Graduate students in physics generally pursue a path toward a career in research. That was the early road for all of us who are now editors at Physics Today. We diverted off the standard path to arrive here, and in my case, the path included a long detour as a teacher at an undergraduate college. If your career options are wide open, perhaps the following observations based on my years as researcher, teacher, and editor can help you choose the road with the best chance of leading to your fulfillment.
Pure excitement
For pure excitement, nothing tops being a researcher at a good institution, where first-rate physicists pass through on a regular basis, sharing their ideas. Because those ideas were not always fully developed, visitors were often as eager to hear what their hosts—faculty, postdocs, and graduate students—had to say as to tell us what was on their mind.
When I was a postdoc at the University of Texas, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg would sometimes come into the office that I shared with other postdocs and request a few minutes of our time. He’d ask for our help with something that was puzzling him.
Actually, Steve was always a few steps ahead of us and we usually ended up learning of some subtlety we hadn’t appreciated rather than setting him straight. But we were glad he thought enough of us to ask, and we must have done something right because he’d stop by again before too long.
I much enjoyed the intellectual exchange that is a defining feature of the research world. A significant part of that pleasure was a conscious awareness that my colleagues and I were puzzling out ideas that were at the edge of humankind’s knowledge.
It was hard work. I recall vividly one evening when I was in graduate school and a nonphysicist roommate stopped by to pick me up for the walk home together. A bunch of us in the office were in the middle of a discussion, so he patiently waited. When it was time to go, his first words were “Man, that was intense.” I assured him that he’d just observed the normal give and take that’s all in a day’s work for a grad student. The day’s work often spilled into nights. Since dinnertime usually arrived with problems still unresolved, many of us found it difficult to leave our work at the office.
Nocturnal ruminations notwithstanding, we might well arrive at the office on any given day no further along than we were the day before. As a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I asked my senior colleague Geoffrey West if he too had many zero-progress days. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Any given day is likely to be miserable and frustrating. But when you finally solve the problem that’s been bothering you, well, there’s no better feeling than that.”
Geoff was right that a successful research project can be enormously satisfying, but his remark did help confirm that the research world was not right for me. I could think of things more satisfying than solving theoretical physics problems and I was frustrated that my work would likely be helpful to only a small number of like-minded researchers. In 1992 I joined the faculty of Ripon College, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin.
Tremendous upside
Teachers can potentially influence a great number of people. And I can think of no more honorable work than serving as a positive role model for young students embarking on life on their own.
Ideally I would have liked to inspire my students to continue studying physics. That was quite a challenge, especially when the students were in my classes to satisfy a distribution requirement or prepare for admission exams in another field—for example, medicine.
At the beginning of one class, I asked how many of my students were there because they felt they had to be there, not because they wanted to be there. Ninety percent of the hands went up. Next question: As long as you have to be here, how many of you will work to make the best of a bad situation and get something out of the course? One hand remained up.
Admittedly, it was a small class, but the results of that survey were discouraging and they were repeated time and again. Although teaching was often frustrating, in the end the classes had their good moments, and the students learned some physics.
Working at an undergraduate institution offers several advantages. I enjoyed being a part of a scholarly community that included all the fields taught in a good liberal arts college and having the opportunity—even the expectation—of attending a wide range of faculty seminars.
I and many of my colleagues liked being in a community with so many young people; it kept us young. And if we didn’t inspire our students to study our favorite field, but did demonstrate how to be prepared and enthusiastic and how to handle difficult issues with integrity, then we perhaps accomplished enough.
Teaching felt different from research. Whereas research is necessarily open ended, and one never knows if a given research project will end in success, I did know that I could plan and conduct a good classroom or lab session. My teaching job didn’t have the intellectual highs and lows of a research job. Rather, it was more like a steady grind. There was always a lot that had to be done for the next class session and weekends were often largely taken up with grading.
A lot of a teacher's work may be for the good of the institution and not related to teaching physics. As a member of an undergraduate faculty, you should be prepared to serve on numerous committees, cheerlead at admissions fairs, and so forth.
An additional difficulty, at least for me, was keeping up with the latest advances in the field. I still remember how I felt 13 years ago when I encountered Ed Witten's feature article in Physics Today about string theory duality. I knew the field wouldn’t stop moving forward just because I left it, but I was still stung to read about new discoveries of which I was not aware that had ripened enough to be worthy of a story addressed to the community as a whole. In short, I was no longer in the club.
A little this, a little that
In 2001 I became an editor at Physics Today. In some ways, working at a magazine like Physics Today splits the difference between being a researcher and being an undergraduate teacher. Editors have the opportunity and obligation to keep up with new developments—in string theory and in the other branches of physics.
But we are reporters of those developments, not contributors to them. We teach and serve a large community of physicists and scientists and play a role in giving that community its cohesiveness—at least we hope we do.
I’m proud of that work, though for me it is not as important as mentoring young people. The environment is intellectually stimulating though not as intense as in a research environment, nor as multidisciplinary as at an undergraduate institution.
The job has some special and wonderful features. Editors and science writers have a chance to learn at least a little bit about a broad range of fields in physics and related disciplines. The physicists whose advice we seek are eager to talk about their work and, stereotypes notwithstanding, are usually pretty good at explaining it.
Admittedly, authors sometimes put an editor’s diplomacy skills to the test, as when one told me I was “a poster child for what’s wrong with the American educational system.” But by and large they are a cooperative and collaborative lot and if they have an objection to what I do, there’s almost always a good reason.
Editors need to accept that their contributions to an article generally remain uncredited. But we also write pieces under our own byline. Those stories allow for a different kind of creative outlet, and seeing your byline in print never ceases to be exciting.
One of my roles here is to run Quick Study. Launched in 2006, the department features short tutorial essays that we hope will engage and inspire undergraduates. Sometimes it seems that just coming up with ideas month after month is the toughest part of keeping the department moving. Once I’ve gotten an idea—often provided by a Physics Today colleague—I typically need to get expert advice so that I can outline a short, cohesive, undergraduate-friendly piece based on that idea and identify a suitable author to turn the outline into a tutorial. The two tasks are not independent; often the author and I hash out the story idea together. Once the first iteration of the Quick Study is in house, the review process and the editing for punch and clarity usually go smoothly enough.
Although the workplace is intellectual and collegial, it would not be mistaken for a college or university. Two of the pleasures of academic life—job security through tenure and generally hands-off bosses—are not perks that the editor enjoys. Organizational hierarchy is more present here than in academia.
The worlds of research, teaching, and writing all have their own rewards and frustrations that need to be balanced out for someone choosing a career. Fortunately, we live in a varied world too, in which we all have our own formulas for evaluating that balance.
