[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Emeriti-faculty] Job Candidates' Visits




To All Graduate Students:

This week, weather permitting, we will have the first of nine candidate visits for the two open faculty positions (condensed matter theory and high energy experiment).  The next six weeks will be both very busy and very exciting. Each visit will include a colloquium and an opportunity for students to have an informal lunch with the candidate. Please pay close attention to your emails and posted announcements -- days, times and rooms will vary, and weather could disrupt the schedules.

This is a wonderful opportunity for you to learn -- not only about condensed matter and high energy physics, but also about what it means to be an early-career physicist on the job market.  Please note the following:
  • You are expected to attend the colloquia.  They are an essential part of your educational program and your development as a scientist.  Your classes provide a scaffolding of basic physics for you to build on, and your individual research provides deep expertise in a specific field and vital experience in independent exploration.  One of the purposes of the colloquia is to provide an exposure to other research fields, other analytical approaches, and other perspectives that you may not otherwise encounter. You may think that talks on protein dynamics or neutrino oscillations are of no interest or importance to you, but you're wrong. You never know when you will pick up a useful idea, and time spent learning good science from a good scientist is never wasted.
  • Their value to you transcends the specific science the talk is about. They show you how science is done, and how to talk about it (or sometimes how not to talk about it) to an audience of nonexperts. This is an absolutely crucial skill for any scientist and you should take advantage of any opportunity to observe how it is done.
  • Talks by job candidates are especially valuable.  They are invariably given by outstanding scientists (otherwise they wouldn't have been invited) and are usually very good talks (since the speaker is highly motivated to do a good job).  Also, the speakers are only a little bit ahead of you in their careers -- in a few years you will be standing where they are.  You can see what an excellent graduate and postdoctoral research program looks like, how to put together a job talk, how to handle questions -- even how to dress and how to present yourself.  These are indispensable professional skills.
  • Having pizza with the candidate is great, and I encourage you to participate, but it's not a substitute for attending the talk.
Many of you have already been regularly attending the colloquia, which is wonderful. Getting to the job talks will take a little more attention and organization, since they won't all be on Friday afternoons, but it will be richly rewarded.

The first job talk will be this Friday Jan. 28, 3:00 pm, in Robinson Hall (either 250 or 253), by Dr. Lisa Manning, on “How Does Surface Tension Emerge From Structure in Biological Tissues?”.

I look forward to seeing you all there,

Roger Tobin

begin:vcard
fn:Roger G. Tobin
n:Tobin;Roger G.
org:Tufts University;Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
adr;dom:;;4 Colby St.;Medford;MA;02155
email;internet:roger tobin tufts edu
title:Professor and Department Chair
tel;work:617-627-5461
tel;fax:617-627-3744
x-mozilla-html:TRUE
url:http://www.tufts.edu/~rtobin
version:2.1
end:vcard