This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from March 2018, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos ).

Over at NPR’s science blog, Adam Becker has a post on “The Puzzle Of Quantum Reality”. It’s a good example of what it is, namely yet another explanation of the measurement problem and interpretations of quantum physics. As you can tell from the tone of the previous sentence, though, while I think interpretations of quantum physics do matter, I’m a little tired of reading these kinds of pieces.

Instead, I’d like to reverse the question a bit, and ask not what’s weird about quantum physics, but what’s weird about us. If the universe is really governed by quantum rules, why do those rules seem so strange to us?

The answer is basically right there in the definition of “weird”: quantum physics seems weird because it runs counter to our everyday intuitions about how the world works. The rules we have discovered for the behavior of quantum systems– the Schrodinger equation and so on– don’t obviously resemble the rules we use to describe everyday objects– Newton’s Laws of motion and the other things you learn in high-school physics. We spend the vast majority of our lives interacting with things that obey Newton’s Laws, and that defines our intuition for how things “ought” to behave. When quantum physics departs from that, it seems weird.

But why is there such a difference between the everyday physics rules that define our intuition and the quantum rules? The Copenhagen approach, which Scott Aaronson amusingly dismissed as “shut-up and calculate except without ever shutting up about it” basically asserts that this is just The Way Things Are and tries to impose an absolute separation between the microscopic scale where quantum rules apply and the macroscopic scale where classical rules hold sway, but that position is pretty clearly untenable. The point of Schrodinger’s infamous cat gedankenexperiment was to show exactly that: the state of the macroscopic cat is entangled with the state of a microscopic atom in a way that crosses the scale boundary that the Copenhagen approach would impose.

A better answer is to say that there isn’t really a difference in the rules that apply for big objects and the rules that apply for small ones– the universe is quantum on every scale. The “classical rules” that we see are just the result of quantum physics when applied to really big things. In a sense, it’s just another application of the principle that “More Is Different,” to borrow the title of an influential 1972 paper by Philip Anderson. As Anderson noted, when you study the behavior of huge numbers of objects whose individual interactions are described by simple rules, you often find that the collective behavior of the large system seems to be described by another set of simple rules, rules that aren’t necessarily obviously related to the original interaction rules. This idea of high-level rules emerging from lower-level ones leads to the hierarchical structure of sciences– chemistry is the physics of too many atoms, and biology is the chemistry of enormous numbers of molecules, and so on.

In a sense, that’s what’s going on: when we apply quantum mechanics to enough particles to make up a visible object, the particles and their interactions are all governed by quantum rules, but the collective effect is to give the appearance of a different set of rules that we call “classical.” Everyday reality is just what happens when all those quantum properties blur together.

In some cases, this transition is relatively easy to see. If you look at the behavior of a single quantum particle, you find that you can’t trace out a classical trajectory with a well-defined position and momentum at all times. This is what leads to some of the signature quantum phenomena like the wave-like interference of material particles.

It’s an undergraduate-level problem to show, though, that the average position and average momentum over a large collection of measurements do exactly what you expect from Newton’s Laws. And in a sense, when we follow the trajectory of a classical object– a golf ball in flight, say– that’s really what we’re looking at: the average position of an uncountably huge number of atoms making up that ball.

The disappearance of the other signature quantum behavior, a kind of discreteness of energy, is a little trickier to understand. If you look at the behavior of a single electron in an atom, it’s very much not classical: you can only change its energy in discrete jumps from one orbit to another. If you look at the behavior of a macroscopic number of electrons in a conductor, though, you don’t see that discreteness– when you apply a voltage to drive a current, the electrons move in a way that looks very classical. The average velocity seems to increase smoothly, without any discontinuous jumps.

So, where do the jumps go? They haven’t really gone anywhere– the individual electrons in a conductor still jump between discrete states of well-defined energy. It’s just that the states become more numerous as you add more particles, and the energy difference between states becomes smaller, until they start to run together and the sharp energy states of atoms become energy bands in solids. They’re not really continuous energy bands, but when you’re working at the coarse scale that defines everyday life, they blur together so thoroughly that they might as well be.

Of course, just because the quantum rules smear out into classical ones doesn’t mean that the quantum rules are completely gone. If you look closely, you can find small behaviors that indicate the underlying quantum nature of things. Electrons in a conductor move about in a very classical way, but insulators do not, and that points toward the existence of band gaps, which in turn are evidence of the wave nature of electrons. You can also set up situations where huge numbers of quantum objects act independently of one another, so the quantum-ness doesn’t smear out, giving you phenomena like the bright spectral lines of excited atoms (pointing to the discrete energy states within) and the photoelectric effect (pointing to the particle nature of light). That’s how we learned about quantum physics in the first place– following a trail of clues leading from the behavior of everyday objects down into the strange world of the quantum.

Again, this is not to say that quantum interpretations aren’t addressing interesting questions (they are), or that quantum physics isn’t weird (it is). Given the vast amount of evidence that our universe is quantum, though, it’s interesting to step back and reflect on why, as quantum creatures in a quantum world, we’re surprised by quantum physics.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from March 2018, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos), though I may add back the couple of images that were original to me.

My post the other day about how classical rules emerge from quantum ones was spinning off from an NPR post by Adam Becker on quantum reality. The idea of the post is also based on something I’d been thinking about recently, in the process of revising my forthcoming book on quantum physics (due out in December)– writing about quantum physics of everyday life forced me to deal with that a bunch.

I don’t want that post to leave the impression that quantum physics isn’t weird, though, because it very much is. “Weird” here meaning “behaving in ways that run counter to our expectations from classical physics.” The fact that the rules of classical physics have quantum roots doesn’t change the fact that they’re very different from the underlying quantum rules.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there can’t be quibbles and subtleties about what, exactly, counts as “weird” in quantum physics. In the NPR piece, Becker spends a fair bit of space talking about the shift from particles with definite positions that can be specified with only three numbers to a quantum wavefunction consisting of “an infinity of numbers, scattered across all of space.” This is mostly to set up a discussion of quantum measurement, but I think it mis-states things in a couple of significant ways.

For one thing, he’s short-changed the ideal classical picture by a factor of two– to really specify everything you need to know about an electron, you need not just three numbers for its position, but three more numbers for the components of its velocity. The quantum wavefunction contains that information as well as information about the position, because the momentum of a particle is related to its wavelength.

More importantly, I think the weirdness of the wavefunction giving you a probability is over-sold a bit. You can also describe classical particles in terms of a probability distribution, and in fact I would argue that a truly responsible treatment of classical physics demands that you describe the motion of particles in terms of probability. Any measurement of a particle’s initial position and velocity will necessarily be limited in precision, and that will lead to some range in the possible outcomes of any projection into the future. If you’re trying to describe, say, the flight of a golf ball, you can have a pretty good idea of where it’s going to land, but it’d take an amazing amount of effort to narrow the landing zone to better than several square meters.

Both quantum and classical physics, then, should describe objects of interest in terms of an infinity of numbers, in the form of a probability distribution covering all of space. The thing that’s weird about quantum wavefunctions isn’t their scope, but the fact that they’re subtly different than classical probability distributions– to describe the motion of a classical particle like a golf ball, you work with probability distributions directly, but the quantum wavefunction is more like the square root of the probability distribution. This is what makes it possible to see wave phenomena like interference and diffraction. If a classical particle has two possible paths from its initial position to its final position, the final probability distribution is just the sum of the distributions from each path, and will generally have two distinct lumps. A quantum particle, on the other hand, will produce a probability distribution with lots more wiggles in it, reflecting the wave nature of the particles.

So, the weirdness of quantum probability is more subtle than just the notion of probability itself. Quantum measurement, the process that gets you from the probability distribution to the single measured outcome, is more strange, but there are ways to make that less weird, too. That’s what interpretations like the Many-Worlds Interpretation are for– it’s a simple explanation of how the world can consist of objects in superpositions of multiple states without us ever noticing that. You can also remove a lot of the weirdness of quantum measurement by taking a more epistemic approach to the theory, and saying that the wavefunction is really describing our state of knowledge about the system, rather than a real, physical thing. (There are some significant issues with the latter approach, but they’re very technical and not without controversy, so it remains an approach with many backers.)

There’s one bit of quantum physics, though, that I think is inescapably weird, and that’s quantum entanglement. This is a topic I’ve written about a lot– see, for example, this analogy to a sudoku-like game, or this one about how you make entangled particles, or even this one about how to use quantum entanglement to better understand the Many-Worlds Interpretation. There are links in those posts to lots of other posts, as well.

In quantum physics, “entanglement” refers to a correlation between the states of two particles that leaves the state of the individual particles indeterminate, but lets you know the collective state of the two with absolute certainty. That is, you can’t say for certain whether the state of particle A will be 0 or 1 until you measure it, but if you get a 1 for particle A you know with 100% confidence that the state of particle B will also be 1.

