Getting Your Degree

If you come from an American school you are probably used to the idea that graduation occurs once per year on some random weekend day in May or June, during which the college town overflows with family and friends.

But this is not how it works at Oxford.  There are something like a dozen degree ceremonies per year.  Once you have been given permission to graduate (or if you are a DPhil, it is called "leave to supplicate", which strictly speaking means, "permission to beg" for your degree), you then have the right to sign up for a ceremony.   This can be shortly after you finish, or could be many years later.   It is not at all unusual for people to return to Oxford to finally collect a degree they earned twenty or more years ago.


In September, a whole bunch of my recently finishing undergraduate students decided to collect their degrees together.   This most excellent bunch, having (most of them) started four years ago this week and finished this past June, is the first set of students who I have seen through from their first year to their last. So I admit that I am particularly attached to them.    I came to the ceremony just to wish them well, and of course, to take their pictures!

.. and here they are!

Apologies for the fact that some of the pictures are not great.   Extra points if you can spot the portrait of Mary Somerville, the namesake of our college.

Nice Optics

One thing that is actually nice about all the light drizzle around here is that you get quite a few good rainbows. (For those who might not recognize it, that is Keble College on the right and the Clarendon lab of the physics department straight ahead). 

Just as I was taking this photo my colleague John Chalker came up behind me and said "Don't let anyone see you doing that, or they might force you to teach optics!"  

Presentation to the Visitor

Last Saturday, Somerville College officially inaugurated its new Principal, Dr. Alice Prochaska. The ceremony is actually known as “Presentation to the Visitor” with “Visitor” here not meaning something out of star trek, but rather meaning the Chancellor of the University – the Lord Patten of Barnes.

[The person with the real power at the top of the administration is actually the Vice-Chancellor. The Chancellor is mainly a figure head, but does preside at formal occasions such as this one.]

During the ceremony of “Presentation,” the Fellows of the College gather, in academic gowns, in the Senior Common Room. Many were dressed in Black and Red, the Somerville colors. (I was happy just to have found a clean shirt and did not think much about the color). Then the senior fellow of the College, Mrs Lesley Brown, presents the principal-elect to the visitor.

[Mrs Lesley Brown has been a distinguished scholar of Ancient Philosophy at Oxford for many many years – having been elected fellow at Somerville College in 1970, and even having chaired the Philosophy department for several years since then. However, having been elected fellow so young, she actually never bothered to obtain her DPhil or PhD, and is thus listed as Mrs rather than Dr or Professor]

Mrs Brown then did the “presentation”, reading the officially prescribed text, in English (Of all the times when Latin might have been appropriate, this might have been one – being that Mrs Brown is a Latin expert).

I, Mrs Lesley Brown, Fellow of Somerville College, in the University of Oxford hereby declare the Dr Alice Prochaska was formally elected Principal of said College, in Succession to Dame Fiona Caldicott at the stated meeting of the Governing Body held on the 17th June 2009.

Then the Principal Elect makes her declaration:

I, Alice Prochaska, hereby declare that I will faithfully perform the duties of my office as Principal of Somerville College, and will observe the Statutes and By-laws of the College in force for the time being

People were a little puzzled by the phrase “for the time being” that occurs in this declaration, but that is what is officially prescribed in our statutes (although no one could quite explain why this phrase is inserted).

And finally the Visitor confirms that this has been witnessed

I, the Right Honourable Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Visitor of Somerville College in the University of Oxford, hereby declare that Mrs Lesley Brown, Fellow of Somerville College, having announced to me on this twenty-fifth day of September 2010 that Dr Alice Prochaska had been duly elected Principal of Somerville College, presented to me Dr. Prochaska as said Principal. The said Dr Prochaska declared before me that she would faithfully perform the duties of the office of Principal of Somerville College and would observe the Statutes and By-laws of the College in force for the time being.

That first sentence is a bit hard to Parse, huh?

After the ceremony, toasts were made to Somerville and to our new Principal, and we all adjourned to the Margaret Thatcher Centre (the Iron Lady was a Somervillian) for lunch. This gave the fellows a chance to catch up with each other after their respective summers away.

At one point (after only about four champagnes) I found myself sitting next to the Visitor, the Lord Patten. I should have done my research about him in advance so that I could have intelligently argued with his disparaging remarks about the Black-Scholes equation -- although if his remarks were focused entirely on the excesses of the system and rather than on the wisdom of the Nobel prize, we might have agreed entirely.

Incidentally, you can also read the new principal's view on this event on her blog.

Embarrassing moments include

Last week my former graduate student Ilya Berdnikov stopped by Oxford for a visit. Although the weather was a bit inclement, I wanted to show him the sights of the city of dreaming spires. (My tour of Oxford is getting pretty polished --- you can see some of the highlights from previous tours here and here). Undeterred by the weather, we dressed in foul weather gear – rain jacket, umbrella, boots – and started on our way.

