It’s been a crazy couple of weeks here in Syracuse since I got back from China. Certainly, for the last week, I haven’t even found time to blog, even though there have been lots and lots of things to talk about.
Anyway, tonight the cosmology group took me out for dinner and drinks. It was a lovely time. The cosmology group here doesn’t have very well defined edges, since there are many collaborations involving high energy theorists and cosmologists. But the people there tonight were my colleague Cristian Armendariz-Picon, our postdocs Levon Pogosian and Nicolas Chatillon (who, for example, we share with high energy theory) and my graduate students Alessandra Silvestri and Eric West.
This group is working on a wide variety of topics in cosmology and particle physics: anisotropic cosmologies, modified gravity, perturbations in models of cosmic acceleration, baryogenesis, inflation in supergravity, braneworld models, dark matter, and many many more. As you might imagine, this makes for a stimulating environment.
This post isn’t about anything particularly deep, but one thing I hope our blogging can achieve is to give an idea of what it is like to be a scientist, and what are the pluses and minuses of the career. For me, evenings like tonight are one of the big pluses. Working with other people who love what they do the way that you do is a wonderful experience, made even better when they become friends. Tonight we talked about life, about cosmology and about physics gossip over burgers and a couple of beers (well, I had a clam sandwich, but that didn’t seem quite poetic enough). Great fun!
It is true that we live in very difficult times for science. Funding is hard and science is under attack. Certainly, my co-bloggers and I have written about these problems many times. However, it is equally important to point out and remember the great things about life as a scientist.
If you want to follow this career path it will undoubtedly be difficult, involving many years living on a graduate student stipend, further years of career uncertainty as a postdoc, and insane hours at relatively low salary for your training if you are lucky enough to become a full-time research scientist. It is a hard and exhausting job. And it is definitely worth it!
September 14th, 2005 at 11:54 pm
Hear hear. I hope we do a good job of giving people the impression that being a research scientist is a uniquely fortunate position, uncertainties and pressures notwithstanding. And the colleagues are a big part of it.
September 14th, 2005 at 11:57 pm
On the other hand, fashion-trend forecaster sounds like an intriguing alternative career path.
September 15th, 2005 at 2:37 am
As is common this time of year, undergraduate seniors such as myself are wondering, “is graduate school the right thing for me?” Being an avid reader of science blogs, I get to read of the daily/weekly experiences of practicing scientists whose research, well, is just cool. But one cant help but wonder, if the job prospects are so lousy and the work so demanding (and painful), is the enjoyment one gets from studying the physical world really worth it afterall. Naturally the posters here would say yes, hence “It is a hard and exhausting job. And it is definitely worth it!” Just don’t know if its right for me.
September 15th, 2005 at 5:40 am
Hi Doran. In general I wouldn’t say the work is painful – it’s challenging, unpredictable and exhausting; but fascinating and rewarding.
The question of whether graduate school and this career path is the right choice, definitely depends on the person. It is important to grasp the nature of the obstacles, uncertainties and demands before making a decision. For some people it just won’t be the right choice. I wish you luck making it for yourself.
The career isn’t for everyone. Given the realities of the job market, and the lengthy path one must travel before even entering it, if there are other careers in which you think you’d be equally happy and which don’t have these drawbacks, then I’d advise you to aim for those.
However, if this is what you want to do, regardless of the obstacles, then what I wanted to do in this post was hopefully to reassure you that at the other end it truly is the wonderul experience it seems from afar in graduate school. Sometimes we write here about the harsh realities of academia; but we love it, and you will too if you decide it is what you want to do.
Good luck if you decide to apply. Let us know here how it goes.
September 15th, 2005 at 6:50 am
hey Mark, I really appreciated this post. I’m still a grad student in biology, so I complain a lot (not so much about the stipend, but other things.) But I think it’s also important to point out the relative fortune we have (especially in biology, which is better funded than other disciplines).
To me the greatest advantage of being a scientist is the reasonably flexible work hours.
September 15th, 2005 at 6:54 am
Sean – thanks for the link. I think I found my calling. I’m not joking. I thought about becoming a fashion consultant for scientists, but maybe the fashion trend forecasting would be more profitable.
September 15th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Mark – Since this is a general posting, maybe it would not be inappropriate to go off-topic. I just finished Lisa Randall’s book, Warped Passages (which is well worth reading for the non-scientists in the audience; it’s a bit bloated and extremely slow in getting to Randall’s own work, but clear and fascinating when she does get there). Randall states, as you have as well, that gravity must propogate into all dimensions but the other three forces can (must??) be confined to our four dimensions. Randall puts this in terms of the gauge bosons of the other three forces being trapped on a four-dimensional brane while the graviton cannot be so confined. However, she never explains why this is so. What is it about gravity or the graviton that requires it to enter all dimensions while other forces and gague bosons do not (or can not??). At one point she cites this as a consequence of the Standard Model; at anothe point she has it as a known fact going back to Kaluza-Klein, which must mean it is a consequence of GR.
Is it possible to explain why physicists believe that this must be the case?
Thanks in advance,
TM
September 15th, 2005 at 10:35 am
I’d also say to Doran: if you’re unsure about going to grad school, but think it sounds fun: go for it! You can always change career later (as most people have to do anyway). At least in the US. In some countries many companies seem to rather think that a PhD is a drawback.
I wish there had been scientist blogs 8 years ago when I was deciding what to do. At that point the university web pages where so bad that it was really hard to find out what they were doing. But I didn’t regret it one single day so far.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Sean – thanks for the link. I think I found my calling. I’m not joking. I thought about becoming a fashion consultant for scientists, but maybe the fashion trend forecasting would be more profitable.