The idea of an indeterminate-but-correlated state is weird, but might not seem all that weird, but it gets stranger: the result of these measurements does not depend on the distance between the particles or the time between the measurements. You could put one particle in New York and the other in San Francisco, and measure them a nanosecond apart, and the correlation would still be absolute. Quantum physics is “non-local” in this way, meaning that particles can be correlated with each other in ways that don’t seem to respect distance in space or the speed of light.

As bits of physics go, that’s as weird as it comes. It’s also absolutely real, confirmed by experiment. Explaining how that works, and how it’s not actually a tool for sending information faster than the speed of light has been one of the most active and fruitful research areas in quantum phhysics over the last couple of decades. (I’ll put in a plug here for George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance, which is a good general-audience overview of the field, and Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger, who’s one of the biggest names in the field of entanglement experiments.)

These are, of course, just my opinions about what’s weird and what’s not, and you’ll get some argument about some aspects of this. If you pin down a bunch of people in the field, though, and ask them to name the single weirdest aspect of quantum physics, odds are they’ll tell you it’s quantum entanglement.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from April 2018, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos ).

My day job is as a professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and as is typical for an academic institution, we spend a lot of time thinking about what it is that we do. The other day, we had a meeting squeezed in between admitted-students events at which we ended up trying to define some very general goals for a liberal-arts education– what general skills and knowledge should students graduating from a small liberal-arts college like Union have?

I wasn’t that happy with the meeting generally, but I was fairly pleased with my attempt at a one-sentence summary of the goals of a liberal-arts education:

Students should be able to analyze a situation, decide on a course of action, and advocate for their choice.

As an off-the-cuff attempt at a pithy summary of what we’re trying to do, I think that captures most of it, and it’s nice and concise. Of course, now I’m going to ruin that concision by explaining at length what I think that means in the context of a liberal-arts education.

(Note: I’m going to hyphenate “liberal-arts” here, which is slightly non-standard, to try to make clear that I’m talking about “liberal-arts education” in the sense of a broad education covering topics from a wide range of disciplines, not “the liberal arts,” which is often used as a term for the arts and literature side of academia. And also to try to head off the idea that “liberal” here has a political connotation, though that part’s probably doomed to failure…)

Students should be able to analyze a situation…

One of the failure modes of one-sentence summaries, particularly in academia, is that you often end up with a sentence that wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel, bespangled with adverbs and adjectives and hung about with extra clauses trying to cover every contingency. That cuts against the real goal of the whole thing, particularly in this Twitter-y age, so I fight against the tendency to add adjectives, even where they’d help make the meaning clearer.

In this case, the adjective that I debated including but ultimately didn’t is “complicated.” A successful liberal-arts education should leave students able to look at a complicated real-world situation and analyze it to determine what’s really going on and why.

Analyzing complicated situations is often held up as one of the characteristics of “humanities” disciplines, the idea being that science reduces everything to simple cases. This completely misses the critical point that real science is all about analyzing complex things. The real world is a complicated place, and the reductionist approach of science is not a failure to acknowledge that, it’s a strategy for dealing with it.

Rigorous and controlled experiments and observation are powerful tools– among the very best we have– for taking a situation whose complexity might seem overwhelming and breaking it into manageable chunks. When you do that, the individual problem elements no longer seem quite son intractable, and you can begin to think about them one at a time.

A liberal-arts education necessarily includes science– preferably a laboratory science– because students need to experience this process in action. They need to know that the explicit process of science– looking at the world, thinking about why it works that way, testing your theory, and sharing the results– is a powerful and general approach to just about anything. (I have a book-length version of this argument, but I’ll try to restrain myself here.)

That said, a liberal-arts education necessarily includes studies outside of science because the important context of a complicated situation will often include aspects from a wide range of human experiences. Understanding a real-world situation requires some level of comfort with issues of history and culture, and empathy for others. Students need to be able to navigate these fields, not just brush past them on the way to science-ing up a problem, lest they clumsily create new problems.

“…decide on a course of action…”

While analysis of context can be fun in its own right– I’ve lost many an hour chasing the context of some issue down ever deeper Wikipedia wormholes– life requires actions. And actions require decisions about how to act.

This is another place where I debated but resisted adding an adjective, specifically “appropriate action.” One of the points of a liberal-arts education is for students to learn to use their analytical tools to decide on a course of action that is not just effective, but ethical and humane as well. For every complex problem there’s an elegant but brutally reductive solution that will make everyone unhappy– we want students to have the wisdom to avoid those and chart a better course. That again requires knowledge of history and philosophy, and empathy for others.

That said, too much analysis can be a trap. There’s an element of truth in the character of Chidi Anagonye in “The Good Place,” a former academic with an encyclopedic knowledge of ethical philosophy who is horribly indecisive as a result. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in the context of a situation that you never actually decide what to do about it.

This is, as I’ve written before, a regular source of frustration for me when interacting with academics from other fields, but also an area where the science component of a liberal-arts education can be of help.The notion of taking action and making progress is an essential part of science. Any new theory worth its salt suggests new experiments that could test it, and new avenues of theoretical exploration. Any new experiment will demand some refinement of theory, and suggest future experiments to extend our understanding of the problem at hand.

Science is all about how to responsibly make models and decisions based on incomplete information. And that, in turn, is an essential skill for life in general.

… and advocate for their choice.

Analyzing and acting on an individual level is great, but meaningful large-scale effects will only come from the collective action of many people working together. This necessarily requires being able to communicate and persuade others to join in with your chosen course of action.

The non-science connection here is obvious: to communicate effectively, students must learn to write and speak persuasively, and the study of arts and literature are essential for that. The best way to learn to write is to study the writing of others and figure out how and why it works, and what you can take from them for your own use.

The sciences have an essential role to play as well, when it comes to communication. Quantitative data can be as powerful a tool for persuasion as lofty rhetoric, in the right hands. Effective advocacy demands not just the ability to turn a clever phrase or speak well into a microphone, but also the ability to marshal and present data to support a position. And, just as importantly, the ability to cut through and counteract attempts to use bad data in obfuscatory or propagandistic ways.

Comfort with quantitative data is essential for advocacy, and that is a skill best acquired in the sciences and social sciences. The intimidating mathematical apparatus of modern science exists because it’s a set of tools for, to paraphrase Feynman, not being fooled. The science component of a liberal-arts education is essential for giving students the ability to engage with and understand the real meaning and limitations of quantitative data. This is obviously critical for analysis, but it’s equally important as a tool for advocacy, helping persuade others to join in action to make the world a better place.

So, that’s 1200 words unpacking the meaning of nineteen: “Students should be able to analyze a situation, decide on a course of action, and advocate for their choice.” I think that sentence does about as well as one short sentence can at encapsulating the essential nature and central goals of a liberal-arts education. And when you dig into it, both science and the arts have a key role to play in achieving those goals.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from August 2017, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos ).

It’s mid-August, which means the new academic year will be starting soon. At this time of year, the students are thinking about the next semester, faculty are frantically trying to finish the research and writing they had planned for the summer and bloggers are thinking about offering unsolicited advice.

I’ve written in the past about things prospective science majors should do before getting to college, so this time out, I’m going to offer some tips for things to do while actually in college. The following suggestions are based on my own experiences as a student and 16 years spent on the other side of the classroom teaching physics to college students. This will be skewed toward private college/university students, because that’s my background both as a student and a faculty member, but I think it’s fairly generally applicable.

So, you’re a college student, planning to study science (most of this will work for other fields of study as well, with some tweaking, but I’m going to focus on prospective science majors). What are the best things you can do to help ensure success in your chosen major and future career?

1) Go To Class

This may seem like a screamingly obvious point, but it’s remarkable how many students seem to need this said explicitly. Really, though, go to class.

Yes, you have a textbook, and since it’s the 21st century you have access to the Internet and all the assembled wisdom thereon, but you should still go to class. A typical textbook will contain much more material than will actually be emphasized and tested in any particular course, and if nothing else, going to class will help you know which bits are most important.

(Historical aside: I took a computer science class back in college that was deadly boring. The professor had copious notes in Word format on a shared drive on the campus network, and his lectures consisted of pulling these up on a classroom computer and going over them point by point. I pretty much stopped going to that class, checking in only occasionally to pick up and hand in homework. At the end of the semester, one of the questions on the open-book-open-notes final exam asked “Explain the two methods of [doing a thing with seven methods in the notes] that we discussed in class.”)

