snowmen, laughing, running, snow angels . . . good times! Jodi and I grabbed lunch at our new favorite sandwich shoppe near campus, and I finished prepping my lecture for today’s class. That was all before SMU officially (finally!) closed the campus at 3pm. We made it home before all the crazy commuters could hit the road.

So after an insane week, I am finally ahead again on my lectures (kinda by accident). I even got to shuffle around some crazy physics ideas with a few of our grad students before we escaped for home today. Getting home without being killed was nice, though! And when Jodi saw all that snow on our yard, she went straight outside and started making a snowman.

It didn’t take me two minutes to joined her. We avoided some yellow snow left by a neighbors dog, and kept building up the snowman. The snow was a little too heavy to work with; this led to the snowman collapsing from weight at several points. It was a little taller than we intended, but Jodi’s finishing touches with the coal and the carrot (yes, we had those on hand) was great!

OK, so we had the first snow day in over a decade. Fun, but I’m glad this doesn’t happen too often here in Dallas!

Share this post with your friends

Related posts:

1. Our little corner of the world Jodi and I went to SMU today to do some...
2. Becoming This was my first week as a faculty member at...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In the span of the last five days, I’ve trained for so-called “Trigger/DAQ”, or TDAQ, shifts. These are the desks in the control room responsible for monitoring the health of data-taking, from the trigger to the pushing of reconstructed events to disk. I will tomorrow “shadow” the Trigger Desk and learn how the trigger desk shifter operates. I’ve been taking training classes, practicing on a simulated trigger monitoring panel, and tomorrow at 06:30 I’ll walk over to Point 1 and become a newbie shifter.

I’ve also been trying to get my brain around physics analysis on a hadron experiment, and specifically inside ATLAS. A colleague of mine took time this past Saturday to walk me through all the stages of analysis, from finding data, to reducing the data and creating new objects (such as Z boson candidates) to plotting the data and thinking about how to learn more about these events. ATLAS now has enough events that people are having a lot of fun (and stepping all over each other’s toes). I wanted to taste some of that excitement, and I’ve been having big highs (made my first plot) and big lows (data processing crashing after 27/3000 events).

Really, I feel like I did in 2000 when I showed up at BaBar. Nobody thinks I know how to do anything (including me), I’m absolutely terrified of pissing off an international collaboration of long-time Atlanteans before I gain their trust, and I’m exhilarated as I start to have ideas about things to look for in the real data.

I missed the first data taking on BaBar in 1999, but this is my 1999. 10 years late, but better than never.

Share this post with your friends

Related posts:

1. A quiet Sunday morning We are enjoying a quiet Sunday morning. This month has...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This lull is just ahead of a work week that, for me, leads to travel to California. I am attending a workshop on the BaBar+Belle Legacy Book, a project we’re hoping to kickoff this coming week. The idea is to compile the results of these two frontier flavor experiments into a book that serves both archival and educational purposes. I am a co-editor of one of the chapters (each one is edited by at least two people, one from each experiment). After the workshop is the BaBar collaboration meeting, where I’ll present the case for SMU membership in the collaboration. For me, this is extremely exciting. This is my first chance to become a principal investigator in an experimental collaboration. My group won’t be big, but I have some clear goals for the next 3 years on BaBar and I’m excited to become a member so we can get moving.

After this push on BaBar, I can re-focus on ATLAS again. That’s its own beast.

Let’s set all that aside, though. This is supposed to be my quiet Sunday. Blue skies. Cool air. Radio programs. Waffles. Sleep. Ah.

Share this post with your friends

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

That said, I want to comment on some observations I made about the class that SMU offers. It’s run by a third-party, and SMU clearly pays for the right to offer the course to its faculty. I started taking it yesterday. There are about a dozen required units, and you have to take four additional elective units. You must have a grade about 80% (on average) to pass the class.

The first unit was about mentoring. It defined the role of a mentor, the expectations of a mentor, and the expectations on a trainee seeking a mentor. It was actually pretty good reading. However, I noted two things in the module that stuck me as a little . . . odd.

