Anniversary in Samland : Part 2

Reflections on Academe

I have decided to compromise on two aspects of what I am thinking of developing as a three-parter sketch. One, the linear sequential narrative and two, exact details. Fudging faces and figures and even facts at times without altering the essentials would be the safe way to play out here, since I find it physiologically impossible to be kind to everything and everyone.

I cannot claim that I wanted to be a grad student for as long as I can remember. But I wanted to be, rather I knew, I would be a grad student, ever since I opted to join the physics department of institute xxx, the most prestigious such program in my native land with all the associated benefits that brand name manages to carry in our pretentious world. I was in many ways the starry eyed kid when I chose to study physics in college, I was bubbling with ambitions of unifying field theories, and when I graduated, I was the perfect picture of disillusionment (and hadn't learnt any field theory by the way). Well in a way this being put in your place is the deepest realization in their careers that probably all students of physics make (except the ever-enthusiastic not-too-bright varieties that live on a diet of happy hormones and are incapable of the threshold depth of thought needed to experience existential angst), but my experiences, compounded by my own intransigence and particular bad luck, were a bit too drastic even by those standards.

Anyway all that prelude was just meant to give the reader some idea about my attitude towards and expectations from my career, and academic systems in general, when I crossed the Atlantic (and half the Asian and whole of the European landmass before that). As mentioned already I was disenchanted and to a great degree depressed with my past, but now my expectations were so low that I'd be easily pleased, and this new phase of my career held out a lot of promise and excitement. Was my situation, with respect to my academic life at least, similar to that of the Depression Era immigrants whose first awestruck glimpse of the Statue of Liberty is so celebrated in celluloid? I couldn't help toying with the analogy as my plane decided to curve away in preparation for landing and I caught my first and distant glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. But I did not want to dream any more, for dreams always come with rude awakenings. A resolute karmic blankness was better.

University formalities were expectedly smooth. I decided to like the NPB (the neat and stately New Physics Building which was to be my place of work) and the large tree (what tree is it?) that obscures its sight from the street, at first sight. Thoughtful and charming, was the idea to have a sort of science museum in the ground floor....with its madcap chaotic pendulum, a couple of optical tricks and a plasma discharge tube, it was on the whole a welcoming and friendly place for hardboiled physicist and child-on-a-school-trip alike. I even had my name up on the door of an office room. Quite uplifting. Now I was a recognized graduate student with my own stamp of spatial authority on hallowed research territory, no more the undergrad to be kicked around and bossed over and denied research privileges...it was a childhood dream come true! Just overdoing it a bit for the sake of nerd blog humor, you see. The first few days, heady as always, meeting new people, settling in, six hours of prelim exam and an hour of english speaking test later, I was a happy animal quite at home in my academic environment. The fact that I topped the physics test and max-ed the speak test did not do any harm at all to my now rapidly recovering (and in hindsight rather flimsy) self-esteem.

Now begins that strange journey which they call graduate core coursework. Now I am a student with a Masters' degree, having done my fair share of coursework. My nonchalance at not studying for courses and passing and even flunking exams was of the same degree exhibited by Camus' L'Etranger at his mother's funeral. Of course I wanted a waiver and to jump into the real stuff, research and advanced courses, right away. I wasn't the American grad student for whom the grad core coursework invariably turns out to be some sort of a forbidding initiation ceremony. Here comes the reassuringly depressing realization. Pompous, self-important, authoritarian people exist in all parts of the world. And I was always to be haunted by my grade-sheet from xxx. Consequently I was forced by the all powerful prof in charge of our fates (Dr. MAD) to take quantum mechanics (QM-1) replete with all the prosaic particle-in-a-well-harmonic oscillator-hydrogen atom routine. Classical mechanics I thought might be interesting to go through the mathematical formalism and dynamical systems part again, and I wasn't too disappointed in the end. But the real deal was Electromagnetic theory (EMT-1) and we would be solving that nightmarish canonical textbook by J.D.Jackson with a professor (let us call him Dr.Bessel or Dr.B) who had the reputation for eccentricity and taskmaster-de-rigeur in equal measure (more on him later).

This sketch so far has turned out to be way more detailed and inaccessible than I had willed it to be. So I'll quickly summarize what I liked about the coursework. Comparisons with the previous system I had been exposed to were inevitable.