It’s also good to go to class because any good instructor will know more than one way to explain the material being covered. So if the specific treatment in the textbook isn’t clear to you, it’s possible that the explanation given in class will be more helpful. And if it’s not, you can move on to:

2) Ask Questions When You Don’t Understand Something

There are going to be times when you don’t understand something that the instructor says or does. Don’t let these slide past on the assumption that you’ll read about it in the book and figure it out later — you may find that the book is even more cryptic. Raise your hand, ask the question, and get your confusion cleared up as quickly as possible.

Don’t worry that you’re wasting time or annoying the instructor — answering student questions is a big part of what we’re paid for. It’s actually kind of unnerving as a professor to go over a point that I expect to be confusing, and not get student questions — it makes me worry that students have just tuned out, and that never ends well.

Also, don’t worry that asking questions will make you look dumb in front of your peers. As a general rule, if one student in the class is confused about some point, odds are that several others are as well. Your classmates aren’t going to be thinking “What a dope, he doesn’t understand ____…” they’re going to be thinking “Oh, thank goodness somebody asked that, because I didn’t understand _____, either…” Asking questions benefits everyone, not just the person who does the actual talking.

Asking questions in class will also help with:

3) Make Sure The Instructor Knows Who You Are

This is one that needs a little caution, because you don’t want to be annoying about it, but you should make sure that whoever is teaching the class knows you as something other than a name on the grade roster.

This has some benefits within the context of a single class — many grading schemes have a little bit of slack built in, usually with a percentage given for “class participation,” or some such, and this comes into play when grades are near the borderline. A student who is right on the line between B+ and A- is much more likely to get bumped up a notch if they’ve been engaged in class.

The main benefit of this is longer-term, though: If the instructor knows who you are, that’s likely to open doors for you. If you’re someone a faculty member knows to be a good and engaged student, they’re more likely to think of you when somebody needs a research assistant or a tutor, and they’re more likely to respond positively if you ask them about research opportunities (either hiring you directly or steering you to another faculty member who is hiring).

And if nothing else, at some point, you’re going to need references who can speak well of you to help you get a job or get into a graduate program. You’re a lot more likely to get good letters if you’ve made sure that the professor knows who you are. There are few things worse, on the faculty side, than having to write a letter that says, essentially, “I know this student was in my class because I see grades for nearly all their assignments in my spreadsheet.”

Speaking of which:

4) Do The Homework

This is another one that might seem too obvious to need including, but an alarming number of students need it spelled out. So, do the homework. Even if it’s not graded or represents only a tiny fraction of the grade.

There’s an old joke in faculty circles, about salaries in the profession: “I teach for free. They pay me to grade.” Believe me when I tell you that faculty members are not assigning homework because we get a cheap thrill out of spilling red ink on your papers — for most faculty outside of a Pink Floyd video, grading is a miserable slog. We do it because the only way to really learn science is by doing science, which means doing problems yourself. Which is what homework is for.

Yes, homework can be kind of tedious, and often confusing, but that’s the point. I’m really fond of Rhett Allain’s analogy between homework and working out: Confusion is the sweat of learning. You don’t get in shape by reading the instruction booklet for a Stairmaster, you have to get on the damn thing and do the reps, getting sweaty and tired in the process. Homework is the intellectual analogue of that — even the most tedious assignment helps you practice skills you’ll need later on.

Of course, just like there are ways to make exercise more pleasant, there are things you can do to make homework more enjoyable, starting with:

5) Get To Know Your Fellow Students

If you’re taking a class on a college or university campus, you’re not going to be alone, you’re going to be with other students. Get to know them, and unless it’s expressly forbidden by the professor, get together with them to do homework and study.

At the very least, getting to know other students in the class will give you a resource to draw on if you have to miss a class or two — somebody you can get notes from — and someone to vent to about any especially unsatisfying lectures. More than that, though, working together on homework will have all sorts of benefits.

For one thing, having a group that you work with will help ensure that you actually do the homework, in the same way that having a workout partner will help ensure that you actually go to the gym on those days when you’re not really sick, but don’t quite feel like working out. A little peer pressure can be good. More importantly, different students tend to be confused about different things, and working with others can help you all get un-stuck. I got through my upper-level physics classes as an undergrad largely because I worked together with a bunch of my fellow students, and I firmly believe that you learn a lot more by getting all the way through to the end of a problem with a little help from your friends than you would be working on it entirely alone and getting stuck on part b of f.

Working with others also is a chance to practice:

6) Learn To Express Yourself Clearly

Contrary to stereotype, effective communication is an essential part of science, particularly when you’re learning it.

When you do your coursework, with friends or on your own, make sure that whatever you hand in is as clear as you can make it, spelling out what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and most importantly why you’re doing it.

Part of this is kind of mercenary and cynical: if whoever is grading your assignment can’t read what you’re doing, you’re not going to be able to get partial credit for it. This may seem obvious, but you’d be amazed at the number of homework papers I get that seem to have been wadded up in the toe of the shoes their author wore to class. Scrawled equations with no explanation, crossed-out work replaced with scribbles in the margins, and no indication of which of the many numbers given is the final answer. Don’t do that.

More importantly, though, there’s a lot of truth to the old joke that you don’t really understand a subject unless you can explain it to someone else. Explaining a topic in a way that makes sense requires a deep understanding and a certain clarity of thought, and those are worth cultivating. So, when you finish your assignment, go over it before you hand it in and make sure you’ve clearly explained what you’re doing at each step of the process from question to answer. Bounce it off one of your friends, if you’re not sure.

And because seven is a good number of items for a list of advice, let’s end this with:

7) Take Advantage Of Your Environment

The previous items on the list have been rather narrowly focused on the specifics of a particular class, but I’m a faculty member at a liberal arts college, which means I’m obliged to remind you that there’s a big world outside the classroom. And as important as your specific science classes are, it’s also important to engage with the rest of your community.

If you’re a student on a college campus, you’re going to be surrounded by a wealth of opportunities to do things beyond just going to class and doing homework, the vast majority of them free, or at least very cheap. There will be lectures, and concerts, and clubs, and parties. Take advantage of those things. Go see famous people talk about what they do, or bands who aren’t famous yet but someday will be. Look at art and listen to music from outside your normal comfort zone. Hang out with your classmates and BS about philosophy and politics and which recent films have the most quotable dialogue.

Unless you go on to a career in academia you will never again be surrounded by so many smart and interesting people, with so many opportunities to experience new things. And even if you do go on to work in academia, you’ll never have as much free time to enjoy those things as you will when you’re a student. Don’t squander that opportunity.

It might seem odd for a faculty member to encourage outside interests, which might seem like distractions from classes and homework. But taking breaks from a single-minded focus on classes and grades is essential from a mental health standpoint. And in the long term, there’s a lot more to success in life than just getting good grades in your science classes. Those outside activities may prove to be essential to long-term success in unexpected ways. A talk from outside your major field might inspire an interest in a new subject that will lead to a new research direction. An image at an art show might trigger a realization of how to solve a vexing problem. A barroom conversation about football might spark a friendship that will open doors, or a long-term relationship that will enrich your future life immeasurably.

So, step away from the books and notes from time to time, and take advantage of the extracurricular aspects of college. If nothing else, it’ll make you a more interesting person than just “that guy who got really good grades.”

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from April 2015.

Today is the first of several Accepted Students Days at Union College, where I’m a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy (and, for my sins, the current department chair…). As such, I’m thinking a bit about how to sell the school to students, which is something I’ve written about before on my original blog, but not yet here.

At first glance, a small liberal arts college may seem like an odd place for a professional scientist. And, in fact, when I took this job, I occasionally had to explain to colleagues that no, I wasn’t just settling for a small college, I had actively sought this out. There’s a strong perception in academia that only second-raters accept jobs at anything less than a major Research I university.

But contrary to that impression, small colleges are a great training ground for future scientists. The country’s liberal arts colleges serve only a tiny fraction of the total college-age population, but are probably over-represented in science grad schools– I know lots of people in my field of physics whose undergrad degrees come from small liberal arts colleges, and these include some spectacularly good scientists. My own undergrad experience was at a small college (Williams College, in MA), a bunch of the students and post-docs who passed through the research group were small-college grads, my immediate supervisor was a Wesleyan grad, and the group was headed by Bill Phillips, a proud alumnus of Juniata College in Pennsylvania. Every year at the research conference in my field, we try to take a group photo of the large contingent of Williams alumni working in the field; I think our record is 15, at a conference that draws about 1,100 people. And in the 14 years I’ve been at Union, we’ve sent a substantial fraction of our physics majors on to graduate school, and a handful have already completed their Ph.D.’s.

So, contrary to the idea that small colleges are only for liberal arts majors, they’re actually a great place to study science. Which is part of why I wanted to work at a place like Union, and actively sought a small-college job even though targeting these schools puzzled some of my colleagues and supervisors. So, what is it that makes these schools a great fit for science students?