One key part of the tour is to go to the top of the tower of the Church of the Virgin St. Mary. On the way into the church tower, you walk through the church itself. As luck would have it, a choir was practicing there, so we stopped to listen. Recognizing the conductor and some of the singers, I realized it was the Somerville college choir. (They did sound very nice in that space!) Bells should have gone off in my head at that point, but alas, they did not. I should have wondered why the Somerville choir was practicing in that church on that particular day.

We climbed up to the top of the tower and looked at the scenery for quite a while. The weather was perhaps starting to clear. It was cold and a bit drizzling but not uncomfortable up at the top. I mulled over “is that building Lincoln college, or is it that building?”, and pondered other geographical mysteries for quite some time. Then we started the long descent down.

As we neared the bottom we could hear the organ playing in the church. (I very much like organ music). The organ sounded a bit like a funeral precession. Loud bells should have been ringing in my head at this point, but alas… they still did not.

I opened the door to exit from the tower into the church and immediately stepped into a precession of my colleagues –- the Fellows of Somerville college –- coming into the church for a memorial service which I was supposed to be attending. The service was for the college’s former principal (and well known british spy) Baroness Daphne Park (you can read a very interesting obit here). All of the other Fellows of the college were wearing academic robes and black tie. I was dressed in my blue raincoat and hiking boots. I immediately turned bright red, turned around and jumped back into the church tower and closed the door behind me to hide in shame. I had completely forgotten that the memorial service was being held on that particular day. You might think that the choir and the organ music would have jogged my brain, but alas…

Anyway, we hid in the church tower for a moment trying to decide what to do next. It turns out that there is a back exit from the church tower into the café next door. Unfortunately, the exit door was locked, but I bashed on the door and pleaded with the café workers until they got a key and let me out through the escape hatch. But (alas), on the way out, I was caught by another fellow of the college who had been late for the precession (but was at least appropriately dressed) and who appeared to be trying to sneak into the church in exactly the same way I was sneaking out.

I’m not sure how many of the college fellows actually saw my faux-pas. I’m certain a few did. Fortunately, I think can get away with a few blunders like this one just for being an American.

Things they don’t teach you in graduate school include: Catering.

I’ve often complained that many of the skills you need to succeed in science are not taught in graduate school. Rarely does anyone receive formal instruction in teaching, presenting, grant-writing, managing a group, or schmoozing --- which are all pretty important skills for practicing academics. Most of us eventually learn to do these things competently, even though these are not necessarily the things that we are really good at.

At Oxford, academics are expected to have skills that really stretch into the realm of the completely ridiculous. The reason for this is that each college is run (and in some ways owned) by its governing body –-- essentially the tenured professors (see the discussion here). As a result, we professors have to make decisions on everything from investing the college endowment to hiring the gardeners. We are certainly smart enough to realize that we know nothing about these things and as much as possible we try to consult people who actually do know something. Nonetheless, there are inevitably times when we have to ring-in on something that we know absolutely nothing about.

This week, Somerville College held interviews for a Deputy Head of Catering. In assembling the interview panel, it was deemed necessary that a certain number of members of governing body sit on this panel. Having avoided many odious tasks over the last year, this time I drew the short straw. So this week I sat through an entire day of interviewing caterers… as if I have any clue what these guys do. I suppose in some ways it was interesting: by the end of the day I learned that the caterers at Somerville actually do a whole lot --- from putting together the food for the students, preparing fancy formal meals, holding events and conferences, dealing with the health authorities (who randomly come by and inspect everything) and so forth. Obviously what I actually know about this profession is pretty close to nil. Yet I was still asked to form some sort of opinion about the candidates. Fortunately, there were two people on the interview panel who actually did know what they were looking for. I think I was there just for --- well, actually, I’m not entirely sure why I was there, but somehow it was deemed important that I be there anyway.

Never a dull moment…

The Bells

When Paul Wiegmann visited Oxford early last year, he stayed in the cushy accommodations of the very weathly St. John’s college. Despite the luxury, he was seriously perturbed by the Bells of St. Johns.

“At 1 am they rang and woke me up. Then at 2am they rang twice and woke me up. Then at 3am they rang three times and woke me up…” ... and so forth.

My house (or “terraced”, as it is called) is very close to St. Barnabus Church. There are also hourly chimes at that church all night long, but I’m just far enough away that they don’t disturb me while I am sleeping (a block away is about enough, being that I’m slowly going deaf).

Bells at Oxford are just a fact of life you get used to. In addition to hourly chimes from everywhere, you frequently hear a bell cacophony that continues on and on for minutes, or even for the better part of an hour sometimes. You rarely know where these things are coming from, or why they are ringing in the first place. Many of the 40-something-odd colleges and halls have bell towers, as do many of the dozens of churches scattered around Oxford.

