What I expect of my PhD students

Every graduate student needs to be aware of expectations.  Each adviser is unique and operates on different principles.  A small number view their students as a pair of hands to do the dirty work.  In the old days, some advisers expected their grad students to mow their lawn and do housework. A friend of mine from grad school had an old-school adviser who had him come to his place on the weekend for services.  However, most faculty members by that time had already moved into the modern era and this kind of despicable practice is no longer tolerated.

It is important that each student have an understanding of what they are getting into when they join a research group. Here I will explain what I expect.

My highest principle is thinking of a graduate student as a junior-colleague-to-be.  Even the best students start out incapable of doing real research.  They are clumsy in the lab and need lots of hard work to sharpen their analytical skills.  As such, my first criterion is that they be good students who like to learn.  That doesn't mean that they need to be straight-A students.  In fact, many A students make poor researchers because they lack creativity.

On the topic of classes, I believe that the more the better.  I encourage students who are in the middle of their research phase to take classes.  Ironically, the students themselves resist because they feel it interferes with research.  Even some of my colleagues prefer that their students not take courses that are not of direct help to the research at hand.  I strongly disagree with this premise. The process of learning new things sows new ideas.  I myself enjoy learning because these new nuggets of knowledge invariably get incorporated into my research, which leads to totally new and wonderful directions.

Principle 1.  Always keep learning from classes, reading the literature, and just thinking about crazy ideas.  If you feel yourself to be leaving your comfort zone, you are on the right track.  I expect my students to never stop learning and to be constantly pushing themselves.

An important part of being a PhD scientist is independence.  Grants, which support research activities, expect results.  Many advisers thus give their students a very short leash.  The end result is bad for the student's independence.  I prefer to give the student a specific assignment, and let her and him work on it for a year or so without giving them a detailed map of how to get there.  However, I do give lots of course corrections and teach them things they need to know along the way (or send them to the literature) if their struggles are based on missing information.

I once had a PhD student who complained that I seemed to be giving another student lots of attention while neglecting him.  I treat PhD and masters degrees differently.  The individual with a masters degree needs skills to survive in industry, while a PhD scientist is required to come up with new ideas and find ways to tackle a new problem.  Having said that, some of my best and independent students happened to be masters students who were quite capable of getting a PhD.

Principle 2. Learn to be self reliant early on in your research.  Read the literature and talk to others to gain the skills you need to do your work, but don't wait for someone to tell you what to do with those skills.  Constantly try new things in the lab or with paper and pencil to both sharpen your skills and generate new ideas.  You will make lots of mistakes along the way when not given step-by-step instructions, but making these mistakes and getting through them are the most important part of the experience.

I do not yell at my students, ever.  I may tell them when I am displeased with research performance, but if a student does not perform, (s)he will not get a degree.  Passing the Prelim and being in a research group is no guarantee of success.   I disagree with the idea espoused by the administration that we need to help the students along so that we increase our graduation rate.  Graduating a PhD without the proper skills and talents serves nobody.  A PhD degree is not a ticket to a good job.  It's the skills that the individual has mastered and the ability to think independently that makes him or her valuable to society.  A huge pool of unemployed physicists is not what we want to be generating.

It takes lots of hard work and perseverance to finish a PhD degree.  People often ask me how many hours they should work.  My answer is all the time.  If you are not excited by your work and don't enjoy thinking about physics beyond your area of expertise, then you're in the wrong field.  Academic jobs are tough to get, and real research jobs in industry are rare.  However, PhD physicists have lots of success in engineering jobs, which are more plentiful.  If you like to tinker, then engineering may be an excellent way to earn a good living while having fun.

A PhD degree should not only be a guarantee of skills, but of work effort and perseverance.

Principle 3.  Approach your research with a passion.  The benefit of enjoying your work, aside form the direct rush of endorphins, is that you will put in the time required to do a good job.

One of the most important attributes is perseverance.  Watching Star Trek, or other sci-fi shows/movies gives one the impression that scientists apply skills to very easily solve problems.  This is not the case unless a student is super lucky.  I have a long list of stories on the same theme;  students who would spend months trying to get an experiment to run, only to have to start from scratch to try a different approach.  Aside from being good problem solvers, the PhD degree is an imprimatur of a person that does not give up.

