My New Jobs and Working in Academia

THE NEW JOBS

I've talked before about my current position as a postdoc (short for postdoctoral scholar/researcher/fellow/etc.).  This is a temporary position very much like a medical doctor's residency.  I've held this position for the past 5 years and I've loved it, so much so that I managed to land myself a more permanent position, or I should say positions since I now have 2 jobs.

My first job that will be replacing my postdoc (which is up at the end of the month) is "Data Analysis and EPO Scientist" for Caltech but working at the LIGO Livingston Observatory (EPO stands for Education and Public Outreach).  This is a half-time position that will allow me to continue my LIGO research and continue to perform outreach.  Basically, this new scientist job at LIGO will let me to keep doing what I've been doing for the last 5 years.

My second job is an instructor position in the LSU physics department.  This semester I am teaching conceptual physics (PHSC 1001: Physical Science) which is sometimes referred to as "physics for poets".  I am especially excited about teaching the class at LSU because many of the students are future teachers themselves.  I've taught the equivalent course to this while I was at Penn State (PHYS 001: The Science of Physics).  This was the one course I had complete control over while I was at Penn State: including text book selection, lecture & exam creation, etc.  I picked this class because it is hard to teach.  Through my previous teaching experience, I discovered that the less math you use in a physics class, the harder it is to teach.  Calculus-based physics is MUCH easier to teach than algebra-based; not because the students in the calculus-based physics class are smarter (which isn't true), but because a teacher can use math as a crutch and not have to truly articulate concepts.


THE GOOD AND THE BAD

I am really thrilled about my jobs.  Not only do I have a job (with benefits) in this economic climate, but it is in my field and doing what I love to do.  I am also back in the classroom which I missed (but loved the work in outreach I've been doing).  I get to continue doing to LIGO research.

In a sense, I have a very non-traditional "professorship" since I get to teach and do research.  The reason this isn't really a professorship is that I do not have the ability to earn tenure.  In academia, after a certain amount of time (usually 7 years) you are eligible for a promotion that makes you a permanent member of the faculty at the school.  In higher education, the evaluation criteria usually include the quality of your research (usually measured on the amount of grants you obtained and papers that you published), your teaching, and your service to the school and the profession.  At very big research schools, much more weight is placed on research; in smaller liberal arts colleges, teaching is often more important.  The fact that I am in a non-tenure track position is good in that I don't have to worry about obtaining my own research funds or publish stacks of papers and it is bad in that I am never going to have the security that tenure could bring me.  Of course, I have the option of leaving my current positions in the future and finding a tenure-track job (which isn't easy to do these days).

Another good aspect about my split position is that it think it is pretty hard to get laid off from two different jobs at the same time.  I guess that's a kind of job security...  I may not have tenure but it will be hard for me to be completely unemployed.

Ultimately, I am thrilled that two different universities are willing to claim me and I still get to do what I love...  It doesn't get much better than that!

The Two-Body Problem: Relationships and Physicists

THE PROBLEM OF DUAL CAREER RELATIONSHIPS IN ACADEMIA

One of the more difficult things about being a physicist in a relationship is that your partner is usually also a professional in a technical field as well.  Working in specialized fields make finding jobs in the same location as your partner difficult.  So many of us have experienced these issues that we have a special name assigned to it - the two-body problem (re-purposing the phrase referring  to the physics of two masses interacting, say in orbit).

The problem isn't about finding work, but finding work working in our specialties.  For example, I am a skilled physics educator and every college and university teaches physics at some level so there are job opportunities for me in that respect.  Of course, these jobs are still very competitive to earn, but you get the idea that there is work out there.  But many of these jobs would likely be strictly or mostly teaching without much in the way of research opportunities.  I could be employed but I would likely not be able to continue my LIGO research which is important to me.  There are about 80 institutions from across the country and around the world that work in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (click here for a list of these institutions).  While this sounds like many, the odds of not only landing a job at one of these institutions and having fulfilling job prospects for a spouse isn't great.

My two-body problem was made official in 2003.