Perhaps the most impressive, if not the loudest, set of bells is at St Giles church, which is conveniently squeezed between the Theoretical Physics department and Somerville College, and can be heard very clearly from both. The bells in this church have an impressive history. The tenor F# bell dates all the way back to 1632 and bears the inscription

         FEARE GOD HONAR THE KING 1632

“Honar”-ing the king probably meant “do what the king tells you if you want keep your head”. “Feare”-ing God probably also meant, “do what the church tells you if you want to keep your head”. Perhaps “Learn to spell” would have been a good addition to the inscription as well.

Despite the ruckus caused by the frequently ringing of these bells, I confess to having a soft spot for bell-ringing. Back in high-school in Rochester New York, I was heavily recruited by several churches to be part of their bell-choirs. I was considered a choice recruit because I could read music well and, as an agnostic jew, I was always available on Sunday mornings. Admittedly, this was handbell ringing (See here or here), not real quasimodo-style bell ringing, but I’m not sure that any church in Rochester New York even has a proper bell-tower for that. The handbells were popularized as practice tools for their larger counterparts, but have now taken on a life of their own – particularly in sacred music, and in places where they don’t have real bell towers. At any rate, some of these bell-choirs were really fun to play in and they had talented musicians as their leaders. The down side was that I occasionally ended up having to sit through church services --- I guess the corresponding benefit of this was that I finally learned a bit about what goes on in churches (although it also more or less cemented my opinion that I was not really missing much as a non-church-goer). At any rate, I think I may have been the only agnostic Jew in high school who could quote new testament scripture.

Lecturing

Much of the teaching at Oxford is done in “tutorials”: one, two, or three students at a time with one professor (A similar system exists at Cambridge with the one important difference being that they are called “supervisions.” Oxford students insist that the word “tutorial” is better because you can shorten it to “tute”, which they do more often than not).

The tutorial system is very manpower intensive, but reasonably effective in forcing the students to keep up. I’ve been handling a full load of tutorials since the first day I joined here last year.

In addition to tutorials, there are also regular lectures. Last term, (Hilary 2010) I gave my first lecture course. It was a softball intended to ease me into the hard work of lecturing: a graduate course with only one lecture per week for 8 weeks. (Graduate courses are considered easier to teach as there are fewer students, the students are all very motivated, you can talk about whatever you want, and if you do a bad job there is far less carnage).

For those who are interested, the topic of this course was “Topological Matter”. If you want more details you can check out the web page here. (Feel free to try some of the homework assignments for fun. Many of the problems can be done without having attended lectures, and they are meant to be fun – well, fun for physicists).

As I probably should have expected, in 8 lectures I made it through about a third of my intended course outline. For a graduate course this is not so much of a problem. The course is meant to introduce the students to certain topics that they want to know about. If they learn fewer topics, but learn them better, that is fine too. Maybe another year I’ll teach the remaining two thirds.

Next year, however, I will be lecturing Condensed Matter (aka Solid State) Physics for 180 undergraduates (give or take). In this case the syllabus is very constrained, and I am required to cover certain topics –-- as these are the topics that will be examined. An interesting feature of the Oxford system is that the lecturer is not the person to write the exam. Instead, a syllabus is agreed upon before the course starts, and the exam is written based on the syllabus. The lecturers, as well as the tutors, are responsible for imparting the information in the syllabus and hence preparing the students for the exam. If a lecturer does not cover all the material, then the students could be in some trouble, and this makes everyone very unhappy. I have until January 2011 to prepare this course, and it already feels like I’m going to be very squeezed for time!

Motivated Students and Motivating Students

Some of my students are extremely serious, motivated, and smart. I frequently see the same hard-working students at lunch or dinner arguing over some physics problem, or doing some calculation while eating. I’m very impressed with these students, they are a pleasure to teach, and as one might expect, these are exactly the students who have been doing extremely well on their exams.

Even some of the students who arrived at Oxford with an educational deficit (perhaps having gone to a not-so-good high school) have a fair chance of catching up and doing well if they are smart and really work like crazy. Alas, in some cases, if a deficit is too large to begin with, it may be too great to overcome. Nonetheless, I’ve already seen some driven students come here with a philosophy of “succeed or die trying” (or as they said in Sparta "e tan e epitas", with your shield or on it!”). A few of them have pulled off what can only be described as exam miracles.

Then there are a few students of the opposite variety: those who are not working hard enough and are barely scraping by. My initial philosophy upon coming here was to treat them as adults: If they want to waste their education, they are fully entitled to do so. However, it soon became clear that this was not going to be an acceptable policy. To begin with, poorly performing students are considered a bad reflection on a college (and inevitably on the professors that teach them). Secondly, one must remember that much of the funding for education in the UK comes from the government (Oxford was essentially free to UK citizens until just a few years ago –-- now it is absurdly cheap [by US standards], but not free). As such, allowing students to waste their education, and hence UK taxpayer money, is frowned upon. Finally, academic competition between colleges is fierce (as measured by the famous “Norrington Table” – the subject of much discussion around here – I’ll save that for another post). The colleges that perform well by this measure are then able to recruit better students, and then perform even better in future years. At any rate, the upshot is that part of my job is to squeeze the best performance possible out of my students.