Mostly, it’s the size. The small size of a typical liberal arts college– typically 1,500-2,500 students– means that science classes usually aren’t the giant-lecture-hall variety. Which is not to say that you can’t do amazing things in a lecture hall– groups like the Science Education Initiative at the University of Colorado do fantastic work on effective ways to teach enormous numbers of students (they’re one group among many; I singled them out because I’ve used a lot of their resources after adapting them to smaller classes)–  but it’s a lot easier for students to get lost in a class of 400, and the need to scale everything up constrains the kind of work you can do.

On the other hand, the largest intro courses we teach in physics at Union are capped at 18 students per section (we teach a lot of sections…), and the largest in any of the other sciences are 30-ish. That allows for a lot more interaction, which in turn lets faculty pick out students with potential who might otherwise disappear into a mass with similar grades. We can encourage students who aren’t working up to their potential, and deliver the occasional kick in the ass as needed– as I can personally testify, having had my academic career turned around by one of my physics professors junior year.

Small colleges also offer a lot of opportunities to get involved in research, which might seem paradoxical given the smaller size, which you might think would limit resources and opportunities. But while small schools tend not to have as many faculty labs, they also don’t have the huge crowd of graduate students and post-docs you find at a research university. Small college students get the chance to get involved in meaningful projects at a much earlier stage in their education— I regularly have students work for me the summer after their first year in college, and get deeply involved in the design and construction of experiments from the very beginning. That’s not impossible at a larger place, but it’s a lot harder to do. We’ve had really good luck actively recruiting first-year students who are too quiet to put themselves forward, or don’t realize that summer research is an option for them, something that works because of the small numbers– a student who might not stand out as a good prospect in a class of 200 is much easier to identify in a class to 20.

This chance for research experience is, of course, a resumé enhancer, but more than that, it’s a chance for students to see whether they like doing research, which is a dramatically different thing than just doing class work. This is particularly true in experimental science– a colleague at Williams says that the hardest thing to teach new students is that a research project is not a three-hour lab, that you know will work in a finite time– but theoretical research is also a dramatic change from class work. And that difference doesn’t track with academic ability in a simple way. I’ve seen students who excelled in the classroom but just couldn’t get into the research mindset, and also students who were kind of mediocre in class really blossom when given the chance to work in a research context. A colleague in computer science says that he specifically likes to hire B students for research projects, because they’re familiar with struggling through problems and trying lots of different approaches that don’t work. And that process of struggle  is pretty much your one-sentence definition of what doing research is like. The A students are often used to immediately recognizing what to do, and get thrown off when confronting a real-world problem where the first step isn’t obvious.

Finally, a major advantage for science students at small colleges is the greater presence of the liberal arts. This may seem like a strange thing for me to say, as my comments about bad defenses of liberal education are often misinterpreted as disparaging “the humanities.” But much as I roll my eyes at some of the things people say, non-scientific subjects are an essential part of science education. Contrary to myth, science is not a rigid and objective realm where “soft skills” play no role, but an intensely collaborative process where teamwork and communication are absolutely essential. Scientists are expected to write papers and give talks, something a fair number of entering graduates students are alarmed to discover. Classes in “the humanities” and the social sciences are extremely useful for learning how to communicate, and how to understand the social and political context in which we work.

There are drawbacks, of course. Small colleges are, in fact, small, and thus tend to have more resource restrictions than larger institutions (though not as much as you might think– we have an impressive array of instrumentation at Union, comparable to some research universities, and the greater access students have to it helps a lot). Because we’re dealing with smaller numbers of students, we’re not always able to offer as wide a range of classes as we might like– we have a rotating list of “Advanced Topics” courses that we run, and a typical student won’t be able to take all of them– and a small college won’t necessarily have somebody who works in every field a student might potentially be interested in. And finally, we sometimes trade off content coverage for more intense engagement in classes– we spend a bit more time doing some kinds of problems and activities that might not get done at a bigger place, but the time we spend on those means there are other topics we just don’t get to.

(And, of course, there’s the larger issue of the price tag: most small colleges are private, and thus expensive, at least in terms of sticker price. That’s a different trade-off that depends very strongly on individual finances, financial aid packages, etc.)

But, on the whole, I continue to believe that small colleges are an outstanding destination for students interested in studying science. So, to scientifically inclined students and parents making the tough decision of what college to attend next year, or what colleges to apply to next year: don’t be afraid to think small.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from August 2015.

We’re past the midpoint of August now, which means a lot of universities are opening their doors to a new crop of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students fresh out of high school and eager to start their college careers. This also means it’s the season for bloggers and op-ed writers to offer unsolicited advice to those incoming first-year students, and who am I to buck that tide?

So, here are a few suggestions for students just starting college who are planning to major in STEM fields over the next four-ish years. These come from my own experience as a former science major, and fourteen years as a physics professor at a small college, much of that time spent teaching first-year science and engineering students, so I do have some idea what I’m talking about, here…

Learn to Do Algebra

You’ll find lots of advice posts out there talking up calculus, but really,the biggest mathematical stumbling block for the first-year students I see isn’t calculus. I can write functions on the board all day long, and nine out of ten students will know how to take the derivative right off, and seven of ten can do a definite integral.

The point where students get tripped up is algebra. This surprises a lot of folks, because algebra is supposed to be simpler than calculus, but the problem is that too many students in too many schools rush through to calculus without taking the time to really get comfortable with algebra, and as a result they struggle with any problem that requires symbolic manipulation. But once you get past the most basic formula-regurgitating stage of the intro classes, algebra is everywhere.

So, my advice is: get comfortable with algebra. Granted, this probably would’ve been more help two years ago rather than two weeks before you start college, but even at a late stage, you can do something about it. You’re not going to effortlessly grasp the process of simplifying horrible fractions, but even with simple problems, push yourself to do them symbolically as far as possible, only plugging in non-zero numbers at the final step.

This is an essential skill for higher-level science classes, and a path to insight. I regularly assign problems in intro mechanics where one of the parameters (usually the mass) does not affect the final answer, and I’ll sometimes give those really horrible numerical values–117.3 kilograms. Working the problem out symbolically lets you see that the answer doesn’t need that, because the solution requires you to first multiply by the mass and then divide by that same mass. If you just plug numbers in, though, you’re pointlessly typing four-digit decimals into a calculator twice, increasing your chances of error.

Learn Some Statistics

This is an embarrassing gap in my own education– I don’t understand statistics as well as I should, because my background is in a field where we rarely need really sophisticated statistical data analysis to pull out our signals. This is not a path I would recommend, though. Knowing something about probability and statistics is absolutely invaluable for understanding modern science, and finds applications in other fields, as well.

Happily, the rise of wonks like poll aggregator extraordinaire Nate Silver and the folks at FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and The Upshot, among others, means that statistical analysis is becoming more common and accepted in mass media commentary. And the popularity of fantasy sports gives number-crunching an important role outside the pencil-neck-geek crowd, as well.

So, learn some statistics. Like algebra, it can get a little scary, and some Nobel-caliber smart folks will get tripped up by the finer points. But get the basics down, and you’ll become a better scientist, be less likely to be fooled by political hacks, and dominate your fantasy football league. Wins all across the board.

Learn to Program

I’ll outsource a bit of this to my friend and colleague Rhett Allain, who explained why your intro physics class should include computer programming last week. I wholeheartedly agree with Rhett– computer simulations need to be a part of the intro science courses, and we use the same Matter and Interactions curriculum he mentions.

When we start doing programming, I tell students that this matters because there are only about a dozen problems in physics that you can readily solve exactly with pencil and paper, and many of them are not that interesting. And that goes double, maybe triple for engineering, where you can’t get away with the simplifying spherical-cow approximations we’re so fond of in physics. Any really interesting problem in any technical field is going to require some numerical simulation, and the sooner you learn to do that, the better.

The best way to handle this is to have it integrated into your intro courses in your chosen major field– the best way to learn to code is to have a problem you need a computer to solve. If you’re not at a school that does this, though, take some programming classes. It doesn’t really matter what language you learn- the critical thing is the mode of thinking needed to get instructions into a computer-friendly form. If you master that in one language, you can pick up any of the others quickly enough.

Learn to Communicate

This may seem like an odd one, but it’s essential. Science, broadly defined, is a four-step process– I have a whole book on this— and the last step of that is communicating your results to others. If you want to have a successful career in science, you need to be able to write papers that other people can read and understand, and give presentations that convince other people you know what you’re doing. If you’re going into the corporate world, you need to be able to sell your clients and bosses on whatever course of action you’re proposing, which again means writing good reports and giving good presentations.

