{"id":3446,"date":"2009-02-26T10:17:02","date_gmt":"2009-02-26T10:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/02\/26\/what-do-you-do-well\/"},"modified":"2009-02-26T10:17:02","modified_gmt":"2009-02-26T10:17:02","slug":"what-do-you-do-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/02\/26\/what-do-you-do-well\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do You Do Well?"},"content":{"rendered":"

ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty\/post-docs\/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: “What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s a good topic that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it<\/s> re-pose it without that frame:<\/p>\n

\n

What is one thing in your professional life that you do especially well?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Leave your answer in the comments. One exceptional skill per comment, please (JVP, this means you).<\/p>\n

My answer: I’m good at telling stories.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I fit half of the original frame for the question, being an academic scientist, and teaching is a big part of my job. My best lectures are the ones in which I can construct some sort of coherent narrative around the topic. In modern physics, this often takes the form of historical anecdotes, but it doesn’t need to be. It can be built around a particular class of problem, or a new technique–I tend to do this a lot in intro mechanics, posing some question that can’t easily be solved with Newton’s Laws, and then showing how energy or momentum make the solution simple.<\/p>\n

My weakest lectures are ones in which I need to convey some relatively disconnected set of facts and definitions. Without a good story to provide a natural flow from one topic to the next, I struggle with the transitions, and the whole class ends up being a little disjointed.<\/p>\n

This affects my research career as well as my teaching. I tend to gravitate toward research topics that lend themselves to narrative, and I struggle with areas that are thick with abstract formalism. My worst grade ever in a physics class came in a Solid State class I took in grad school– I never really got my head around “reciprocal lattice vectors,” and as a result had a hard time with pretty much everything that followed. My weakest area in my own field of AMO physics is the zone where atomic physics shades into condensed matter (the BEC-BCS “crossover” regime, for example).<\/p>\n

My understanding of high energy physics is also very limited, in large part because I’ve never been able to get a good feel for what goes on behind the formalism of symmetry groups and the like. This is due in large part to never having had a class on the subject to help bridge the gap between pop-science and high energy theory blogs.<\/p>\n

I trust that the connection between skill at telling stories and the book-in-production is obvious.<\/p>\n

So, anyway, that’s what I do well, or at least what I think I do well. What do you do well?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question: You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty\/post-docs\/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: “What is… Continue reading What Do You Do Well?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}