A few weeks ago, over a late night beer, I asked a few of my more experienced colleagues how they get their students to work harder. Although answers varied, at least one took a “no-holds-barred” approach: Students worked… or else. Basically this professor viewed it as his job to whip the students into shape, whether or not they appreciated him later for doing so. It turns out that most of his students do actually appreciate him for doing this (although I’m sure there will be a few who don’t like this kind of military approach to matters).

Somewhere along the line most students run into a strict but fair teacher who commands total respect and demands the impossible. In the end, students frequently like and remember fondly these demanding teachers for forcing them to learn. For me, perhaps, it was Mr. Fraction at Twelve Corners Middle School, who was not a math teacher, but an English teacher. He gave me detention every day for a month until I could improve my handwriting to the point where it was readable. I’m not going to say that my handwriting is now particularly legible, but without him, probably even I would not even be able to decipher my own scrawl.

I’m not sure if I have it in me to be one of these taskmasters, I find it difficult to chew out students even when they deserve it. But perhaps slowly, as I get more annoyed with students who are not performing as well as I know they could, I might morph into Mr. Fraction.

Comments encouraged from profs or other teachers who might be reading this…

Electing the New Pope

[I wrote this blog posting last spring, but never got around to posting it]

Each of the constituent colleges of Oxford is run by its own governing body, which consists of the “fellows” of the college, meaning essentially the tenured faculty, and a few others (about 40 in total for our college). In fact, in some legal respect which I don’t really understand, the governing body actually owns the college and is completely responsible for everything that happens there. (L’etat c’est nous!) While the head of each college (called the Master, the Principal, the Warden, or whatever, depending on which college you are talking about) is the figure head, and frequently runs the college on a day-to-day basis, the vote of the governing body is the final word on any issue. The phrase “Primus inter pares” (first among equals) is frequently used to refer to the position of the head with respect to the governing body.

These "heads of house” can come from almost any walk of life. Their similarity is that they are all extremely accomplished intellectuals of some sort. Pembroke College Cambridge right now has the ex-head of MI6 (Cue James Bond music).

Dame Fiona Caldicott, the principal of Somerville college Oxford since 1996, is retiring this summer. As such, it is the duty of the governing body of the college to elect a new principal. This process is extremely complicated, with various arcane rules and regulations, which struck me as being similar, perhaps, to electing a new pope. (And Somerville is one of the younger colleges, I’m sure there are some completely insane rules at the 800 year old colleges).

The head of the search committee, Professor Fiona Stafford (yes, many people in this country are named Fiona), did a marvelous job. Some joked that if we couldn’t agree on a candidate we would all agree to draft Professor Stafford. While she had no particular extra power per-se, it was her job to create a process that would satisfy the governing body.

Fiona (Stafford) worked with a headhunting company to target some candidates. I read through the full book of candidate applications (a hundred perhaps) and many of them, on paper, looked spectacular. I am probably forbidden from saying too much about who these people were, but they were pretty impressive.

Eventually the list was narrowed down to about seven frontrunners who were all interviewed. From there, three finalists were selected. Each of these finalists met informally with a fraction of the governing body personally in small groups in the days leading up to the final interview.

To those who do not know the Oxford system, the final interview might seem a bit bizarre, but in fact it is quite similar to the way hiring is done for almost all positions here: The committee (the governing body) sits, in full academic gowns, around a large table. The candidate comes into the room, speaks for twenty minutes, then the committee fires questions at the candidate. The whole thing is over in about an hour. (This is not too dissimilar from the way I was hired).

Once all three finalists were interviewed, the governing body needed to come to a consensus. Like electing a new pope, the governing body was essentially trapped until it came to a conclusion, and white smoke rose from the chimneys. I was psychologically prepared for a very long night. What was surprising to me was how quickly the opinions converged. (Perhaps we are more of one mind than the college of cardinals?). The first thing we did was to go around the table with everyone saying whatever they wanted to say about the candidates. After everyone spoke a straw-poll was taken and one of candidates was already strongly in the lead. A few of the more opinionated members gave impassioned speeches explaining their positions, and a second poll was taken. At the end of the second poll, the majority opinion was extremely close to unanimous. We had decided in advance that we would need a 2/3 majority, but in the end we were essentially without dissent.

And so in just a few hours, the governing body announced that they had tentatively found their candidate. Within a few weeks (after some details were attended to) we announced that the next Principal of Somerville college would be Alice Prochaska.

SCR

SCR stands for “Senior Common Room”. The usage of this acronym confused me for quite some time. SCR refers not only to the actual room itself, but also to all the people who have access to said room – I.e., the “grown-ups” in our college --- fellows, lecturers, tutors, postdocs, and so forth. Similarly, JCR is “Junior Common Room,” meaning the undergrads, and MCR is “Middle Common Room”, meaning grad students. There are also actual rooms known as the JCR and MCR as well (although they are not as posh as the SCR).