Even at the most specialized technical university, you will be required to take some classes where you read books and write papers– DO NOT BLOW THESE OFF. Yes, literature is a squishy subject, and it sometimes seems like a big game where you twist works to fit a pre-determined position. Learn to play that game. The specific rhetorical tricks employed in lit classes won’t necessarily be useful, but the general idea of persuasive writing will be essential down the road.

Likewise, if you’re terrified of public speaking, find a way to get past that. Give oral presentations in class, take part in discussions. Take an improv class, if they offer one. Even in the nerdiest scientific field– and believe me, it doesn’t get nerdier than physics– you are expected to give talks and poster presentations on a regular basis. The sooner you learn to do that, the better.

Get Involved in Research

While you might think you love science based on your experience in classes, classwork is a pale imitation of actual science. One of my colleagues at Williams used a phrase that I love, and quote all the time, saying that “the hardest thing to teach new research students is that this is not a three-hour lab.” In classes, you are only asked to attack problems that can actually be solved in a reasonable amount of time– your homework sets might take hours to write out, but they won’t contain problems that can’t be solved with the techniques you’re discussed in class, and the labs are designed to be completed within the time block assigned by the Registrar. In research, neither of those are true– a real research question doesn’t have a known answer, and might even turn out to be impossible to answer.

This difference is sometimes a rude shock to students who have always done well in class. The transition from knowing that there’s an answer out there to fumbling around trying to invent an answer that nobody has previously found is a tricky one. Some students who excel in class will crash and burn in research, and some indifferent students will turn out to be outstanding researchers.

The best way to find this out is to get involved in research projects as quickly as you can manage. This is easier to do at a smaller school– one of the reasons why small colleges are great for science students— but even at big places, there will be opportunities available, you’ll just have to work harder to get them. But put in the effort– get to know at least one of your intro professors well, and ask about research opportunities. Even if that particular professor doesn’t have a spot for you, he or she may be able to point you to a colleague who does.

Getting involved in research early is a big resume boost, but more importantly, it will tell you whether you like doing research. And that’s absolutely essential information to have, because going on in science past the undergrad level is all about research. If it’s not something you want to spend a lot of time doing, better to find that out as soon as possible, so you can adjust your plans accordingly.

So, there you go: five things to do on the way to your college degree in a STEM field. Or not– if doing one of these helps convince you that you really don’t want to major in science, that’s fine, too. All of these actions will get you experiences and skills that will be useful to you, no matter what you go on to do.

Bonus Etiquette Advice: College faculty get a little touchy about titles, and calling your instructor “Mr./Ms.” (or, worse, “Hey, dude…”) will make a bad impression. A good rule of thumb is to remember that very few people will take offense at being addressed with a higher-status title than they actually hold– addressing a grad student as “Dr. Lastname” will usually make them happy; addressing a full professor as “Mr. Lastname” will get you a spot in an anecdote about Kids These Days in the faculty lunchroom.

Unless you have been specifically told otherwise, assume that the person teaching your class holds the title “Professor,” and address them as such. (This is especially important if the person in question is not an older white man– science faculty do not all look like Einstein cartoons.) Even if they aren’t really a professor, it will make them think better of you, and that’s always a good thing.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from September 2015, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos ).

My “day job” is as a physics professor, and one of the things those of us in the business agonize about is the steep drop-off in students taking physics at various levels. Using statistics from the AIP, nearly 40% of high-school students take physics, while putting together enrollment numbers and the total college population suggests that the fraction of college students taking physics is a factor of ten smaller (this is a crude estimate, and seems low but not wildly implausible). Very few of those take anything beyond an introductory course required for some other major– years ago, I went to a conference on introductory physics teaching, and the factoid I remember is that only around 3% of students who take the intro course go on to take another class.

The problem is particularly acute for physics, because we have a (not undeserved) reputation as the hardest and most mathematical of the sciences, but it’s part of a more general phenomenon. Lots of students take science in high school because it’s required (either formally as a graduation requirement, or informally as a “you need to take this set of elective courses if you want to get into a good college” kind of thing), then run away as fast as they can when they get to college, and have (nearly) full control of their course selections.

Students who aren’t already planning to major in science often regard it as a waste of their time, a message unfortunately echoed by powerful politicians. Most colleges and universities have some sort of “general education” requirement forcing students to take at least a couple of math and science courses, but many non-science majors will take the barest minimum, and work very hard to put those off as long as possible. Disgruntled spring-term seniors who don’t want to be in the course but can’t graduate without it are a regular and unpleasant feature of our “Gen Ed” courses in physics and astronomy.

This approach is a major mistake, and having offered some advice to future science majors, let me offer some encouragement for non-scientists facing the prospect of having to take science in college. There are lots of reasons why you should take science, or at least shouldn’t avoid it; here are a few.

Science Is What Makes Us Human Academics studying art and literature aren’t shy about claiming fundamental status for their subjects, regularly declaring that art and literature capture something essential about the nature of being human. They’ve even successfully branded themselves as “the humanities,” as if all other areas of study are inhuman and alien.

In fact, though, science is every bit as fundamental to the human experience as art. Art scholars will point to ancient paintings and sculptures as evidence of the fundamental human drive to make art, but science is a necessary precursor to those. Before some proto-human could paint hand prints on a cave wall, they needed to figure out what rocks to grind up to make the pigment, and how to mix them with ash and animal fat to make paint. That process demands reasoning that is fundamentally scientific.

Branding aside, the scientific mode of thinking is not alien and difficult– scientists are smart, but not that smart. When you actively avoid engaging with science, you’re cutting yourself off from a deep and fundamental part of the human experience.

Science Is More Familiar Than You Think Following closely on the previous point, I would argue that scientific thinking, broadly defined, is an essential part of all manner of everyday activities. Things that non-scientists do for fun and relaxation are, in fact, making use of the same reasoning process as scientists making discoveries. Hobbies like stamp collecting, hidden-object games, or playing sports draw on the same process that scientists have used in the past to make great discoveries.

Yes, science requires a good deal of specialized background knowledge; so does anything worth doing. The core process is fundamental and universal, though, and if you focus on that, you’ll find that science is not so different from ordinary hobbies. If you understand how to play cards, you can understand the path to dark matter, and pretty much any of the other great discoveries that have reshaped our understanding of the universe.

(As you can tell from those links, this is a Thing for me– I have a whole book about the ways scientific thinking shows up in everyday activities.)

Turnabout Is Fair Play At this point you might be thinking “You may be right that I can use scientific thinking, but I’m not comfortable doing that.” And, sure, personal inclination plays a big role.

But then, the same thing is happening to many of your classmates who plan to major in science. Those same general education requirements that make English majors take science classes force science majors to take English classes. And in the very same way that many future literary scholars find it uncomfortable to work in an explicitly scientific mode, many future scientists find it uncomfortable to grapple with the fuzzy ambiguity of literature. If anything, the non-scientists often have it easier, because science departments generally offer special courses tailored for the interests of non-majors. Pretty much any college or university will have some variant of “Physics for Poets,” but it’s exceedingly rare to find anyone offering “Poetry for Physicists.”

So, yeah, you may not necessarily find the scientific mode of operation congenial. But some of your classmates feel the same way about whatever you’re majoring in, and they have to take those classes, too. It’s all part of the essential process of “ making yourself into the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

College Science Is Not High School Science A lot of the apprehension new college students bring to math and science classes stems from bad past experiences. These often result from teachers with limited resources, sometimes working well outside their own areas of expertise, forced to teach a prescribed curriculum aimed toward a particular test.

Many of these constraints will be different at the college or university level. If you take physics in college, you’ll be taking it from a physicist, not a biology education major who needed to pick up the physics class because the district can’t afford a separate physics teacher. The people teaching your classes will be genuine experts in the subject matter in ways that high school teachers often are not. And the available resources for labs and hands-on investigation are often far better than you’ll find at the high school level.

More than that, if you’re taking one of the targeted “gen ed” courses for non-majors, you’ll be getting the “Good Parts Version” of the subject in question, a selection of the most interesting topics presented in an accessible way. Last fall I taught a non-majors course on relativity, where in a single course we got to topics that only show up in senior-level electives in the major sequence. You don’t need to go through two courses’ worth of blocks sliding on inclined planes before getting to talk about black holes and wormholes.

You may think you don’t like science based on bad experiences in high school, but it may just be that you don’t like high school science. What you see in college is a very different thing, and you may well find it more appealing, even inspiring.

Even If You Don’t Care About Science, Science Cares About You There’s really no way to avoid an “eat your vegetables” item on a list like this, so, well, you need to eat your vegetables. By which I mean that even if you don’t personally find science congenial, your future life will be affected by scientific issues in a deep and profound way, and you need to understand at least a little bit about it to make informed decisions.