MY TWO-BODY PROBLEM

This is usually most difficult for us academics as we finish our degrees (or when an appointment ends if the relationship started when not a student - mine did so this is what I reference).  For me, it was especially stressful since I finished my doctorate before my husband finished his.  My solution to the two-body problem: take a mini retirement.  He was supposed to graduate next semester so I figured that I would wait for him.  Besides, after writing my dissertation, I was quite burned out on research.  Well, next semester turned into the next next semester and I started to quickly lose my mind as I wasn't nearly as burned out as I thought.  I had a small contract teaching job at Penn State, but it was something that I had been doing for years as a graduate student and it wasn't challenging or time consuming.  Then I discovered vampire books and decided to do a normal person job for fun (almost all of my work previously has been in academia).  One of my students gave me tips on where to apply for a waitressing  job.  I was looking for something in the evening, like in a bar, but I ended up with breakfast/lunch service at a hotel restaurant.  Except for the very early start time (I had to be there for 6 AM, which I know isn't that early, but doesn't exist in my universe), I loved the work!  I met lots of new people and none of them treated me like I was odd because I was a physicist (since they didn't know).  This did come at a potentially steep cost professionally since effectively being out of the field for nearly a year (like I was) is usually career suicide.

Finally, there came a job I was willing to suffer a long distance relationship for - the one I have right now.  It was pure serendipity that they were also hiring engineers with my husband's skills at the same time.  We both got jobs and we are both happily employed at LIGO now.  This is EXTREMELY rare.

Now my concern is maintaining the ability to sleep under the same roof with my husband in the future.  My job here is a postdoctoral scholar is temporary, much like a medical doctor's residency.  I've been at this job for almost 5 years now (I did get promoted to senior postdoctoral scholar after my third year) which is a long time to be a postdoc at the same place.  That's not to say that it's unusual to have several postdoc appointments at different places for more than 5 years.

What to do now?  Well, I am trying to work out a new position but I don't want to jinx by talking about it here now.  This solution would let me stay put but definitely mix things up a bit for me.  Fingers crossed!

THE TWO-BODY PROBLEMS OF MY MENTORS

To give you an idea of how lucky I am to live with my husband through our transition from student to scientist, I've had two advisors on my way to getting my Ph.D. who both had extended long-distance relationships due to the two-body problem.  The first was Gabriela Gonzalez who left Penn State to go with her husband (also at Penn State) to LSU where he was offered a prestigious position and she would be able to work much closer to LIGO.  Before they found the Penn State (and then LSU) solution to their two-body problem, they worked for about 6 years hours apart from each other (you can read about their story here - you may need to register, but it's free).  When I turned down the opportunity to go to LSU with her (due to my own relationship), I then worked for Sam Finn at Penn State.  He and his wife also spent about a decade apart before they found their solution.

Conclusion, I am lucky beyond belief to not only have a job that I love but to have the one I love with me as well.

Read More:

A Dual Dilemma  (NatureJobs.com)
Is the Husband Going to be a Problem?  (New York Times)
Women in Academia: The Two Body Problem  (Persephone Magazine)

Science Summaries on ligo.org - FEEDBACK WELCOME!

A new initiative the LIGO Science Collaboration (LSC) is undertaking is composing science summaries of all of our newly published papers so that everyone can keep themselves up to date on what new science LIGO and her sister observatories produce.  Today's post gives you a look into my experience writing one of these summaries.

One unfortunate thing about science is that almost all publications are written for an audience of other experts in the field.  This allows us to communicate to one another in efficient terminology that is all but alien to non-experts.  Some research is so specialized that it can be difficult for experts in a related sub-specialty to understand papers without careful study.  However, most physical science research is funded through government agencies - that means with your tax payer dollars.  LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (that's right kids, the same people who pay Elmo pay me!).  So, for the same reasons that I write this blog (to let everyone see inside of LIGO) the LSC is publishing these science summaries of recent publications.

There have been several already published (click on "science" and then on "science summaries"), but I wanted to talk about my experience writing one on the a paper titled "Implementation and testing of the first prompt search for gravitational wave transients with electromagnetic counterparts".  Of course, the title for the summary is a bit more succinct, "Optical, X-ray, and Radio Telescopes Seek Explosive Sources of Gravitational Waves".  This is that paper that outlines the development of the procedures and software needed to alert optical telescopes when we think LIGO may have seen a gravitational wave (I wrote about working on this in a previous blog post).

