A digression from a few Mondays ago

Preface: I was under pressure to do several sets when this was written and now feel much better. :) and am publishing this as it's another post and for attendant points ;)


There's a lot of things I don't know, and that is never more obvious than when someone explains something by physics. It's a little discouraging, at first, to think that you have never noticed -- never cared -- about the simplest things that surround you.

It's interesting. I don't want this, my first post in a while, to be so vague and insecure and uncongealed. But right now I don't want to explain the coolest bit of physics that I've learned in a while. I will, of course. In a while.

I can't let go of this right now. I sat down to finish a few blog posts (that will not happen, due to a variety of reasons, social foremost among them) and got quite off the main road. That's kinda what has happened just recently. I guess this midterm season went not as well as I'd have liked. It didn't go badly, per se, but not well - and that's discouraging, to always be mediocre. Mediocrity at Caltech is not bad, but not exactly desirable either. I should work harder or care less - this middle ground is unfortunate.

I learned this term that I would willingly give up Astrophysics, not because I dislike it or have too much work -- that's not true at all -- I absolutely could do more work-- but because it doesn't come easy to me. Is that a cop-out?

I think it is.

Ignoring this very self-centered vein -- sorry -- I try pretty hard to widen my perspective, to work hard and play a lot, to wake up every morning knowing that my time was well spent the day before and that if I had died, disappeared in the night, even the time I wasted I enjoyed. So much time lost to my memory and lost even from there. But there are few regrets (one, actually, is not learning to play the cello; another, that I hadn't spent more time forgiving the faults of my grandparents).

It's not -- this whole widening perspective thing -- a constant in my thoughts, more a thoughtful constant that I believe (or wish I did) to the fullest of my ability and my reason. (Take the almost-Objectivism here with a grain of salt -- last year I downed all Rand's books only to discover I hated them. I hate her metaphors. I mean this - don't read them if you don't have to). There's not enough meaning in the world to gift it only to one life and one POV - your own -- that is the most limited, restrictive overview of life that I can imagine. Singularity? Uniqueness? Do these apply when there is so much to discover?

Yet there's a problem with knowing that not only is your life so stolidly average this conception of average and uniformity is beyond you. You -- ah, perhaps, only me -- but you see the dilemma there? It's not only me; so let me begin again. You in that giant, heaving mass of humanity -- you have to deal with the consequences of facing it. It, you ask? Facing the fact that you are nothing - that there is always someone more smart, more fun, more interesting and more charismatic and better in all things, even those you cannot imagine. And you feel overwhelmed. And you just...

Ah.

Alternate career paths

http://astrobites.com/2011/09/08/careers-in-astronomy-what-am-i-doing-with-my-life/

I'm impressed by the brevity of this article. It concisely lists a few articles of reasonable alternatives to unfortunate situations, or times when you may ask "What's the point?"

The article is prefaced with an apology to those who have their lives and futures in astro planned out, noting that grad students are often "plagued by a series of 'what ifs'." The writer, a Maria Drout, asks a question I fear will happen and might one day stop everything in its tracks: "What if, horror of horrors, I get four years into a PhD and realize that research just isn't for me?" Yep. 

Here's a summary of alternate career paths (alternate referencing all those not ending in grad school and tenured professorship at a university):

1. Research. Instead of working with a university, you can work at federally funded agency, or with a large collaboration research group.
2. Observatory Staff Scientist! This sounds like fun. You maintain instruments, while doing your own research and helping others with their research! And spending your life at an observatory. I have a few links regarding this. For instance, Keck is hiring technicians right now. :) although those are more relevant to engineers and people with lots of experience with instruments.
3. Small liberal arts teaching :) or high school
4. Science writer - for editors for Fermilab, freelance book and magazine article writing, developing physics courses, etc. This is apparently very flexible.
5. CfA press officer :) or NASA or any science institute
6. or outreach and education positions (available at most labs and universities) which might include observatory support and running planetariums and museums and teaching.
7. Industry: R&D positions pay well and give you a lot of autonomy. This particularly interested me. You expect stress and bosses and loss of autonomy, but apparently, after finally finding a job, he works in a cubicle in 'relative obscurity' - but that's a minor obstacle. He had developed  a long-range research plan for jets that he could initiate, develop and control only industry.
   He writes, "There is no adviser poking his head in for frequent updates; there is no grant committee that needs a written progress update. in fact there is no grant committee at all. If I want to do something, I do it. Succeed or fail, I own it. And failure isn't necessarily bad: if half of your projects don't end in complete failure, you're probably not pushing the boundaries enough."
   He goes on to say that there's a lot of waste expected in buying equipment, and no one will pester you about it. :( Spending money is encouraged. Impressively, "Time is worth more than money. If we need something, we buy it. In industry, you will never want for the tools you need to do your job."
   There's a difference in the way hierarchy is approached. You have bosses, sure, but they let you do your work with little supervision - treat you "like an adult...[it's] oddly liberating" because you are the expert on your subject matter, and in that regard you are in charge.
   There's no tenure - everyone is competent and hardworking. His coworkers are, "quite smart but slow to show it off; nobody cares how smart you are if you can't play well with others, and a brilliant person who nobody can stand to work with will soon be out of a job."
   And you get sleep. :) You smile, but never have job security.
   However, he says, "With a physics PhD and a good resume, in Silicon Valley, your starting salary as a minimum should begin with a "1". (knock off 20% for astronomy - sorry!) Wall Street will pay several times that, even now. Close to half a million is not unheard of. What ever you do, do NOT settle for something like $70k, because I guarantee you that jobs that pay that level won't challenge you and won't offer upward mobility. This is not academia."
   But this seems less astronomy/astrophysics based and more applicable to engineering. So it is a little tempting to me, but at the same time I've always idealized academia...
8. Business manager - managing program development for telescopes or intelligent, law enforcement, and energy.
9. A comment on the bottom of the page mentioned jobs in the federal government in fields related to science policy. Civil societies (Red Cross, Habitat for humanity, World Bank, IMP), for profits, and the Bureau of Human rights in the state department. "I met two people there that had PhDs in astronomy and three in physics. You may not do astronomy, but with your training in scientific thinking, yuo can really find that your expertise is desperately needed. many scientists got their positions via fellowships, especially the AAAS fellows and APS/AAS fellows. you can find work at State in nuclear weapons control, cyber security, international relations involving large scientific collaborations....There are jobs in the White House too." This was from nicolas Suntzeff, the Mitchell Prof. of Astro at Texas A&M.