The first was spelling and grammar. The module wasn’t well-written. The module was all about setting standards through words, actions, and behavior. It made statements like, “If a mentor argues for rigorous authorship criteria, but fails to follow his or her own advice, then lessons learned by the trainee may include that the mentor is an unreliable source of information and that the standards of conduct in research are poorly defined.” The module then, just paragraphs later, had this little grammatical gem:

“Too stimulate mentoring activity, . . . ”

I’m pretty sure that’s a textbook case of failing to set a good example by your own actions. Being lectured about being a good mentor by a text with mis-spellings, bad grammar, and poor writing was ironic, at the very least.

The second observation was a deeper one. The module presents examples of situations of bad mentoring, or stories of ethics compromised by pressures from poor mentoring, through movies and “case studies.” The first example focused on two grad students, both women, feeling abandoned by their male advisor. After failing to get an award because the mentor won’t advocate for them, one student commisserates with the other about their experiences. Is it gender bias? Is it bad mentoring? The audience is left to guess.

In the other case studies, a female grad student needs to find a replacement member for her thesis committee. She picks a male, untenured assistant professor. We don’t know the gender of the other members of her committee. The case focuses on the struggle the male professor feels when he has to judge the quality of her proposed work. Her proposal appears poor, but is he making the right decision if he turns down her proposal? In another study, a female post-doc’s research is ripped off by her male boss. In the next study, a female grad student discovers her faculty advisor plagiarizing and is told that she shouldn’t worry about it, that it’s “no big deal”. In another case study, a female student’s dissertation work is published before results are actually ready so that her male boss can secure grant funding for their lab.

See a pattern? What the hell! While I am very willing to accept that women in these positions face a much worse set of situations than their male colleagues, the message coming across from this course is that every situation involves a women in a subservient position to a male whose ethics are challenged by the male, whose work is stolen by the male, whose values are cheapened by the male. I don’t think this is what the course meant to teach, but that’s what it’s teaching.

It was after the fourth consecutive movie/case study that I got concerned (the sixth case study did actually involve a male grad student). While abuses of younger researchers might more often involve women than men, abuse can go all ways and there are male researchers who are asked to do outrageous things by their mentors or advisors. It would have been nice to see one situation early in the module that I could directly relate to, without needing to adjust my own gender schema to read for subtext.

Courses should speak to people. In total, 6/7 of the movies and case studies in the mentoring chapter were women abused my men. As a male, it would have been nice, early in the course, to read  one case study of a male student and one of a female student abused by their mentor or advisor. It would have allowed me to immediately bring my own experiences and values to the table, rather than having to calibrate constantly to make sure I wasn’t missing a gender-bias subtext in the story.

I did do another module in the course yesterday. It, too, had case studies focused on women abused by men.

Share this post with your friends

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I work in Fondren Science, which houses several departments including chemistry and physics. The whole campus is beautiful, and this end is no exception. Wherever I’ve worked or gone to school for the last 15 years, the sciences tend to be in less pleasant parts of campus. SMU certainly has the best science buildings, mixed with sidewalks, grass, and trees, of any place I’ve worked. While the laboratory facilities themselves still have a way to go to rival Stanford, MIT, Yale, or other schools, the existing buildings with their modern classrooms, labs, and (for physics) renovated offices are a good start.

Next door to Fondren is the Dedman Life Sciences building, housing departments such as biology. Together, Fondren and Dedman form  a corner at the northeast edge of the main campus. Dallas Hall, a main administrative and classroom building, is the impressive domed building shown below. This is also the headquarters of Dedman College, which contains the sciences as one cluster out of of many more departments.

This coming week is the first week of classes, starting on Wednesday. Jodi will teach her first two classes this week; her course this semester is a Cosmology class for advanced undergraduates. I’m excited and nervous for her, since I won’t be teaching until second semester. We also have convocation on Tuesday, the traditional and formal kickoff to the new year welcoming new students. For Jodi and I, this will be preceded by our first faculty meeting.

On top of all of this, we are finalizing our Early Career Award applications so we can present them to the Research office for completion of our application package. Both of us have a lot of work to do before these applications are in the right shape, but it has to get done because the deadline is Sept. 1.

Now begins the real effort of faculty life, as we rush into meetings and teaching, grants and hiring, recruiting and researching.

Share this post with your friends

Related posts:

1. Becoming This was my first week as a faculty member at...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.