Before I started writing this summary, I re-read the paper.  Wow.  This paper wasn't too difficult to read because of jargon, but there were so many details that I thought were important (... of course I did!).  So I sat back and asked myself how I would explain this to my mother, who is a real estate appraiser and not an expert on what I do (even though she always smiles and nods when I ramble on about work).  What are the most important points I would want her to know?  The first is that we were successful in creating a system that would give us a good chance of imaging the source of a gravitational wave if we were to have a real detection.  The other was that we made partnerships with scientists who operate telescopes around the world (and they are just as excited to work with us as we were with them - but we don't talk about that in the paper).  After I determined these 2 major points, I made sure to detail the who, what, when, where, why, and how as well.  Then my draft went to the rest of the group who did the work described in this paper for their opinions.

I got many helpful comments from the project group.  There are so many small changes I was advised to make so that my prose would be better understood (I am sure my regular readers can tell me many ways that, if I just changed the way I said this or that, my blog would be improved).  Once everyone was comfortable with the summary draft, it then went to the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group in the collaboration for review.  This is where all of us who are interested in sharing LIGO's work with the public get together to plan events, etc.  The comments I got from this group had me doing some major reworking of the summary.  You see, I answered most of the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions in a few very long sentences right at the beginning.  Instead of this, it was suggested that I give a more introductory paragraph that established background instead of a flood of facts.  After these major revisions, my summary wasn't any longer and still contained all of the same information but in a much more digestible manner.

Now that the summary has been published, I am wondering what your thoughts are on it.  What could I have said better?  I've learned so much from my colleagues in writing this, but in the end, they are still experts that are just as biased as I am towards jargon.  I would love to learn from you!  Please feel free to leave comments below!

Bittersweet: The End of A Professional Service Term

I have mentioned many times on this blog that I feel that performing service to my profession is just as important as the research and public outreach that I do; in a way, this is a form of professional outreach.

I have had the uncommon honor to serve on the American Physical Society (APS) Council and then, half way into my four-year term, I was elected to serve on their Executive Board.  I have met many new colleagues whom I would have never met otherwise since we don't work in the same field of physics.  Even better, some of them have become friends (good enough friends that I will even discuss my Impostor Syndrome issue with them - I wrote a whole post about this).

As far as contributing to the profession, I have had the opportunity to work extensively on strategic planning for the next decade of the society and represented young physicists' concerns on many issues.  Even more than that, I am now able to better understand the workings of my professional society, understand the concerns of physicists who work in industry, outside of the United States, etc. and learn more about the politics (inside and outside of physics) that make research happen (or not).

My term comes to a close (on both the Council and the Executive Board) at the end of this year and I have just traveled back from my last meetings in Salt Lake City, UT.  I am sad about not getting to meet the new people who will be elected to replace all of us rotating off this year (I do recognize if we never left, there would be no new people!).  A big relief to me is that I won't have to travel so much - if you serve on the Council, that is 2 trips a year and then if you serve on the Executive Board that is an additional 3 trips (or 4 trips next year).  Since I HATE to travel, this will mean more nights in my own bed <contented sigh>.

The view from my hotel room in Salt Lake City.  This is facing Temple Square and the LDS temple is visible between the 2 red-orange buildings.

If you are reading this and are not a physicist (I hope some of you aren't since it is for you that I really write this blog), I hope that I have given you a little peek into the physics community outside of LIGO.  If you are a physicist, I urge you to consider expanding whatever service work you do to the APS, AAPT, OSA, etc.  It can be a lot of work, but I would definitely do it all over again.  Of course, service isn't all work (just mostly):

Wine tasting during the APS Executive Board Retreat, Santa Barbara, CA (Photo: Ken Cole)

Special thanks to Ken Cole for permission to use his picture of me (above).  Ken is the APS Special Assistant to the Executive Officer (and has done a great job a wrangling me these last years) and is also a gifted photographer.  You can view more of his photos here.