Sometimes the use of this nomenclature for both the room and the group of people gets a bit confusing. The SCR eats at high table. (Note that I did not say “the members of the SCR eat”, but rather “the SCR eats” which makes it sound like the room itself is eating at high table, sounds a bit silly until you get used to it). On normal days, the MCR does not eat at high table, but for formal Hall dinner, the MCR joins the SCR at high table and after dinner both the SCR and the MCR go to the SCR.

Crashing

The nice thing about the formal hall "High Table" dinners is that they are a relaxed many-hour affair, with several courses, a great deal of wine, all in the company of scholars.

The bad thing about the formal hall "High Table" dinners is that they are a relaxed many-hour affair, with several courses, a great deal of wine, all in the company of scholars.

The truth is that they would be a lot more fun

(a) if I were not so busy these days that several hours seems insanely long for a meal, and...

(b) if I got to choose which scholars I sit next to at dinner (the seating chart is sometimes a very pleasant surprise, and sometimes a cause for groans).

So I thought to myself "there must be an efficient new-yorker way to handle formal high table dinner". And indeed there is.

After the meal is finished in the great hall, the Principal bangs her gavel, all the students stand, and the high table files out to the senior common room, where the after dinner drinks (including nice port), chocolates, coffee, tea, fruit, and whatnot are served. (We do not have snuff like the folks at All Souls though). People linger in the senior common room making conversation , and working on the digestifs -- crucially, there is no seating plan for dessert, so you can talk to whomever you please.

My new york way to handle high table?: Skip the dinner and crash dessert.

I'm not sure that this is actually against the rules, but it is certainly something that no one else seems to do. But why should it be against the rules? I mean, the college has no objection to feeding me dinner with dessert. Why should they object if I decline on the dinner and go straight for the chocolates and port? Despite my insistence that it is all on the up-and-up, I admit that I do not make it all that public that I've become a crasher --- in fact, I tend to hide in the corner of the senior common room far from the principal -- as she is really the only one of sufficient gravitas that I would feel ashamed of myself trying to argue to her that "Well, it may be that it is "just not done" here, but since i dont' see why it is "just not done", I'm just gonna do it anyway".

Web Page

After a year at Oxford, I finally figured out how to edit my Oxford web page so it looks fairly decent. I'm not sure if I am brave enough to put a link on that page to this blog though. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

Admissions

The undergraduate admissions process here is interesting. To begin with, the faculty does the admissions directly, rather than some centralized admissions office. If you apply to Oxford to “Read” physics, you are interviewed by the Physics faculty who would be teaching you, were you to be admitted. This gives the faculty a chance to choose their own mistakes.

In the UK it is a strict rule that you can only apply to Oxford OR Cambridge, not both. Given this, Oxford gets a bit over 1000 applicants for roughly 180 Physics places. Actually, that is pretty good odds for the students, as in some other subjects the ratio is much worse. Incidentally, admission here is like Early Decision in the states where it is understood that you will attend if you are accepted. A few alternates are chosen in case someone bails out, but this is pretty rare.

The students send the usual transcripts, recommendation letter (just one from their school), and short essay. They then are asked to “sit” a pretty hard entrance exam. The exam was instituted in a truly organized way only a few years ago, so the clever prep-schools are just beginning to be able to train their students for the exam. Up to this point, however, the entrance exam has been the best indicator of future success at Oxford. So the exam is now taken pretty seriously. (Perhaps once Stanley Kaplan and Princeton Review start giving courses to help people game the system on this exam, its validity as an indicator will drop).

The students who perform above a cutoff on the exam are “summoned” for interviews (this does not involve flue-powder). Those that do not make the cutoff are “de-summoned”. In a few cases, a student may be “rescued” from below the cutoff for one reason or another – for example, if their school does not even teach physics and they had to learn everything on their own. If you score way up near the top on the entrance exam (top 50 or so) you are virtually guaranteed a place unless you do so badly on the interview that you are suspected of cheating on your exam. In all, roughly half the students are summoned for interviews. So that means roughly 2.5 students will be interviewed for one place.

When the students are summoned for interviews, they are asked to come to Oxford for several days – during which they stay in the dorms and mostly seem to roam around and get nervous about their interviews. During that time they are given at least three interviews. Interviews are typically done in teams of at least two interviewers to one student. Whichever college is the student’s first choice college interviews the student twice (two teams of two interviewers), and their second choice college interviews them once. Sometimes a student declares a first choice college, but that college has too many applicants so the student is assigned a new first choice college. If you are a phys/phil (physics and philosophy) candidate you are interviewed these three times by physicists and then at least twice by philosophers as well. Some of the overseas candidates are interviewed by telephone, and one has to assume that these interviews have bigger error bars. We have a fair number of overseas applicants, but I'm surprised we do not have more from the US. (Even including travel costs, Oxford is still less expensive than most elite US colleges I think).

