I have heard variations of this line so many times over the years that I lost count long ago and certainly don’t remember half of them. As familiar as it is, my internal reaction to it is never totally simple. It is clearly often meant as a compliment, I’m glad that I don’t look like your average concept of a physicist [nerdy white guy with funny hair?], and in fact one of the things I like about what I do is that I defy expectations every day just by showing up at work. But there’s of course so many stereotypes (about, depending on what’s said, science, gender, looks, style, age, personality, smarts and their various correlations) in variants of that statement that it’s hard to even know where to start.
But all that aside, I got a new one recently: “You seem too relaxed to be a physicist.” Now, that’s probably just because I took my first real vacation in years, and a proper time on Kaua’i followed by a move to a wonderful city will make anyone seem relaxed — people who know me well would hardly say that “relaxed” is my general demeanor, and I’m sure it won’t last. But I was surprised to hear that it was perceived by someone as the anthesis of being a physicist.
Actually, the one I have been getting most often recently since I acquired my new professorial title is “You look too young to be a professor”. Now, although I am 10 years out of college and older than these young humanities whippersnappers who show up to teach fresh from defending, since the average time that a professor spends on a faculty (or some combination of them) is probably of order four decades and I’ve been here a month, this isn’t too surprising of a comment. Regardless, I still haven’t come up with a witty comeback. Any suggestions?
October 16th, 2006 at 10:37 am
“Thank You” would be the obvious comeback for your last paragraph, you can use it for decades.
October 16th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Just tell them that some of your best friends are nerdy old up-tight white guys with funny hair who wouldn’t appreciate the comparison.
October 16th, 2006 at 11:05 am
How about “You got me, I’m not actually a physicist, I’m a professional
poker player.”
October 16th, 2006 at 11:14 am
‘I’m very old but I simply invented a time machine…’
October 16th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Depends on if you want to keep talking to them. If so:
“I may be young, but I’ve learned a few things in my time.”
If not:
“Thanks. I’m a genius.”
October 16th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
“Thanks,” she said, thoughtfully rubbing her chin. “I tried growing a beard in order to look older, but it hasn’t really worked out yet.”
October 16th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I set a new personal record last week when a visitor declared “I was expecting someone two decades older than you.”
But eventually we all lose our ability to blend in with the grad students at social events, so enjoy the free food while you still can.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
But eventually we all lose our ability to blend in with the grad students at social events, so enjoy the free food while you still can.
Risa will never be able to blend in with us, she actually knows stuff. We don’t but we can tell when people do.
October 16th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
A student once told me I was “too cool to be that old”. She was a high school student in a summer program that I was TAing for. I was 26.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
“You look too young to be a professor.”
Maybe with you being at SLAC you are somewhat sheltered from this kind of thing, but I remember during my first month or so as an Assistant Professor my schedule was packed with various receptions, orientations, meetings, workshops etc for new faculty, and it really stood out that people in physics take a LONG TIME to become professors.
In many other fields (including other areas of science, especially math & engineering) it is common to start as an Assistant Professor right after finishing the PhD, or perhaps after one year as a postdoc or fellow somewhere. We would go around the room saying what we were working on and many people were “finishing up their thesis work.”
I was so happy to have finally achieved this stage only (!!) 10 years out of my undergrad, but I was often the oldest person in a room of children, it seemed to me. I consoled myself by imagining that tenure rates in those other departments are much lower (which I don’t think is actually true).
October 16th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Last spring, a photographer at a local art gallery wanted to take my picture for his next project and I obliged to his request. The final artwork ended up hanging in his store all summer, and the last time I visited he told me a lot of people refused to believe it’s me in the picture. Apparently the common disagreement over this is “it can’t be her, she’s a physics major!”
So apparently us physics girls can’t be pretty. Hmmm…
My usual retaliation on this is to tell non-physicists who mention it that I got lost, wandered into the store for directions, and accidentally got my picture taken. I also mention to physicists who mention it that I’m a cute girl that it was a mistake as well: I got lost, wandered into the physics building for directions, and accidentally got a major declaration form. The worrisome thing about it is the physicists are more likely to believe I’m serious.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
When someone says “you look too young to be a professor” here’s what you do: get a panicky look in your eyes, give a few glances left and right, and then snatch up an armful of the nearest available paperwork and frantically flee the room.
October 16th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Confronted with the same challenge, Feynman found that lying could be the most strategic course.
Or you could just say: “Two words. Doogie Hauser.”
October 16th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
In my early 30′s, teaching a large 100 level class, I thought I was the hip young professor.
Until I realized I was almost twice the age of my students.
October 16th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
“Too relaxed to be a physicist” is the one that you’re like to get from another physicist– even a young, with-it, female physicst.
Because many of us academics know that we’re not supposed to be relaxed.
As for too young to be a physicist– I’ve never gotten that one. However, there’s a grad student in my department who is only 3 or 4 years younger than me. (He came back to grad school after some 10 years out of college.) He was a TA for me, and one day one of the students was telling him something about how old Professor Knop is. He asked this studend how old they thought he was; the response that Professor Knop was way older than him. That made him very happy, and he reminded me of it several times in the next few weeks.
If somebody gives you the “you look too young to be a professor” thing, you might come back with a, “hmm, and you seemed to smart to be a stereotyping idiot,” or some such. Depending on whether or not you never want to hear from them again.