1) Homework : This forms an important chunk of the US grad school experience. This is an excellent way to learn stuff. You get to figure things out, discuss with peers, be under a system of continual evaluation...the list of benefits is never-ending. If I were to put it in one line : solving problems is the ONLY way to learn physics. Back home, most teachers were too lazy to assign homework, and even among students, the problem-solving work culture was absent.

2) Responsible Teaching : The QM-1 teacher was the one least liked by students. He lacked rigor in development, was obscure with presentation, used to unconsciously pester students with condescending questions. Still the amount of effort he would put into the course, in terms of clarifying doubts and being accessible to students, were all above the average I had come to expect. Teaching here is a job you get paid for, and you strive to do it well. As simple as that. To all the unwilling people back home I had encountered who think teaching is only a secondary part of their duties, and for whom, we poor undergrads were a tax on time which could otherwise be well-spent on exalted research (shall we compare the publications per capita for people here and there?) and hence a receptacle for their irritability, I would advise immediate relinquishing of their jobs and joining some research-only institute or better still, retirement to some obscure Himalayan cave, where they can in the true ostrich-like Indian tradition strive for exalted knowledge while being detached from humanity (who wouldn't be much worse off without their likes).

3) Respect for the student : Thoroughly professional conduct and respect for the student as a human individual with certain intellectual aspirations is something I have always received here, barring two notable exceptions. One of the deviants, Dr.B said some of the most politically incorrect things you'll ever hear in an American graduate classroom, yet he will remain one of my favorite teachers ever for all the concern he showed for students and more importantly their physics education. Dr.M was the reassuringly familiar pompous ass who gets me nostalgic about xxx.

A considerable part of my first year went away just in solving homework problems, mostly Jackson. Courtesy Dr.B we're all hooked to Jackson now more or less, and I think it'll still be fun to go back to the energetics problems of chap.1 or the Green's function expansions of chap.3 when I'm feeling empty. My earlier encounter with this book had been painful. Now I overcame that mental block. It was like learning swimming and whoever learns it without floundering about a bit? Some of the other homework, especially QM and statistical mechanics was drudgery, as I learnt nothing new but still had to solve routine problems.

Now let's take a slightly different track. My teaching duties. Another very important and no doubt colorful part of the US grad school experience. I was assigned mechanics labs, 2 sections, each with 18 ug kids. The sense of absolute power I had over these little ones (evil laughter) and even a little bit of responsibility (really I am getting very soft and moral these days) gave me a lot of kick. The experiments, by Indian standards, were ninth-grade, at best high school level. But the amount of care put into designing them was evident. They were meant to get simple ideas across to people with a very diluted high school education and some even from a non-science background, and even within that the smart thinking directed at making things easy and user-friendly (this wonderful American trait I have written about at length in part-1 of these sketches) was evident. The two guys overseeing the lab are friendly and active. One of them holds a Phd in physics education from Chicago (They do take their teaching very seriously here!)

The social dynamics of the classroom was something I was apprehensive of to begin with. I was secreting more than my fair share of adrenaline when I walked in for my first lab (the bawdy joker in me cannot help a cursory thought about other kinds of hormones, for the fairer sex were more than fairly represented in this class). Friends, judge me kindly. Being educated in an all boys institution, and then spending five frustrating years in xxx where women are woefully under-represented, I have been deprived all along of any meaningful female company. Well, at any rate, getting used to the idea of sharing workspace with shapely young women in tight-fitting shorts and plunging neckline tops (which seems to be the staple all-weather Floridian female attire), took me some time. While all the feminist theory I have studied and internalized makes me sensitive to the problematics of the male gaze, a general animal feeling of wellbeing when members of the other gender (some very attractive ones!) are around, was unavoidable. Blame my inappropriate gender politic on my patriarchal South Asian upbringing! To be fair to myself, I never lose sight of the boundaries of classroom ethic; the days when a lot of my peers used to maliciously note how many TA s went out of the way to be chivalrous aren't that far behind. I hope I manage to remain fair and equable in my duties as a teacher at least.