Night Life at the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration Meeting

I've talked before in this blog about what it is like being at various scientific conferences including the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) Meetings.  At the March LVC Meeting, I was able to share the exciting news about the "Big Dog" blind injection (my blog about it | official LIGO release) and discuss the value of blind tests in science.  Last week I was at the September LVC Meeting in Gainesville, FL and, while there was much to talk about, nothing was truly exciting except to those of us in the business.  So, I decided that I would share with you what the night life is like at a meeting like this.

On the evening of Tuesday September 27th, A good friend of mine called me to ask if I had any plans.  Since I didn't I asked what she had in mind and she told me that she and a bunch of other LIGO people were going out to a trivia night.  I had to think about this for a minute since I am very much a homebody and was looking forward to finishing the book I was reading, but then I realized that I tend to have no life at all and should go out.  So, off I went!

We ended up going to The Laboratory which is a science themed pub/cafe.  Below is a picture of me standing in front of The Laboratory:

Me in front of The Laboratory

When I got inside, I saw that the place was definitely "no frills" and a little divey but the atmosphere was still fun and settled in for an evening of showing off my vast intellectual prowess (read: know a few of the answers and hope my other team mates know more than I do).  I grabbed one of the few menus and took pictures for your enjoyment:

Front of menu (FYI: the URL listed on this menu does not work)

Back of menu

All of the food has a science themed title.  I chose the Dr. Hawking chicken sandwich (the item on the left bottom corner on the back of the menu pictured above).  How could I possibly order any other sandwich since I specialize in relativity?  I was so hungry when it arrived that I dove right in and forgot to take a picture for you.  So, here what it looked like when I woke from my hunger craze and took a picture:

What was left of my Dr. Hawking when I remembered to take a picture

As I was eating, more and more people started showing up for the trivia event.  And the place ended up being nearly overrun by all of the usuals and the mass amounts of LIGO people who showed up as well (I didn't actually count, but there wer about 20 of us).  The lights went off, the black lights came on and the trivia started, hosted by none other than Doc (get it?).  We settled into teams of about 6 people and played the night away.  There were 20 questions.  After each question the DJ played a song and that song usually had some kind of hint to it.  Once the song was over, the team had to turn in the answer on a slip of paper and you got a seconds chance (for reduced points) if it was wrong.  I'm not sure exactly where our team finished (not first and not last) but we had a great time.  Below is a picture of the row of us LIGO people who invaded (and we stick together).  And this isn't even everyone since some stragglers ended up sitting at their own table to the right of the picture:

Just some of the LIGO people who showed up for trivia (yes, all the way to the back of the picture)

And what would a science themed cafe be without lab coats?  Here is one of us brilliant specimens modeling one (with a nice glow from the black lights):

A real scientist in a real lab coat at The Laboratory

After trivia fun was over, a few of my friends and I headed back to the hotel since there was another day of the meeting the next day, but I also had to pack since I left the meeting after lunch to head home (which was an adventure in itself since my plane from Atlanta to Baton Rouge was diverted to Jackson, MS just before we started our decent due to a really horrible storm.  As you can tell, after hours of sitting in a closed airport I did indeed make it home.  And I was glad for it since I was away on travel to Long Island, NY for an APS Executive Board Meeting just before this trip.  Remember how I said I was a homebody?  This body was very glad to be home!

Academic Genealogy

I think that I have mentioned in other posts in this blog that one of my hobbies is genealogy.  I am planning to write more on my family history someday (it's always fun to find a great-grandfather in the state penitentiary when doing a census search) but I wanted to talk a little today about my academic genealogy. 

When earning an graduate degree in an academic field, one normally had an advisor that mentors the students in their research.  So, you can trace back through time who your advisor's advisor was and so on.  Normally, a modern student has only one advisor unless their research is interdisciplinary or other reasons.  Therefore, unlike a normal family tree where each child has a mother and a father, an academic genealogy doesn't branch as much.

I have done some research in the past on my academic genealogy.  My doctoral advisor was Lee Samuel Finn at Penn State and his advisor was Kip Thorne at Caltech.  On my own, I was able to trace my academic genealogy back about 10 'generations'.