Of course, you could also just say, “give it time, that will go away.”
-Rob
October 16th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
When we were moving into our current abode, the neighbors kids came by to ask, “are you helping the professor move in?” I laughed, pointed at my sweetie and, said, “yes, I am helping her move in.”
October 16th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
I recommend saying “You MOM looks too young to be a professor!”
Alternately, “That’s what your MOM said!”
October 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am
“That’s because, when I was studying under Einstein in 1920, I discovered that light speed really slows time and hence, the aging process. So, you know, I started running really fast and damn if I didn’t show up here in 2006! Can you spare me a penny for hansom fare?”
October 17th, 2006 at 12:29 am
I’ve been hearing variations of this same comment every single time I say that I am a physicist to people I meet for the first time — for all my years as a physicist. At the beginning I was not sure how to take it. As you say, there may be so many different combinations of stereotypes hiding behind such a comment. But then I decided to just have fun with their bewilderment. So I simply choose to take it as compliment, smile, say “thank you”, and move on.
October 17th, 2006 at 7:52 am
Too relaxed and young-looking? A few semesters of lecturing can easily put that right.
October 17th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I just reply “we don’t all look alike”. I think that motivates at least more reflective people to pause and reconsider their biases.
October 17th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Well, I think a good reply to all these comments about being a physicist, being very young-looking etc. etc. is simply:
“and…?”
a few “and’s” usually makes people approach a (fixed)point of confusion
October 17th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Yep, I also get the “you look too young” thing all the time, usually followed by, “but, you look like a student.” My responses span a range, depending on my mood and the other person. If I am meeting someone like, say a new neighbor, I just reply “thank you” and move on. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ll say “yep, I’m actually pretty smart.”
October 17th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Regardless, I still haven’t come up with a witty comeback. Any suggestions?
“You look too old to tell the difference!”
October 17th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
No that assumes the speaker to be old. He/She may not be.
I feel too often they will not be
October 18th, 2006 at 12:36 am
The summer after my freshman year, I was working at the cyclotron at LBL as a summer intern. (Great deal for me!)
Shortly after I got there, a visiting scientist from Duke asked me, “Are you a grad student or a post-doc?” It was sad to admit that I was in fact a rising sophomore undergraduate….
Nowadays, sadly, I look like the very typical example of the physics professor — overweight nerdy white guy, perhaps not yet as old as I’m supposed to be, but with messy hair around a major bald spot. I don’t dress very well either. And I wear glasses. I only manage to break the stereotype when I’m tooling around campus on a unicycle. Yeah, that doesn’t make me look less nerdy… but it’s not what you expect out of your physics professor.
-Rob
October 18th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
“we don’t all look alike”
Unfortunately I do seem to look like the stereotypical physicist, so much so that people have guessed immidiately what I do purely on my appearance. At one time a friend of a friend I never had seen should pick me up at a trainstation and she went straight for me:
“You’re f?”
“Yeah, s gave you a good description of me?”
“No, I just looked for the guy looking like a physicist.”
I also got the same line as Rob Knop a couple of times, so sorry, my experiences do fall on the other end of the spectrum, no witty remarks here…
October 18th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
fh,
Actually I’d guess that you and Rob Knop and the others falling into the category of stereotypical Physicists have an easier time in that regard. Those of us who do not fall into the Venn diagram intersection representing nerdy fashion-challenged older white males in glasses have a harder time convincing people that we too are in Physics! (I think of it as surmounting an energy gap.)
October 18th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
“Thanks. I’ll expect that late problem set in my office by 2pm, then.”
October 18th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
With your glasses on, you remind me of Augustus Barclay Yaffle, aka Professor Yaffle. Yes I know he was a man, am not saying you look like a man, because you obviously don’t, he was a bird.
He was based on Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell your not related are you??
You know what? I hate Bagpuss, he was always was on during school hours. Which meant, for me to watch Bagpuss, I had to be ill. One time I was off, even though I was terribly ill with the measles, I would still watch it, just to watch Professor Yaffle. I had a feeling, back then that he was based on a real character, and today I found out who. So thank you for looking like professor Yaffle.
Qubit
October 18th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Rob Knop said:
In my experience, and that of watching my friends and undergrads working under me, is that for someone a bit young looking it seems grad student is the first guess, then post-doc. The guess of grad student seems to be standard no matter how young the person looks. I had that guess directed at me as a zit-covered highschool student. Further, if you don’t look like a prof, and are hanging around somewhere where grad students don’t tend to be, the guess will be post-doc, which I, at least, had directed at me during my undergradyears and before. I think the guess goes to post-doc second mainly out of not wanting to offend anyone. It’s probably much better to guess a highschool-age kid hanging around is a post-doc than to guess a post-doc is an undergrad!
I managed to mistake a prof for a grad student at a recent conference. Not so good.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
We actually sell t-shirts that say, “this is what a scientist looks like” on the front, because of our own experiences with this phenomenon. Funnily enough this is one of our best-sellers… and particularly the women’s sizes, which is telling.
October 21st, 2006 at 3:43 am
Don’t worry about the “you look too young” stuff. It’ll eventually stop, and when it does, you’ll know you’re over the hill.