Each interview results in a grade from 1 to 10. All of the interview scores are uploaded to a central database, which all the faculty can examine. All of the student's information (including grades, tests, interviews, etc etc) are posted and also amalgamated into one overall score and everything is listed in a systematic and organized way. Each college is listed along with how many slots they need to fill (usually 6 or 7 per each of about 30 colleges) and all the data about all the students they interviewed is listed too. (Hogwarts college is also listed in this file – I’m not making this up, I think it represents stray unaffiliated interviews, unaffiliated students, or something like that). Once all this data is posted, then the drafting and horse-trading begins.

If a student has an amalgamated score in the top 100, they are essentially assured a place – and almost always in the college they designate as their first choice. Even if their first choice college does not want to take a high scoring student for some reason, these students will be snapped up by the second choice college or by other colleges who did not get enough good applicants. Almost all of the arguing and finagling is to allocate the last 80 places in the class. Essentially we have to pick 80 students of roughly the next 200 highest scorers at this point (and defend the decisions).

If a student scores worse than 300th, they are almost certain to be rejected. In a few rare cases, a student will mathematically land worse than 300th, but will be rescued because of extenuating circumstances – like if they come from a particularly poor school, or difficult family situation, and they had to work like crazy even just to get this far (which is often a good indicator that they will still be able to do well by continuing to work like crazy). In these cases, the colleges that decide to take students who score lower, must stand up and make the case of why they are not taking better scoring students… and sometimes they are even requested to report years later on the progress of such rescued students to reaffirm that this philosophy of breaking the rules is actually a good one.

This year I won’t be taking part in the horse trading meeting (the other physics fellow from Somerville is in charge this year… I’ll get my chance next year). The meeting sounds a bit like the NFL draft, where everything happens in real time and every decision is publicly announced with great fanfare – and objections may be raised at any time and the drafting team must defend its decision. The college representatives (the faculty) have several objectives --- both to draft a good "team" for their own college, but also to make sure that any student they think is worthy is taken by some college, even if their own particular college does not have a place for them.

This year I think Somerville will do very well in the draft. While, not having any super-super-stars, a number of strong candidates listed Somerville as their first choices – and we will be very happy to have them. We need to recruit about 6 students and we have most of them nailed down before the draft starts. I’m optimistic that this will be a reasonably good class!

Why The Principal Knows Everything

I’m always the last to figure things out. But the clues were all around me:

Fact 1: Dame Fiona, the principal of Somerville college Oxford, seems to know everything that goes on within college. I always attributed this to her particularly acute perception –- on account of the fact that she was trained as a Psychiatrist.

Fact 2: Dame Fiona’s cat, Pogo, freely wanders the entire college, frequently unobserved. Yesterday he was sitting amongst the high school students as they waited for their admissions interviews.



Fact 3: I have never seen Fiona and Pogo in the same place at the same time... except in this very famous painting of the two of them that hangs in the great Hall.

Yes, now it is obvious: Pogo is Fiona’s alter-ego. With appropriate credit to J. K. Rowling, Fiona is obviously an Animagus, akin to one of my favorite characters Minerva McGonagall who also turns into a cat, and who also is the head of a house… coincindence? Hmmmm...

The painting is painted by Susannah Fiennes, who is the cousin of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Lord Voldemort in the films. Another coincidence? Hmmm... See correction in comments section.

[Photo Credit: Christiane Riedinger].

What is physics about? And what is college about?

What is physics? I mean, what is it all about? What is the big uber-goal that we are all working for? What are the really important directions of research these days?

If you ask a physicist any one of these questions, you will inevitably get the same kind answer. Every physicist will tell you “What I work on is really important and interesting. What I do is what physics is about.” (Here “I” means whoever you ask, not “Steve Simon”). And I think most physicists passionately believe this. If they didn’t believe it, they probably would have (or should have) switched fields long ago to work on what they think is truly important.

Just for example, if you ask “is physics an experimental science?” chances are if you ask an experimentalist they will say “Of course.” If you ask a string theorist, they might say “Er… not necessarily.”

I think this diversity of views of physics is a good thing. The only thing, we really all share, is the underlying belief (perhaps faith) that the world around us can somehow be understood. However, sometimes diversity of views causes some real problems. Obviously dividing up the limited funding pie is a seriously sore point for many people.

“Why should *THEY* get so much funding when what *I* do is so much more important and interesting.”

“Do we really need to hire another physicist who does X when Y is so exciting these days.”

Or conversely

“That stuff isn’t even physics! Why would we pay to have *that* in our department”

Here at Oxford this diversity of opinion rears its head in some interesting places. One point of conflict (that seems less prevalent in the states) is over the undergraduate syllabus. Here in the UK (indeed in much of the non-US world) the undergraduate syllabus is extremely constrained. This is quite a change from my undergraduate experience (Brown University) – which required only obtaining 28 passing grades for graduation, and had no further detailed requirements: every choice of what to study was left completely to the student. In Oxford, the students follow a very rigid path. [ There are obvious advantages to each system – to be discussed another time.]