Recently, I found the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP).  This work by North Dakota State University tracks the academic genealogy of mathematicians both their 'ancestors' and their 'descendants'.  Lucky for me, physics is closely related to mathematics (after all, Newton did pioneer calculus in order to do his physics) and my immediate academic family is documented in the MGP.  I found my advisor and started moving back through my ancestors.  It was amazing going back in time like this!  My academic genealogy goes back through 7 centuries to the High Middle Ages (essentially the founding of universities in Europe) and spans the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine, philosophy and theology.  Before my academic great-grandfather all my 'ancestors' were educated in Europe, mostly in Germany, Austria, France and Italy.  And while this is not at all surprising, I am the only female in the tree (if you click on the poster sized image below, it will be a 6 MB JPEG; you can view the < 1 MB PDF here):

Warning: Clicking on this image will load a 6 MB JPEG.  Click here for the < 1 MB PDF.

You can also view my page on the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Some of my academic ancestors of note (just the historically significant names I am familiar with):

• Nicolas Copernicus - known for heliocentrism (a system where the Sun is the center of the solar system) which was in opposition the accepted geocentrism (a system where the Earth is stationary and the center of the Universe).
• Christiaan Huygens - known as the first theoretical physicist, Huygens is also known for explaining Saturn's rings, wave theory and centrifugal force, among other things.
• Jacob Bernoulli - known for discovering the mathematical constant e (2.71828...) among other mathematical contributions.
• Johann Bernoulli - known for his development of infinitesimal calculus and other mathematical contributions
• Leonhard Euler - mathematician and physicist who made contributions to many sub-fields including mathematical notation (e.g. using the Greek capital sigma as notation for summation), graphing and astronomy.
• Joseph-Louis Lagrange - known for development of the calculus of variations and Lagrangian mechanics among other things.
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier - known for the series approximation for discontinuous functions and related transformation that are both named after him, he also was the first to discover the greenhouse effect.
• Siméon Denis Poisson - known for the Poisson distribution which described the probability of a regular event that has no memory (dependency) on the events that happened before the present, among many other contributions to mathematics and physics.
• Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet - mathematician credited with the modern formal definition of a function.
• Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert - known for his contributions to fluid mechanics and testing for the convergence of a series, among other things.
• Pierre-Simon Laplace - known for work in celestial mechanics (especially work concerning the stability of the orbits in the solar system), the dependence of the speed of sound on temperature, and was also the first to expound upon an object similar to a black hole, among many other things.

So, what does this illustrious heritage say about me?  NOTHING!  Even if you are mentored by the best, it is ultimately up to you to establish and prove yourself.  However, it is humbling to have any connection not only to history but to the science that I've been using for many years.

If you are interested in learning more about academic genealogies and why they are documented in the article "A Trace of Greatness" from the Times Higher Education (6 May 2010).

Slaying My Own Dragons

I haven't written in a while.  I've been working and traveling but that isn't why I haven't been writing.  I've stayed away because I have recently been dealing with my own personal demons (which surface for me at least on an annual basis)... 

When I first started this blog, I promised a look into my everyday life as a LIGO scientist.  Almost everything that I have shared has been positive and, truly, that is how the majority of my life passes - I am blessed beyond my dreams and I love my life and my work.  However, there are the other days where I feel like nothing I've done has amounted to anything other than keeping me busy.  Deep down, I know that isn't true but I have a horrible way of marginalizing everything I do.  Basically, if I did it then anyone could have or it wasn't meaningful.  This is a well known phenomenon called the Impostor Syndrome.  I've heard about this is various places; I think most recently it was in regard to women in physics but this is a widespread phenomenon in both genders. 

Honestly, I am hesitant to even write about this here.  Physics is a competitive profession.  I feel like a person's worth is usually judged on what you've done lately.  I am always afraid that I haven't accomplished enough to not be forgotten let alone respected.  And with my job being a temporary (I am a postdoctoral scholar - this is much like when a medical doctor goes through residencies after earning their medical degree) and on a yearly contract, not constantly earning respect means that I could lose my job all together.