The biggest challenge facing future generations will be dealing with climate change and its consequences, which is fundamentally a scientific issue. In coming decades, critical policy decisions will need to be made– about energy sources, mitigation strategies, etc.– and getting those questions right demands some scientific information. Public health is another huge issue, requiring informed decisions about how to fight pandemic disease, an aging population, etc. There are even strong scientific components to economic and ethical issues like the societal displacement caused by increasing automation and computerization of, well, everything.

Scientific knowledge even comes in to more personal decisions. Scientific thinking will help you avoid all manner of medical quackery and other scams, which can have disastrous consequences.

Successfully navigating the road ahead will require making informed decisions. This will demand not just trivial knowledge of facts, but some understanding of scientific standards and methods for evaluating information. This is acquired in, yes, science classes.

So, for these reasons (and many more), I would urge all students to take science classes in college, and take them seriously. They’ll connect you with an essential part of the human experience, they’ll probably be better than you fear, and they’ll help you gain essential skills for navigating the future. Science courses aren’t an arbitrary bullshit requirement imposed to protect faculty jobs, they’re a necessary step in helping you become a better citizen and a better human being.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from October 2015, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos of random works of art).

My “day job” is as a professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, a small liberal arts college, and because of that, I’ve offered a bunch of academic advice. I’ve written about why small colleges are a great place to be a science major, what science students should study in college, and why non-science majors should take science classes. This covers most of the topics on which I’m most obviously qualified to give advice.

The obvious gap in this collection of advice is why science students ought to take non-science classes. I sort of feel like I shouldn’t need to write this, as essays defending the importance of the collection of academic disciplines known as “the humanities” (a term I hate, because it implies that the sciences are inhuman, which is very far from the truth) are an evergreen topic in writing about academia. Lots of scholars of arts and literature have written at great length about why the study of art and literature and history and philosophy and all the rest matters even in our modern, technological, consumerist age.

The problem is, I mostly hate what they come up with. I wouldn’t be where I am and do what I do if I didn’t believe that arts and literature and the study thereof have an important role in the world, but most of the defenses people offer are just maddening to me. They’re soaringly vague, or make grandly empty claims about “big questions” and “critical thinking” (as if those don’t come up in science), or attempt to distinguish themselves from science in a way that mostly serves to demonstrate that the author knows basically nothing about the practice of science. (One of these made me get a little rant-y yesterday, and is the proximate cause of this post.) They purport to be defending “the humanities” from attacks, but mostly just pander to the sensibilities of an educated elite who already agree with them.

I’ve read a lot of these, and hardly a week goes by without another one showing up in my various social-media feeds. But I’m consistently disappointed by the failure to articulate a clear, concrete case for the value of arts and literature in terms that make sense to somebody who isn’t already committed to these fields. Which I guess means I’ll have to make my own attempt at it.

So, what follows is an attempt by someone who is a scientist by training and inclination to give a reasonably specific and concrete argument for why even people who plan to pursue careers in the STEM fields ought to study “the humanities.” I’m trying to emphasize practical benefits here– not the crass “employers want ‘soft skills’ so taking English will help you get a job” sort (though if you want that, Forbes has you covered), but “this is how these subjects will help you be a better scientist or engineer”– because that’s what I usually find missing from these articles, and I suspect the same is true for many other people of a scientific bent.

So, why should students planning to major in STEM fields take “humanities” classes in college? What benefit does a future scientist derive from knowing something about art and literature?

Empathy

The most important thing that literature does is to give you a glimpse of how the world looks according to someone who isn’t you. If you read a book, or watch a play or a film, you’re getting to spend a brief time looking at the world from somebody else’s perspective. Whether that’s the author, or the director, or the actors, or the characters they’re playing, literature will introduce you to people whose experience of the world has been vastly different than yours.

And that’s critically important because the vast majority of people in the world are not you. In fact, modulo the occasional alternate world scenario, you’re a minority of one.

This is critically important because as much as we might like to, science can’t be walled off from other concerns– science is done by people, and we all bring our own history and experiences to the process of doing science. You’ll need to work with, for, and sometimes around these people, and understanding how they look at the world can be enormously helpful to this process.

Literature can help with this. Not because any of the books you read will provide a perfect analogue for any of the people you meet, but because it’s good practice. If you read a wide range of literature, and study it carefully, you’ll gain experience in seeing how the world looks to other people. Which makes it that much easier the next time you have to deal with somebody– another scientist, a student, a manager or politician– whose perspective you need to understand to accomplish something you want to do.

Context

In a similar vein, as much as we might like to close out the rest of the world to focus on specific research problems, science is necessarily done in a very specific context. We have to do our work within the world as it is, and consider how our work will affect the larger world in the future. To do that, it’s essential to know something about how the world works and how it got the way it is.

Literature can help a bit with this, but this is where history and philosophy play the biggest role. It’s important to understand not only the details of the current moment– who’s in charge of which countries, how much stuff they control, etc.– but also the big processes that shaped the current situation, and the ways of thinking about the world that motivate various groups of people.

Again, this is important not only because you pick up specific facts about specific countries– it’s probably impossible to learn everything you will ever need to know about every country you will ever need to deal with– but as a general practice. Studying the history and politics and philosophy of a few specific countries or regions will give you a sense of the general forces that operate, and some practice at finding and categorizing this information. Studying specific history is useful in the same way that learning one programming language makes it easier to pick up a completely different one later, or the way we study harmonic oscillators in physics not because physicists spend tons of time working with masses on springs but because that solution can serve as a useful and versatile approximation for studying lots of other problems.

Communication

The final and most important step in the process of science is communicating your results. This is what separates science from alchemy– the widespread dissemination of results lets other people build on new discoveries, which in turn powers the rapid advance of understanding that has led to the modern world. It’s not enough to have the right ideas, you need to get other people to understand them. Ernst Stueckelberg is a useful cautionary tale, here: he had basically the full theory of quantum electrodynamics worked out a decade or so before Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga, but he published his results in an obscure journal in idiosyncratic notation, and as a result they got the Nobel and he remains basically unknown.

If you want to succeed in science, you need to know how to communicate, and art and literature are all about communication. Reading, watching, and studying will help you learn how to make a connection with others through various media. Understanding what works and why will make you a more effective communicator, and that will make you a better scientist.

The obvious rejoinder here is that academic writing mostly sucks, so why waste time learning to write like a literature professor? But, again, this can be useful practice without being directly useful. You probably won’t be called on to write in the style of a literary scholar in the course of a career in science (unless you plan to pull a prank), but you will be forced to write in a bunch of different styles, not all of them ones that you’ll find congenial– both academia and industry are infested with “mission statements” and the like, and if you’re any good at what you do you will someday be asked to contribute to these. Getting practice in writing lots of different styles, even ones you find kind of pointless, will be helpful when you need to differentiate a paper from a grant proposal from a popular article.

Having raised, however parenthetically, the specter of the Sokal Hoax, this is probably a good place to discuss the issue of “post-modernism” and other widely derided bits of academic “humanities.” It’s common in scientific circles to point at a cartoon version of this stuff and laugh, taking it as evidence that modern scholarship in the arts and literature is all made-up nonsense buried in obscurantist jargon.

While I have a low opinion of the information content of a lot of scholarly writing, it’s a mistake to completely write off “post-modernism” and the various other much-mocked “-isms” that cluster around it. There’s a crucial insight at the heart of all this stuff, having to do with communication, namely that what really matters is not what you intend to say, but how the person on the other end receives your message. This sort of bridges all three of my items above, as it means that effectively communicating with others requires making an effort to understand the likely perspectives of your audience, and that in turn requires knowing something about their context.

This might not seem terribly consequential, but it’s something you neglect at your own peril. Failure to think about how a message will be received is at the heart of any number of spectacular recent flameouts, like the shirtstorm and the neverending Tim Hunt fiasco.

So, there’s my attempt at making a case for why even scientists need to study the arts, literature, history, philosophy, and whatever else we’re lumping together as “the humanities” this week. Ultimately, of course, the best reason to study these subjects is exactly the same as the best reason to study science: because they’re fascinating in their own right. But even beyond that, there are concrete practical benefits to studying these subjects; far from being a waste of time that could be spent on more science and math, studying art and literature will make you a better, more successful scientist.

(And, incidentally, a better, more interesting human being. But that should go without saying…)

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post from February 2016, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos of college campuses).

The college admissions process goes year-round these days, but the activity and the associated stress level peaks twice a year: once in the fall, when high-school students have to decide what schools they want to apply to, and again in late winter/early spring when those same students are forced to make a decision about what college to attend. The process and the pressure on students has intensified considerably since my high-school days back in the 1980’s (after the dinosaurs but before the giant armored sloths), and as a faculty member, I’ve talked to dozens of students (and parents) over the years who are going through the process, many of them teetering on the edge of panic.