So it seems that over here someone is always saying what a travesty it is that a student with an Oxford physics degree might graduate without any exposure to X, Y or Z. Typically the person stating this is someone who has particular interest in X, Y, or Z. Further, getting X,Y,Z into the curriculum boosts the status of those researchers who study X,Y, and Z in the department – as there will always be a need, thereafter, for people to teach the subject.

But do undergrads really need X,Y,Z? How much does it even matter what they learn? Is a college degree about learning a particular topic, or about learning how to learn – about stretching you brain on anything really hard.

I think both answers are valid, although I do have a bias. If you want to guess my bias… here is a hint: For the record, here is a list of courses that I did NOT have as an undergrad:

Statistical Mechanics
Thermodynamics
Solid State Physics
Electricity and Magnetism
(beyond the level of Purcell’s introductory book)
General Relativity
Astrophysics or Cosmology
Advanced/Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Field Theory
Fluid Dynamics
Optics
Advanced Laboratory

[yes, I did realize upon graduation that I was woefully unprepared for grad school, so I finagled to take some extra courses for a year to make up some of the difference].

Where is Shelob?

Earlier in the year I blogged about S.O.U.S. (Spiders of Unusual Size). One of these little beasts had made her home in my backyard and I decided to give her a rather wide berth. Particularly since I was away so much of the summer, it seemed reasonable that she could have reign of the backyard while I was gone. Well, returning home for the beginning of noughth week, I discovered that she had disappeared – vanished without a trace. I joked that we had made a deal, I bought her plane tickets to florida for the winter, and in return she spun a web with the words “Some Physicist” (*). However, what I really suspected was that she had just come to the end of her life cycle (which for some spiders is not very long). Particularly in cold climates, spider life cycle tends to be yearly and it I figured it was a good bet that Shelob had croaked.

Alas, I fear this may not be the case. Over lunch with Dame Carol Jordan, the discussion randomly turned to the S.O.U.S. “Oh, yes”. She said. “I think that type of garden spider hibernates for the winter and comes back out in the spring… impressive little things aren’t they?”.

I wish I hadn’t asked. Remind me to not go out in my backyard for the next year or two.

(*) Joke credit goes to Nuntiya Kakanantadilok

I am going to gain so much weight

A few night’s back, high-table dinner was a terrific leg of lamb. Fist course was a shrimp salad, and dessert was a chocolate and beet root cake (sounds strange but it was actually wonderful). As if that was not enough to keep me fed, the cake was served with clotted cream – which, when combined with the cake, is delicious! Once I turn that corner and start eating clotted cream… it is only a matter of time.

The Squalid State

This posting is not about the status of my flat (no comment as to whether that would be an appropriate title).

“Squalid State” is the derogatory term used to refer to the field of “Solid State” physics by other physicists, and sometimes with good reason. The field is full of people studying what appears to be the boring minutia of particular physical materials: why this impurity increases specific heat and that impurity reduces it – and so forth. This entire field of study looked so horrid to me when I was an undergrad that I absolutely refused to even consider taking a solid state physics course.

It is rather ironic then that I became a solid state physicist – or, more properly, a “condensed matter” physicist who spends a lot of time thinking about solid state. So why am I now excited about the field whereas once-upon-a-time I thought the whole endeavor was dismal? Well, I now realize that some of the most exciting physics out there is in condensed matter systems, that the diversity of condensed matter is unrivaled in any other field, that many of the deepest ideas can be tested and explored best in condensed matter systems, not to mention the importance of potential applications in this field. Unfortunately, these exciting features are extremely well hidden in introductory solid state physics courses --- almost as if by design.

This year the physics department at Oxford has decided to revamp its third year syllabus. Everyone agreed that the previous third year undergrad program was not working and that we would all benefit from trying something new. I volunteered to develop the solid state physics course for a maiden voyage in 2010-2011, when I will teach this to 180 student, more or less. I view myself as the ideal person to teach this precisely because I thought it was so boring. My job will be to make it non-awful, to somehow bring out the exciting part of the field rather than the dismal part.

However, to some extent I am trying to do this with one hand tied behind my back. The IOP (british Institute of Physics) mandates that certain topics MUST be taught in an undergraduate syllabus. Further, my colleagues will not stand for me eliminating certain other topics. Finally, the total number of lectures cannot exceed 22. Despite these rather serious boundary conditions, I still think that I can put together a very nice course – and this is what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, and will continue to work on for the next year.

So, to all the physicists reading this: Did anyone have a good solid state physics course? If so, why did you like it, who taught it, what was covered, what book did you use?