*********************************************************
Suz, you beat me to it.
Is there such a job as an IMAGE CONSULTANT to scientists?
a) If you find yourself glaring or peering short-sightedly at people, maybe you need new glasses. On the subject of eyewear, au courant frames or contact lenses help upgrade your look from the Sputnik era.
b) A daily shower and freshly laundered clothes go a long way. While you are in the shower, you may want to apply a hair product called “conditioner”. This makes your hair look neater (until you get frustrated by a problem and run your chalky fingers through it). If you can operate a particle accelerator, you can master the logistics of a hair dryer. If you have facial hair try to keep it neatly groomed. Take a few hours off from the lab/ computer and persuade a stylish friend to take you to the mall and give you a makeover.
c) Make a concerted effort to banish nervous tics like cuticle biting. Also try not to spit when you talk.
d) Learn to get an accurate reading on people’s body language/ facial expressions. Recognizing cues such as boredom or being overwhelmed is the first step in realizing that you may be not getting your message through to your audience.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
TM– I will post about Lisa’s book sometime soon. The fact that Standard Model fields can be (not “must be”) confined to a brane embedded in higher dimensions is an amazing fact about branes; it’s not implied by either general relativity nor by the Standard Model itself.
Gravity, meanwhile, is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime, so it will always be able to “leak into” the extra dimensions whenever they are there. Randall and Sundrum (and subsequently others) have figured out clever ways to prevent that leakage from being easily noticeable.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Suz and Citrine — the image-consultant-to-scientists job is an important and underserved one, I agree. But you need to figure out who exactly is going to pay you to do this — the scientists themselves don’t typically put too much effort into image maintenance. Perhaps you could get a grant from one of the professional societies, or just take up contributions from students who have to take their classes.
September 16th, 2005 at 6:06 am
Hey, we could always image consultants, though to earn the big bucks the advice will have to go deeper than just basic personal hygene and some low-level communication skills.
To Doran, I would caution being goal oriented when it comes to graduate school. If you can afford taking a few years for self improvement, this could be great deal of fun. If you think about it as a trade school, the dues you have to pay to become a professional, you may set yourself up for some frustrating times.
best,
Moshe
September 16th, 2005 at 8:08 am
Sean and citrine re: image consultant:
Well I agree a big problem is finding a market. (If it weren’t a big problem, I’d seriously be doing that now.)
I think most scientists don’t care enough to pay for that. There’s only a handful of circumstances of which I can think where an Image/Fashion Consultant for Scientists might be important:
- when science grad students/ postdocs leave the profession for something where dress is more important. I actually discussed this with a local fashion designer, and she says she meets a lot of graduating PhD students looking for a whole new wardrobe (and advice) for their new job.
- when scientists get passed up for advancement/ tenure and image plays a role. Obviously dressing well is not a requirement for becoming a tenured professor, but I think sometimes other image issues – such as looking too young to be taken seriously – can get in the way.
Personally I don’t care what other people wear so long as I don’t see body parts I’m not interested to see, even though I pay a lot of attention to my own dress myself.
But (and this topic deserves a blog post of its own) I think a lot of scientists really need to work on their communication skills. Even when they/we talk to a non-lay audience, many don’t communicate clearly. I hate going to a talk where the speaker doesn’t start by explaning the relevance of her work. Or where the speaker talks into his chin, or assumes everyone in the audience thinks about his particular topic every day. I see a big need for consultants for communication and presentation skills for scientists.
September 16th, 2005 at 11:19 am
Yes, it’s a common observations that scientists are much more concerned with substance rather than style (although there is no law of the universe proclaiming the two attributes to be mutually exclusive
).
It is also true that those of us who love doing science are perpetually perplexed that so few people actually share our intellectual interests. Admittedly, there are many factors that contribute to this situation. But from personal observations I claim that a considerable disincentive for H.S./ college students to get into the sciences is the “image problem” associated with the practitioners of scientific disciplines. Therefore, making an effort to cultivate a better image is, in my humble opinion, not a frivolity but a professional service!
September 16th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Well Citrine, it did cross my mind when we were first plotting about this blog that we could be very pop-culture and go with a name like “Science Eye For the Everyday Guy”, or something like that (where “guy” is gender neutral), but I abandoned this (did not ever tell my co-conspirators about it, thank goodness, as they’d have gone looking for someone else). For those of you who don’t know, this is modeled on the lifestyle/fashion makeover show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, or whatever its called. So now I see that we can do both! We could show up in an SUV at somebody’s house and do both a science and a lifestyle/fashion makeover……excellent!…
You saw it here first, folks…
Um…Producers… you know my email….
-cvj
September 16th, 2005 at 11:33 am
What about “Strings and Threads”?
September 16th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Bloody hell, that’s great! -cvj
September 16th, 2005 at 11:45 am
(pardon my “french”…) -cvj
September 16th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Oh…. that would only work for a solo effort (you know, the edgier HBO spin-off series). I must stress again that my colleagues are not string theorists….
-cvj
September 16th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
“I see a big need for consultants for communication and presentation skills for scientists.”
Absolutely! and in many graduate schools there is a required course, at least if one is involved with teaching. There are various other measures departments are taking (too many to list here), again in connection with improving teaching by both faculty and graduate students. I agree that generally one is not sufficiently trained in that part of the job, and has to work on intuition and instincts alone.
The image issue is more tricky business, as other threads here discussed several times, plenty of it has to do with how the media presents science and scientists. Not sure that clipping our fingernails regularly is going to help with that, but that certainly is a good start.