Having gone through this a lot– this is my fifteenth year as a professor– I have a well-worn set of advice I give to anxious high-school seniors on campus visits. Having previously offered a bunch of academic advice in blog form– why small colleges are great for students planning to study science, what students should do to prepare for studying science in college, why non-science students need to take science, and why science students need to take non-science classes— I might as well offer some general advice on the choice of college.

I will note up front that this is my personal take on the question of how to choose among multiple college admission offers, which I’ll assume are roughly comparable (that is, you’re not trying to pick between paying full tuition at one school and a free ride at another). While I’ll try to keep this as general as possible, I’m coming at it from the perspective of a scientist at a small liberal arts school, so if my answers seem to push toward small colleges, or seem more relevant for science students, well, that’s why. But here’s a version of what I’ve been telling students the last few years about choosing between different colleges.

1) Relax: The Stakes Are Lower Than You’ve Been Led To Believe

First and foremost, if you’re choosing between multiple reasonably good offers, you’re in a great spot, and will end up fine. In fact, if you find that you’re stressed out about the choice between multiple good schools, that’s probably an indication that it doesn’t much matter which of them you pick.

I say that because, ultimately, education isn’t something a college or university does to you, it’s something you do for yourself. Colleges and universities are in the business of providing resources for students to use in shaping their own education. Some of these are obvious– classes, labs, libraries– others more indirect– lectures, cultural events, fascinating fellow students– but in the end they’re all just tools that students will use to fashion their future selves.

And once you’re above a minimum threshold of viability, you can find the necessary resources to get a quality education just about anywhere. If you’re choosing between two roughly comparable institutions (that is, not comparing Stanford to the University of Phoenix) you will find all the tools you need to get a good education at either. What matters more than anything is that you’re actively engaged in the process, and trying to make the most of what your institution offers. The most important factor is that you care about your education, and if you’re worried about choosing between comparable colleges, that’s a good indicator that you have the necessary engagement.

(I should note that while this is largely a statement of opinion, I can cite some (social) science to back it up, in the form of two studies by economists Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger. These show that while graduates of elite schools on average earn more than graduates of non-elite schools, students who could’ve gone to an elite school but didn’t for whatever reason end up earning just as much as those who went to the elite school. There’s a non-technical explanation here.)

So take a deep breath, and try to ratchet back the anxiety a little. The college decision is not an all-or-nothing, right-or-wrong choice– if you’re choosing between comparable institutions, you can be happy and successful at any of them.

2) Your Environment Matters

Given that education is mostly self-determined, the final choice among comparable colleges is to some degree an aesthetic one. That is, you want to choose the place where you will feel most comfortable, and most able to make use of the resources provided to you. And that means that things like the physical environment of the college are important to consider when making a decision. After all, you’re not just choosing where you’ll attend the occasional classes, you’re picking a place to live for the next several years.

I went to Williams College, back in the day, and a couple of my colleagues here at Union sent their daughter there a few years back. Sometime during her first year, one of them remarked to me that people who go to Williams seem to just love it to an extreme degree, and asked why that was. I said “Because the location scares off the people who would hate it.”

That’s only half a joke. Williams is in western Massachusetts, up in the Berkshires, and a long way from anything else. And lots of people from more (sub)urban environments find that really off-putting– my wife visited there as a high school student, and recalls thinking something along the lines of “This is nowhere.” To me, though, having grown up in a small town in a rural area of New York, it felt like home. That kind of comfort with the physical environment matters a lot. I know some classmates who really chafed at the confined atmosphere of living in Williamstown after a while, but for the most part, people who weren’t going to be happy out in the country didn’t go there in the first place.

So, if at all possible, make sure you visit the campuses of the places you’re choosing between (definitely do this if you didn’t get a chance before applying, but even if you’ve seen it before, go there again). If one of them stands out as feeling like home, that’s a good sign. More importantly, though, if you find you can’t imagine yourself living in a particular climate or set of first-year dorms, cross that school off your list immediately.

3) Your Classmates Matter

Even the most intensive academic calendar will see you spending well under a full 24-hour day a week interacting with faculty. Far more time is going to be spent outside the classroom, and unless you’re planning to be a total hermit, a lot of that time will be spent interacting with your fellow students.

So, as much as possible, try to get a sense of what the other students are like while you’re there. Sit in on a class or two, sure, and pay attention not just to what the professor says, but how the students act. And do what you can to get a sense of the social environment– don’t just go to classes, but try to find out what students are like when they’re not in class. If you’re on an overnight visit, hang out with your host and their friends, and go to any evening events the school has organized.

(This won’t be 100% accurate, of course, as a lot of colleges work very hard to keep prospective students far away from anything involving alcohol, but you can get some sense of what people are like as a general matter. The guys I stayed with when I visited Williams weren’t part of the same crowd I ran with as an actual student, but I had a good time just hanging around bullshitting.)

You’re potentially going to be spending a lot of time with these folks, and ideally some of them will become lifelong friends. Make sure there are people there you can feel comfortable spending time with.

4) Academic Environment Matters

It may seem weird to put this at the end of the list, but again, your education is going to be mostly determined by what you do. The faculty and staff are not without influence, though, so it’s very important to make sure that you’re comfortable with them, too.

So, if you know roughly what you want to study, make sure to visit that specific department, or a few departments in the right general area, and get a sense of that environment as well. Are the faculty willing to talk to you, as a prospective student, and make you feel welcome? More importantly, are they making the students who are already enrolled feel comfortable? It’s easy to put on a show for someone on a one-day visit, but harder to fake a comfortable environment for people who live there.

If you visit a department and see students hanging around working together, or working with faculty, that’s a great sign. If you go there on a weekday afternoon and the place is a ghost town, that suggests that students aren’t comfortable being there, which should make you concerned about whether you’re going to be comfortable being there.

And make sure the resources that a prospective college or university provides will be available to you. Having world-class research labs is a great thing, but if they’re entirely controlled by grad students and post-docs, they’ll make very little difference to your experience as an undergraduate. An awesome art collection or library that’s only open every other Tuesday from 8-9am isn’t going to do you any good.

(This is the point where my small-college bias shows through most clearly, of course– close contact with faculty and access to resources is what we’re selling…)

Again, I’m talking here about decisions between roughly comparable offers, so I haven’t said anything about finances or institutional reputation. The advice above presumes you’re deciding between schools whose prestige and price tag are similar, because that’s the situation for most of the students I see. Those factors aren’t completely meaningless– all else being equal, a more elite institution will offer you connections that you can’t get at a state school, and depending on what you plan to do after graduation, that network can make an enormous difference. And, of course, finances can loom very large– with elite schools having “sticker prices” north of $60,000/year, the size of a financial aid offer can be the decisive factor.

Those things are highly contingent on individual circumstances, though. The advice above is as general as I can make it, and applies to any college decision. Far and away the most important thing to remember is that education is something you do for yourself; after that, the decision is all about maximizing your chances of being comfortable with your physical environment, your classmates, and your academic department.

This post is part of a series of posts originally written for my blog at Forbes.com that I’m copying to my personal site, so I have a (more) stable (-ish) archive of them. This is just the text of the original post, from August 2016, without the images that appeared with it (which were mostly fairly generic photos of college campuses).

The calendar has just flipped over to August, which means we’re climbing up to one of the two big annual peaks of college stress. The first, calendar-wise, comes in February/March when admissions departments send out acceptance letters and students have to make a choice; the second is in late summer, when those students confront the reality of actually starting college. (There’s a third stress peak in late fall when students are deciding where to apply, but it’s small compared to the other two…) As someone who is prone to offering unsolicited advice (one, two, three, four, five previous advice posts), this seems like an opportune moment to write something taking an extremely big-picture view of the whole business.

A letter from my college alumni association recently reminded me that I’m rapidly closing in on 25 years since my college graduation, and I’ve been a college professor for fifteen years now. Which puts me in sort of a weird position, both looking back nearly a quarter-century at my own education, and forward at what my students will be facing in the future. Given that context, what I’m talking about here isn’t advice for the first year, or even the full span of a college education. I want to offer some thoughts on what it is that you get out of going to college in the long term– on the time scale of a career, not one job. That’s a hard scale to think about when you’re in your mid-forties, let alone your late teens, but since events and decisions made when you’re 19 have a huge effect on your life when you’re 45, it’s worth trying to take that view now and again.

(And because this piece will inevitably reflect my own background and biases, let me state right up front that what I’ll say here primarily applies to “traditional” students: recent high-school graduates heading off to a four-year college for the first time. Some of these points will very obviously be less relevant to, say, a 30-year-old heading back to school after a stint in the military, but I think some of it will still be useful, even if just as an aid in understanding the psychology of the annoying kids in your classes…)

So, to put it bluntly, what’s the point of this whole business? That is, why do we send kids off to college? What is it that the students get out of this whole thing? As someone who has spent more years in the world of higher education than out of it, I think there are four main things that students should expect to get out of going to college.