Noughth Week

Last week ended my summer of constant travel and I returned to Oxford for “noughth week”. To understand this nomenclature one needs two pieces of information:

First, the weeks of the term are numbered 1-8 (Yes, the terms are only 8 weeks long, making them officially insanely short). No one at Oxford ever uses real calendar dates – instead they will just say “our next meeting is Monday of 5th week” or something of that sort. If you make the mistake of asking “what are you doing on November 3rd?” a person will likely ask “which week is that?” This system does actually make some sense because you can have meetings that occur perpetually on, say, Friday of 1st week (as the Physics Theory Sub-Department meeting does) independent of the term or the year, which is then somehow immune from the fickle fluctuations of the Gregorian calendar.

The second piece of crucial information is that “noughth” means “zeroth” (as in “all for nought”).

With those key facts it should be clear that “noughth week” is the week before classes actually start at Oxford. During this week in Michaelmas term (fall term) the new first year undergraduate students (“Freshers” over here rather than “Freshmen” or “Frosh”) arrive, and the 2nd-4th year students return, hopefully more rested than I am, from their summer breaks.

Over the course of noughth week, things accelerate extremely quickly. Since the terms are so insanely short, once you are in-term, everything is a sprint. The students move in by about Wednesday of noughth week, and by Friday all organizational meetings are done so that by Monday of 1st week, the term is going full speed.

Perhaps the most important event of the week is meeting the new Freshers, which mostly happens at an event known as Fresher’s Dinner. This is a formal dinner in the Great Hall where, very unusually, the Faculty sits at the tables with the students (usually the faculty sits at High Table). As one of my colleagues warned me “Depending your students, this dinner can either be really fun and interesting, or a socially difficult Marathon of trying to think up small talk”. Fortunately, my incoming students this year were a lot of fun to chat with.

Oh, and the Somerville chef decided to serve Kangaroo meat (there was also a vegetarian option). And of course there is a lot of wine at dinner. The drinking age is 18 in this country – so this is to be expected for a formal dinner.

This year’s crop of new Physics students at Somerville consists of four boys and two girls, plus one Physics-Philosophy hybrid, also a girl, making the gender mix pretty close to 50/50. While there are a few girls in the upper classes, it still is a bit unusual to have such a high fraction of girls in the Physics group. (My second year students, for example, are six boys and no girls). Perhaps this is just gender balance finally coming to physics, or perhaps it is an anomaly (or more likely a bit of both).

At any rate, now that the term is starting, my life is about to become completely insane for the next eight weeks. Forgive me if I am a bit sparse on the blog postings.

Oh, and with history repeating itself, at the beginning of noughth week, I had the flu.

Pretty Town -- Overrun with Tourists

My first visit to Oxford was in the summer of 1990. I was playing tourist that summer and after seeing the sights in London I took a train up to Oxford, hoping that it was far enough away from the big city that I’d be able to hitchhike from there up to Edinboro. I kept a journal of my travels that year and I happened to unearth it just recently. My comment on Oxford was “Pretty town – overrun with tourists” -- an accurate description for this time of year.

Admittedly, Oxford is a nice town to see, with all of its beautiful ancient architecture and historic sites. But now with the added draw of “Harry Potter Tourism” (as well as “Golden Compass Tourism”, “CS Lewis Tourism”, “JRR Tolkien Tourism” no, we don’t have hobbits, “Inspector Morse Tourism”, and the list goes on), it seems the natives (meaning me) can’t catch a quiet moment in the summer. It reminds me a bit of being in New York – but without the subway.

Anyway, on my visit in 1990, I only stayed in town for a mere few hours (during which I ran into no less than three other fellows students who were also playing tourist that summer – such was the density of American tourists at that time). Mainly my time here was spent trying to figure out how to get out of Oxford and on my way north. I remember asking around as to where a good place would be to hitch a ride. No one seemed to know. Eventually, some rather shabby looking homeless guy named Nick told me that I should walk to the ring-road north of the city and flag a lorry from there. My memory of the long walk to the ring road (carrying a very heavy pack) does not completely match up with the geography of the city. Probably my memory is faulty after almost 20 years. Or maybe the weight of the pack prevented me from seeing it correctly in the first place. Nonetheless, if I had followed Nick’s directions properly, the path would have taken me right past both the Physics department and Somerville College, my current homes.

On my long walk out of town, I remember stopping to watch a cricket game on the way. Probably this was at the pitch north of Somerville College on Woodstock road. The game absolutely mystified me then – and I understand only a tiny bit more about it now --- except to say that the games go on really forever and are even more boring than baseball (if such a thing is possible).

Finally, being completely exhausted from carrying my pack (which I later would reduce substantially by throwing “unnecessary” things out), I did catch a ride out of town from a random Oxonian – actually, a physicist as luck would have it. If I am not mistaken, this very physicist is now emeritus faculty at University of Sheffield, not so far from here. Hopefully soon I will have a chance to visit Sheffield and I intend to take him out to dinner to thank him for his kindness almost 20 years ago.

I did not return to Oxford until the fall of 2007.