It isn't something that I discuss with my co-workers; after all these are the people whose respect I am trying to earn and maintain.  I don't even bring it up to my friends because, since I really don't have much of a life outside of work, my friends are also physicists - sometimes even people I feel are my competition.  On my latest trip (to Santa Barbara, CA for the APS Executive Board retreat), I did bring this up in conversation over dinner (I felt more comfortable around these physicists since they are not in the same research circle as myself and I rarely see them).  As soon and I mentioned I'd been dealing with a bit of Impostor Syndrome the immediate response I got was, "We all feel that way."  At that, I didn't know how to respond since I was surprised at how open this person was with me.

So, how do I go about slaying this dragon?  Well, the first stage is messy and usually involves much anxiety and panic about the difference between what I feel I've accomplished and what I should have accomplished.  This then moves into a planning phase where I decide what I am going to do and is followed by a series of email feelers to people I need to collaborate with to perform the work.  By this time, I have usually exhausted myself (at least emotionally) and I wait for responses from collaborators.  If they are prompt, a new determined calm can begin to take root; otherwise, the anxiety increases again.  I start thinking, "Wow, I was right and everyone thinks so little of me that they don't want to work with me!"  (Note to self: next time check your spam filter before you flip out again.)  With a new plan of action intact, I get to start the cycle of the Impostor Syndrome again: "I have all this great work to do but I don't think that I am talented enough to complete it."  But, I plug away at it, complete tasks and rarely acknowledge what I've done.

The one good thing that comes from these episodes of mine is that it jump starts new projects for me.  It also reminds me of how lucky I am to have my husband since he is the only person with whom I share this insecurity.  The poor guy is my sounding board for all of the anxiety I've built up and there really isn't anything he can do for me.

A double rainbow taken from the LIGO Livingston Observatory parking lot on 30 June 2008.

This is a good article on the Impostor Syndrome: Laursen, Lucas, "No, You're Not an Impostor", Science Careers (15 February 2008).

***

Revised Erdös Number: 4

A friend of mine read my last blog post and showed that both of us (as members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration) have a lower Erdös Number (4) than I noted in that post.  Here are the references establishing this network:

1: Paul Erdős & Mark Kac
    Erdös, P.; Kac, M. "The Gaussian law of errors in the theory of additive number theoretic functions",  Amer. J. Math.  62,  (1940). 738–742.
2: Mark Kac & Theodore A. Jacobson
    Gaveau B.; Jacobson T. ; Kac M.; Schulman L. S. "Relativistic extension of the analogy between quantum mechanics and Brownian motion", Phys. Rev. Lett. 53 (1984), no. 5, 419–422.
3. Theodore A. Jacobson & Bruce Allen
    Allen, Bruce; Jacobson, Theodore "Vector two-point functions in maximally symmetric spaces", Comm. Math. Phys. 103 (1986), no. 4, 669–692. 
4. Bruce Allen & Amber Stuver
    Abbott, B.; et al. "Detector description and performance for the first coincidence observations between LIGO and GEO," Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 517 (2004), 154 – 179.

My Erdös Number

Many people have heard of the "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, introduced in 1994, where you try to connect a famous person to the actor Kevin Bacon within 6 connections, e.g. X acted in a movie with Y who acted in a move with Kevin Bacon gives a Bacon Number of 2 for actor X and 1 for actor Y.  The idea of six degrees of separation originated in the early 20th century (of course, not with Kevin Bacon) when Frigyes Karinthy conjectured that any 2 people could be connected through at most 5 people.  This was the basis of the Small World Experiment in 1967 by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Long before the Bacon Number in the entertainment industry was the Erdös Number (you can also view the Erdös Number Project page) in mathematics.  Paul Erdös was a prolific mathematician authoring the most academic papers in history, many of those in collaboration with others (at least 1,525).  It became a anecdotal measure of prominence in the field to have a low Erdös Number.  So much so, that the American Mathematical Society has a tool to calculate your Erdös Number based on their database of mathematical papers (click here to go to the tool and select the "Use Erdös" button, try "Einstein, A" and you should see his Erdös Number is 2).  Studies seem to show that, if a person has a finite Erdös Number (meaning, have you published a paper with another author that you can use to start your connection), that number is at most 15 with a median number of 5.  It turns out that my number is 5:

1: Paul Erdős & Mark Kac
    Erdös, P.; Kac, M. "The Gaussian law of errors in the theory of additive number theoretic functions",  Amer. J. Math.  62,  (1940). 738–742.
2: Mark Kac & Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
    Chandrasekhar, S., Kac, M., Smoluchowski, R., "Marian Smoluchowski: his life and scientific work. Chronological table and bibliography compiled by Alojzy Burnicki. Edited and with a preface by Roman Stanisław Ingarden", PWN---Polish Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 2000. 141 pp. ISBN: 83-01-00671-4.
3: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar & James B. Hartle
    Chandrasekhar, S., Hartle, J. B., "On crossing the Cauchy horizon of a Reissner-Nordström black-hole",  Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A  384  (1982), no. 1787, 301–315.
4: James B. Hartle & Kip S. Thorne
    Thorne, Kip S., Hartle, James B., "Laws of motion and precession for black holes and other bodies",  Phys. Rev. D (3) 31 (1985), no. 8, 1815–1837.
5: Kip S. Thorne & Amber L. Stuver
    B. Abbott, et al., "Detector description and performance for the first coincidence observations between LIGO and GEO," Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 517 (2004), 154 – 179. 

Special thanks to Nathan Urban for finding this low Erdös Number for me (using the tool listed above) - the best I was able to come up with was 8 with a manual search.

NOTE:  I have a revised Erdös Number of 4 - see my next blog post.

Do you have an Erdös Number?  Post it and your connections as a comment below!



Random picture for today's blog: an honest to goodness black widow spider I found dead behind the LIGO Science Education Center today (in Louisiana):

Becoming a Physicist II - The Cost $

One aspect that I didn't discuss in my last post about becoming a physicist is how to finance your education.  Here are some thoughts and advice based on my experience...

COLLEGE

Going to college can be expensive.  I know that first hand and this was a huge factor on where I chose to get by bachelor degree.  I didn't have the best grades (yup, that's right - you don't have to be a genius to be a scientist) but they were nothing to sneeze at either.  I ended up getting a large scholarship to a small school in western Maryland that almost no one has ever heard of (Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD) and smaller offers from more notable schools.  I chose Frostburg because I knew when I was in high school that I would need a graduate education to be the kind of physicist I wanted to be.  And, honestly, not many people care where you got your bachelor degree from once you have your doctorate.  A big name school can help you get into a good grad school, but it doesn't carry as much weight as you may think.  At Frostburg, I was truly able to spread my wings and distinguish myself more than I feel I could have at a bigger school.  (However, I don't know that for sure since I never really gave the big schools a chance.)  It was these distinctions that made me attractive to graduate schools (for example, I graduated in less than 4 years with a good GPA).

In the end, I got a good education and into a great graduate program with a minimum of cost.  Overall, I think I made the right choice for me.  Remember, your situation will be different from mine - you need to do what is right for you.


GRAD SCHOOL

One of the questions I get asked most often when I talk to undergraduates about going to grad school is, "Great...  And how much will that cost me?"  They are almost always surprised when I tell them that you usually get paid to get a graduate degree in physics (or biology, chemistry, astronomy, engineering, etc.).  The only science centered graduate training that I know costs a lot of money is medical school (and since this is what most people are familiar with, they apply the cost for med school to any graduate science training).

When you are accepted into a graduate program (usually Ph.D. - many physics programs, at least, do not require you earn a master degree on your way to your doctorate), you are usually accepted with a tuition wavier (meaning you don't pay any tuition) and a stipend you earn through an assistantship (usually a teaching assistantship in your early years and a research assistantship when you are performing your thesis research).  I paid nothing for my Ph.D.  They paid me to work as a physicist (remember in my last post I mentioned that grad school is more like an apprenticeship than course work? - this is an example of what I meant by that).


CONCLUSION

When working to become a Ph.D. physicist (or pretty much any scientist other than a medical doctor), the major cost involves getting you bachelor degree.  After you are accepted into grad school, costs like tuition usually disappear and you start getting paid to do what you love (I hope you love it at this point!).

This picture (about Fall 2005) is of me and some of my best friends while we were in grad school.  We all gathered at one of our apartments and made pizza from scratch - crust and all.  It was a great time!  I also like this picture because everyone in this picture ended up getting married!  (The now wife of my friend third in from the left was taking this picture.)  My husband and I are the last two on the right.