In my PhD work, I had spent quite some time building an experiment on a 5' x 10' table optical table, which was filled with all sorts of laser sources and optics, resembling a Borg city.  Each step in the process often required a step backwards.  After completing the construction of the experiment, it still didn't work.  I then figured out the reason, tore the experiment apart and rebuilt the whole thing on another optical table with another laser.  Luckily, it ended up working.  Only then could I start taking the data that was the topic of my thesis.

Principle 4. Don't give up.  When something doesn't work, don't shy away from the problem.  Work twice as hard.  This will serve you well in all aspects of your lives.  When I was a new faculty member, aware of the importance of getting grants, I would write two new proposals for every one that did not get funded.  After my first two years, I built a healthy portfolio of projects.

Many people do not recognize the creativity behind science.  Creativity is part of choosing a scientific problem to study, helps in problem solving, and leads to interesting new science.

Principle 5.  Be creative.  Always think about neat implications of what you are doing or find new ways of looking at old problems.  This skill is particularity important in the career of young scientists who want to make it to the next level.

Principle 6.  Be meticulously careful in your work. Do not publish sloppy results, which will come back to haunt you, and always apply the highest standards to yourself.  You should be more critical of your own work than I am of you as your  adviser.  On the flip side, do not let this attitude prevent you from finishing a project.  In the end, we can never be sure if we are right, and there will always be a mistake somewhere.  If a paper is perfect, it is not science.  When working in the unknown, there are always huge dark shadows in the areas not exposed by your searchlight.

Principle 7.  Be honest with others, but especially with yourself.  Many very good scientists have fallen into the trap of fooling themselves into believing in something that is false.  Consider cold fusion, N-rays. etc.  Design experiments that are resistant to experimenter bias.  Also, do not try to make data fit your adviser's expectations.  I need to know when an experiment contradicts my viewpoint.  And it goes without saying that you should never fudge data in any way or plagiarize the work of others.

Principle 8. Impress me.  When you graduate, I need to make an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses in the letter of recommendation, which will determine your success on the job market.  Follow all of the above principles.  Do not come to my office to ask what you should do next.  Tell me the issues you are having, your line of reasoning, possible explanations, and engage me in debate about the possibilities.  You should act as a junior colleague.  Don't worry about offending me.  I am more interested in getting at the truth than being right.  However, that does not give you the right to be caustic.

What I have posted above mentions nothing of the content of the work, which is of central importance.  A short post cannot cover the nuances.  To zeroth-order approximation, I expect the student to add a new piece of physics to the body of knowledge.  This could be a theory that helps us understand a phenomenon or the discovery of a new phenomena.  Fitting data to a mathematical expression is not enough.  The parameters of the theory must have meaning that is independently testable, be interpretable in terms of fundamental processes, and make predictions well beyond the domain of the original results that generated the theory.  Perhaps I will write more on the topic later.

If you approach everything in life with a passion, it will be a fulfilling one.   When you take a break from physics, make it count.  While I may seem one-dimensional in this post, I do find time for other activities.  Though I am not good at it, I play ice hockey with a passion.  I enjoy playing the piano and writing.  Taking a break from work is, in a sense, work.  During times of alternate activities, things percolate in the brain.  I have had the most profound revelations while driving my car in the middle of nowhere or playing the piano.  So, don't hesitate to take a break with intense activities.

I have to run now.  After I finish packing, I will take a short walk around San Diego, then I have to catch a plane back to Pullman.  Until then, get excited about physics.

Annual Review of Faculty

I will once again be doing annual reviews of our faculty. Here I share my views on the process; and, describe the metrics I use to make evaluations.

There are three general categories; (1) teaching, (2) research and (3) service to the university and the profession. The annual review is meant to give the faculty feedback about their performance for a particular year, and is one factor in determining raises. However, given budget cuts, there will be no raises in the foreseeable future.

While a faculty member may have a long and distinguished career, it is possible to have up and down years based on the simple fact that there are fluctuations in the metrics; one year a faculty member may have 10 excellent papers followed by a year with none. However, the annual reviews will not fluctuate as much as the metrics given that fluctuations are inevitable and usually not a sign of a problem.

Teaching is evaluated based on several pieces of information. The syllabus shows how the course is organized and faculty usually provide a narrative on new ideas that they explored to enhance learning outcomes as well as student feedback in the form of course evaluations.