1) Subject-Specific Knowledge

The most obvious outcome of a college education is detailed knowledge about some specific subject. If you get a four-year degree, that degree will be in something: Physics, Political Science, English Literature, Business, Art History, Journalism, Mechanical Engineering, whatever. At some point in your college career, you’ll have to declare a major (at least one), and if nothing else, people you deal with in the future will expect you to have some specific and useful knowledge in that subject.

So, if you’re a student facing college, make sure to give this choice careful thought. Pick something that suits your interests and skills– if you struggle with math, you probably shouldn’t try for a degree in theoretical physics, and if you can’t draw a straight line using a vector graphics program, studio art’s probably not for you. And once you make the choice, you should commit to it, and make sure to actually learn about that subject.

This is less of an issue in science and engineering, where major programs tend to be rigidly hierarchical until fairly late in the sequence, but every program has some elements of free choice. Make sure that the choices you make are getting you something besides an easy grade– it’s almost always more useful to take a hard elective in a sub-topic you don’t know much about than an easier class that you can just skate through.

Choice of major subject is, of course, the surface level at which lots of college discussions happen– politicians and parents will try to push students toward more obviously “applied” areas. The most frequent question I get from parents at Admissions events is “Will she be able to get a job with this degree?” While this is a legitimate area of concern, it’s also somewhat overrated, as you can tell from the fact that I’ve made it only one element of this list. Major selection is important, but as long as you pick something and commit to it– don’t be one of those students entering your final semester with a random grab-bag of courses asking the Registrar and Dean to find some program they can be made to fit so you graduate on time (yes, we get those, with depressing regularity)– it’s not that important. What really matters for building a career is that you demonstrate the ability to acquire coherent and in-depth knowledge of some subject to a level that merits a college degree.

2) Learning Skills

Even the most rigidly tracked majors will leave some room for outside classes, and all but the most narrowly focused technical schools will require you to take some courses in areas outside your major. A lot of students view these as capricious, annoying requirements to make their lives harder, and try to find a way to meet the minimum standard with minimum effort, but this is a mistake. Classes outside your major aren’t a stupid waste of time, they’re an essential part of college education, and a foundation for future success.

It’s not just that science has useful lessons for non-scientists or that scientists benefit from arts and literature, though those specific bits of knowledge are important. The larger benefit of these classes comes from learning how to learn.

That may sound annoyingly circular, but the point is that different fields of study necessarily involve acquiring and sharing knowledge in different ways. Some subjects are built around lectures and homework problems that duplicate examples from lecture; others are built around class discussions and open-ended papers. Some classes demand mostly reading and thinking; others force you to make stuff.

When you eventually graduate and get a job, one of these modes will probably be the most immediately important, which is why you major in a specific subject, with its particular set of standard practices. But on the time scale of a career, unless you plan to retire from the exact same job you start in, you’ll eventually need to operate in new ways, and different contexts. And that’s where those non-major classes help. Being forced to think, act, and learn in the characteristic manner of several different fields, not just your narrow major area, helps build some flexibility that will serve you well down the road.

So, the concrete advice here regarding non-major classes (“general education” or “distribution” requirements) is: Take these classes seriously, and try to stretch a little. Don’t just take classes or professors with a reputation for being easy, take ones that have a reputation for being good, even if they’re difficult. And take at least a few things that are very far from your major area.

This may not seem to have an immediate payoff, but it’s a good investment for the future. A random theater class taken as a sophomore probably won’t help you land your first job, but the extra flexibility you gain from studying a range of subjects will help as you move on to the second (and third, and so on…) and have to master a new set of skills and responsibilities.

3) Adult-ing Skills

Even the most rigorous academic program will involve large stretches of time spent outside of class, and even factoring in homework and sleep won’t fill all the hours of the day. In a lot of discussions, this part of the college experience gets treated as ancillary at best. Non-academic activities are talked about as a distraction from “real” education, if not an active impediment to it. In fact, though, this is one of the most important parts of a college education.

This is the item that’s most specific to “traditional” students, most of whom will be living away from home and family for the first time. And for a lot of those students, what happens in the classroom will be less of a challenge than managing time and activities outside of a purely academic context. Setting and maintaining a reasonable schedule of classes, studying, and other activities; managing personal relationships with other students, and navigating the various distractions that come with those; just keeping themselves properly fed and clothed when parents aren’t around to do laundry and make dinner. Those are all skills that are essential for a fully-functioning adult member of society, and those are all things that “traditional” students learn in college.

Now, you might reasonably ask whether you need to send tens of thousands of dollars to some academic institution to acquire these, rather than, say, picking them up while drawing a salary at a job or doing military service. And in that financial sense, everything but the classes is absolutely secondary– most of the price tag is for the facilities and faculty needed for formal education.

At the same time, though, the residential-life side of college provides an important safety net for people who are still learning how to be adults. And that makes a big difference– exceeding your time-management skills for a semester or so might hurt your GPA, but you’re not going to get fired or starve. A typical dorm room might get a little messy, but living in space maintained by a college or university prevents a fall into the risk and squalor you can easily find on the private housing market. And so on. Mistakes made while figuring out how to manage life on your own are much less likely to wreck your future, or anyone else’s.

The concrete advice for students here is to keep in mind that learning to function as an autonomous adult is part of the process. You’re not quite standing entirely on your own, but you should at least make the attempt– your parents shouldn’t be swooping in to fix problems on a regular basis.

Obviously, there’s a fine line to be walked here– self-sufficiency is the goal, but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything entirely on your own. That’s also part of becoming an adult– learning to recognize when you need somebody else’s help to get through whatever’s going on. Fortunately, a college or university environment comes with a lot of people who can do just that– faculty and staff who can help you choose classes and navigate academic requirements, residential staff who can help resolve problems with dorms and facilities, counselors and medical staff who can help with physical and mental health. And you’ll be surrounded by fellow students who can help in a more informal way with all that stuff. Which brings us to the last item:

4) Personal Relationships

While most discussions of higher education focus on the formal and physical aspects– the classes, libraries, and laboratories, and also dorms, gyms, and dining halls– in a lot of respects, the most important part is the people. Looking back 25 years to my time in college, the things I learned in class are important (especially as my day job involved teaching some of those same things to a new generation of students), but the most enduring influence on my life is probably social. A major chunk of what I got out of going to college is found in the relationships I’ve built with people I first met during those years.

There is, of course, a formal educational component to this– it’s important to have good relationships with faculty who will serve as references down the line when you need a job or apply to grad school. And this often comes up in discussions of higher education, particularly more elite colleges and universities, in a sort of cynical sense– the idea of being able to tap into “old-boy” alumni networks for favors and jobs and so on.

While those things are real and important, the biggest impact is often less quantifiable and more personal. The people you meet in college will influence you for the rest of your life, whether you’re talking about romantic partners, roommates and teammates, or just people you sometimes hang out with. They can be useful contacts when finding a new job, or investors in your great idea, or just someone to catch up with when happen to be in the same city. You’ll go to their weddings, they’ll sleep on your couches, you’ll randomly bump into them in airports and say “Holy shit, how’ve you been?” They’ll be friends and mentors, there to offer a helping hand or a sympathetic ear, and you’ll do the same for them.

(Again, this is not stuff that you can only get at college; you can meet people and build relationships if you just go straight to work, too. And some of this is just a function of a particular time of life– I know people who aren’t really in touch with anyone they met as undergrads, but who still have great friends made in the same time period through other activities. It’s part of the package of things you can get by going to college in the “traditional” manner, though, so makes sense to include here.)

As with any social phenomenon, exactly who will turn out to be important to you, and how, is impossible to predict. My concrete advice here, then, is just to remember that the people around you matter. Which is not to say that you should stress out about the long-term potential of every social interaction– really, don’t do that– just that you should treat people well, and not just in terms of immediate utility, because those relationships might matter someday. And if you’re just keeping your head down, going to class and doing your assignments with minimal interaction, you might be missing out on one of the most influential aspects of going to college in the first place.

So, there’s my really big-picture, long-term advice about the most important benefits of going to college, for those heading that way in the near future. It’s awfully easy to get hung-up on short-term anxieties, and details that really won’t make that much difference. Try not to lose too much sleep over small stuff, though– you won’t be able to completely, but try. You’re looking to gain some specific subject knowledge, mental flexibility and ability to learn, basic life skills, and solid personal relationships. Do those things well, and you’ll have a good experience, and a good base for a successful life.