Yep. There is it. This pretty much told me that there are jobs outside of academia after grad school, actually! :) This is good. As appealing academia is, there simply are not enough jobs for professorships for all the physics and astro grads, and (on a more personal note) I don't think I'd cut it as a professor anyways :) 

This is good. There are lots of alternative career arcts in industry, national labs, observatories (<3) and engineering and government and teaching. A lot seem to be more managerial positions, in which research is not referenced. That's not too alright with me right now.

P.S. part two of the last part of our project: Daniel, Eric, and Nathan are in this group!

Quitting astronomy

There's a recent article I read about quitting. It's an interesting topic, especially given the taboo associated with it in our high-achieving, success-driven school. There's a certain line  - it's a podcast - that really, really stood out to me. Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago (woah) and Stephan J. Dubner is a journalist writer for the NYTimes, Time, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

LEVITT: I try to talk my grad students into quitting all the time.
DUBNER: Quitting grad school?
LEVITT: Quitting grad school, yeah. A lot of people — you make choices without a lot of information and then you get new information. And quitting is often the right thing to do. I try to talk my kids into quitting soccer, baseball if they’re not good at it. I mean, I’ve never had any shame in quitting. I’ve quit economic theory, I quit macroeconomics. I’ve pretty much quit everything that I’m bad at.

Per this.

I guess I'm evaluating this in terms of myself - knowing that there are a lot of people who are better at this, at astronomy and physics and that I'm bad at this. Not terribly bad, just not sparkling good.

This is quite relevent to our discussion, I guess, about our future careers in astronomy. These guys, who, in my mind and from what I know of their work in Freakonomics, seem quite well informed from an economic standpoint in decision making and the validity of choices. 

It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

Same source.

So. To quit or not to quit? That seems to be the question.

Melodie's friend from college quit physics. And she does seem very happy.

Ah. A question with an answer only quitters know. I wouldn't know if it was the right decision until far into the future, and even then I'd not be sure.

For now, I am perfectly content with staying with something I know I am bad at, just because it's too early to tell if I'll get better at it. Chances are that your talent may be hidden in the beginning.

P.S. This is kinda number 3 part 1 for our project, which I did with Nathan and Daniel and Eric.

political space

In late September, China blasted off the Tiangong-1 (the "heavenly palace", literally) into space. It's supposed to be a space-lab module, which can support the docking of manned and unmanned spacecraft, and a testbed for China's future modular space station Tiangong-3 (I'm oddly reminded of origami here...) which will be launched in 2020-22.

Now, the reason why this is so important is that China was rebuffed, again, from the ISS, which incidentally is actually finished now. China decided on an independent path to space, with construction of a space station scheduled and followed by missions to the moon. Ha.

So this space station, Tiangong-3, will be 100 tons, five times lighter than the ISS. They expect to be the only power that can reach the moon within a few years of launching it. Former NASA administrator Michael Friffin states, "In my opion, China understands what it takes to be a great power. We have written the script for them....They are a near-peer competitor of ours and I would worry very much about the future of this nation if we were not -- and if we were not seen by all -- to be a world leader...When the Chinese can reach the moon and we cannot, I don't see why any other nation would regard us as a world leader."

That is a demoralizing thought. And he has an interesting take on what it means to be a world leader or power. But nevertheless, I think it is true that a lot of people would feel emasculated if the US could not do something China can easily do in the sciences and in advancing human discovery.

This is, even more interestingly, most probably our own fault. Read the second reference article, written in May this year. "A clause included in the US spending bill approaved by Congress to avert a govt shutdown....has prohibited NASA from coordinating any joint scientific activity with China. The cluase also extends to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy."

Wow. That just seems amazingly shortsighted and xenophobic.

Contrary to what our politicians believe, I don't think that there is anything wrong with international cooperation. Actually, note the very specific ban with China, but not the other EU, Russia countries included in the ISS endeavor. I am confounded by this apparent attempt to slow China down - not to mention such a brazen, bold, and very weak and ineffective attempt.

The superficial reasons is the cyberattack/espionage theories that are almost certainly true and almost certainly overplayed.

Hopefully this doesn't lead to too much distrust between the nations. Or terrible wars in space.

References:
http://news.discovery.com/space/china-space-station-launch-110926.html?dtc=nws-hp-ticker-China
http://news.discovery.com/space/denied-nasa-banned-from-working-with-china-110510.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1190721