I am strictly opposed to standardized teaching evaluation forms because they often lead to meaningless comparisons between professors in the form of numbers that each students assign using very different criteria. I marvel at the well-reasoned forms that each of our professors produce and the unique information that they solicit. Since each faculty member may be using different approaches, a single number assigned by a student does not tell a meaningful story. Thus, I usually read every comment made by each student - even in classes with 250 students. It takes lots of time, but provides quality information with which I can get a better sense of how well our courses are working.

As a case in point, several years ago, I scanned through a bunch of evaluations of a young professor who was teaching a large section with hundreds of students and noticed two things. The mean was slightly below average (i.e. the typical student choose average or below average when comparing this professor to others at our university) and the distribution was bimodal with a quarter of the students giving him the highest marks and three quarters giving him below average ratings.

I gained great insights from the correlations between the numbers and the narratives. The typical student who gave a low ranking said the course was "unfair" because it was too hard. The students giving him higher marks stated that the course was challenging but the professor spent lots of time explaining complex concepts to the students during class as well as during office hours. In addition, this professor scheduled non-mandatory help sessions so that students could ask questions and get extra help.

A picture emerged of a dedicated teacher who expected excellence but was willing to expend a great deal of additional effort to make sure that the students learned. While his average course evaluation was lower than many of the other faculty in our department, I judged him to be a more dedicated teacher than those whose evaluations were high and the comments uniformly positive about the fact that the class was "fun" and "easy."

Research is more difficult to judge. The fact that a funding source is willing to pay top dollar to a given faculty member is a good indication that this individual and his/her work is considered useful or interesting. Similarly, papers that make it through the peer review process at good journals have convinced an editor and a few reviewers of correctness and importance. If a piece of work gets many citations, then it shows that people are reading the papers and finding them useful. Thus, a blend of these factors provides a good indicator of research productivity and quality.

However, these indicators can have the opposite meaning. For example, a paper may be cited many times as an example of bad science. Or, an individual with lots of citations may be a technician who provides specialized samples to many research groups. While such a person is contributing to the science by providing samples, the number of citations may not be a sign that the work is particularly interesting or creative.

Lots of funding is not always a sign of good science. A company may grant big bucks to a researcher to test a trivial property of a product. In contrast, a small grant from the National Science Foundation for work by a single PI who is challenging our perceptions of the nature of space-time would carry much more weight in my mind.

I try to consider all these factors together when evaluating the research productivity of a faculty member, which includes learning a little bit about their research. I may look at the h-index and or the numbers of publications or citations per dollar spent, or other ratios to develop an impression of the research quality. Faculty members who have attained Fellow status in a professional society get such honors from significant lifetime contributions to their fields, so fellowship in a society factors into the annual review. In the end, I make a value judgement that may or may not be in line with what others may think. I accept the fact that the process is far from perfect.

Finally, there is service. Every faculty member is expected to contribute to the operations of the department and the university. Faculty members sit on tenure committees, thesis examination committees, search committees, and do all kinds of thankless tasks such as recruiting students, writing reports for the administration, and doing self studies that support our claims that we are a high quality department relative to our peers. I look for not only quantity of service, but the impact that it has on our department and university.

Service to the profession takes the form of membership on program committees for conferences, being on editorial boards of journals, reviewing papers for journals or proposals for funding agencies, organizing conferences, acting as an external examiner at other universities, and serving on panels that take advantage of an individual's scientific expertise. An active scientist does this kind of service as a matter of daily routine. I thus expect to see a substantial professional service component from each faculty member.

To make a final assessment, all of these factors are taken into account. A positive annual review requires significant accomplishments in at least two of the three major areas, with emphasis on research and education. What makes my job especially difficult is that our department is very strong. All faculty members are doing high-quality research, are well known in their fields, are well funded and are advising undergraduate/graduate students.

I have a few weeks break until I need to get around to this unpleasant task, which takes 5 full days to complete. For now, I am enjoying my break doing some new physics, which includes having completed an interesting calculation that was motivated by my proofing of one of Shoresh's manuscripts. Before the intensity of the new semester begins, I need to proof and submit a few more manuscripts for publication, as well as review a few more papers.

This past year has been a local maximum with a record 12 publications in refereed journals (almost 10% of my lifetime 123 publications), not to mention a bunch of invited and contributed talks. Now I will need to get back to work to maintain this momentum. But not until I take a day off to enjoy family, friends, and this wonderful place we call home.