I don't think I am that bad a teacher but my ratings remain in the high average range. I do try to put in a lot of planning and work into it, but of late I have realized, there isn't that much wrong with the technical aspects of my work. Teaching is a soft skill, and with these students from whom I am distanced by a gap of learning and culture, the importance of the softer aspects of communication become more pronounced. I have even tried writing up a few jokes in my lecture notes and using them at opportune moments in my class, but till date that hasn't worked out all that well. Guess my humor is of the borderline obscure academic variety! I have also noticed that I am better at one-on-one interactions than when I am addressing the class as a whole. Maybe I need to add some theatrical flourishes to my experiment demos and some histrionic style to my speech, I guess. But that's too much to do. I would rather teach a theory section, where clarity of communication and problem solving skills matter more. I have been till date denied that opportunity by the vagaries of the establishment. Still I do get some satisfaction out of teaching; it is after all the least manifestly useless thing that we in academia do.

What the heck! Pages of writing and no mention yet of research. The real reason I'm here for!
Well I remember having promised myself that I'd have a publication by the end of my 1st year, and declare this achievement to those who wish me well as well as those I wish ill, especially people back at good old xxx. It didn't quite work out that way but I am working on the writing phase of what will be my first research publication now, and I am quite excited and impatient about getting it done once and for all. I am real happy with my group out here; my adviser is as sound a physicist as he is a person, he knows what he's doing and collaborates extensively with other groups elsewhere. The two senior graduate students in my group are nice people and we get along very well. The work we do is entirely theoretical and mostly analytic, it has elements of both soft and hard condensed matter theory, but we maintain close ties with experiment, since we're dealing with a very new idea that is being experimentally investigated right now at this very moment. Although I was initially afraid of this field being too narrow and uncertain, the other factors and the excitement of being at the cutting edge more than compensate for that.
My first Phd research problem isn't really as hi-fallutin as I might have expected. All it needed was some knowledge of statistical physics and some metallurgish solid state that I have had to pick up along the way, something I could have handled even as a sophomore. This does disappoint me a bit while also showing up another vast cultural gap between the kind of physics I have experienced in India and here. Here nobody disrespects the simple things and nobody underestimates the students. Our model is quite simple but it explains a lot of the features of experiment and is therefore valuable. I could have, and I am sure, would have been presented with the opportunity to work on this problem and even be published as an undergrad, here! In India most people underestimate the undergrad and think he's incapable of research before he does the grad courses. There are many outstanding Indian physicists and teachers who are exceptions to this rule and I have been fortunate to work with at least one such person. But the majority of proffessors are likely to hand you a book or a paper for reading in your summer ug research project. The trick is to identify or formulate a problem accessible to an undergrad with her background and she will most definitely pay you back rich dividends, for I believe there are important problems at all levels of difficulty for people of all backgrounds and abilities. That's where the role of the mentor is so important. I have worked with mentors who made things look harder than they really were. Right now the case is opposite.

I wish I worked harder at research. Read up all the important literature in the field. Move on to a different problem. I was working nowhere near my 100% over the summer. Patience is an important virtue in research. Focus and motivation are also there. Research to me appears to be a less wild, more temperate microcosm of life itself.

If I were to very quickly mention a few drawbacks of this place, especially in relation to xxx, they would be :
1) peer group : no denying that xxx had some of the best brains in the world. the average grad student here is nowhere near that standard. People also tend to be a bit laidback here for whatever reason. I do sometimes miss the sparkling intellectual effervescence of some select people from xxx.
2) mollycoddling : i have noticed this during the coursework, students expect a lot of help from the professor including help with homework and a good idea of what the exam paper is going to be like; this probably is the outcome of a substandard ug or highshool education system. can't help conclude that american students in general are a pampered lot.
3) grad student interaction : could do with a bit more vibrancy in both academic and extra-curricular terms. but heck! even I haven't done anything to improve things.

On the whole I am very impressed with the academics at this place. Part of the reason may be selfish : clearly there has been a turnaround in my spiritual health and mental focus with change of place and setting. But equally undeniable are the aforementioned advantages, that the overall approach and way of doing things here, offer. As an Italian-American Nobel laureate once remarked : "You need to give Michelangelo a wall to paint upon and he'll do wonders. America gave me that wall". It still continues to be true for so many people, George Bush or no George Bush. I must do my best.