Transcript
Speaker: Academic Defectors.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 5 of Academic Defectors.
Speaker: I am your host, Jillian Marshall, PhD.
Speaker: And look, I'm not going to make any bones about it, I'll be straight with you.
Speaker: Today's guest and I have known each other for coming up on 18 years.
Speaker: We met on the very first day of orientation at the University of Chicago where we lived in the same dorm and had the same group of friends.
Speaker: As it turns out, we also ended up both doing our PhDs at Cornell University.
Speaker: So, you know, I had to explain this.
Speaker: How else would a physicist and an ethnomusicologist cross paths?
Speaker: Brian Leahy, PhD, studied physics at Cornell from 2010 to 2016.
Speaker: His research was supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and his dissertation was titled Orientation Dynamics and Microscope Imaging of Colloidal Suspensions.
Speaker: He continued his academic work as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2017 to 2021.
Speaker: Now, you probably couldn't make up two scholars who had more vastly differing scholarly interests than Brian and me.
Speaker: And as we'll hear today, the PhD journey for a physical scientist and a humanities scholar are vastly different.
Speaker: Nevertheless, there are some striking parallels between the journeys that we can hear in Brian's story.
Speaker: And I'll admit, finding these similarities might be somewhat facilitated by our friendship, and by the weird coincidence that the music building at Cornell and the physical sciences building were literally across the street from one another.
Speaker: But as we'll hear today, Brian is relatable because he has a special ability to explain his intellectual and scholarly interests in a way that anybody can understand.
Speaker: underpinned by a lifelong love of learning that's truly inspiring and nearly poetic in scope.
Speaker: So without further ado, Brian Leahy, PhD.
Speaker: No, I had no idea that I wanted to be a physicist.
Speaker: I ended up doing physics sort of by chance.
Speaker: So I started taking classes in undergrad.
Speaker: I come from a pretty blue collar background.
Speaker: So none of my
Speaker: family really knew what working in something a little bit more technical was, at least none of my like, mother, my father, my aunts and my uncles.
Speaker: So I, I went to college and was good at physics and was like, I'll just take this for a little bit and then I'll see, see what I want to do.
Speaker: And then I just kind of ended up on that route.
Speaker: So it was kind of fell into it.
Speaker: Definitely the right choice in hindsight, but it's kind of fell into it.
Speaker: Did your parents go to college?
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: So my dad, I, you know, this is, I get like different stories, which are kind of, kind of weird, but my dad, he did his associates.
Speaker: So two year college, then he went, there was something about him going to pharmacy school for a while, but he definitely never finished that.
Speaker: And then he was a truck driver and a firefighter.
Speaker: And then my mom, my mom got her GED from high school.
Speaker: And then she went back to college in her twenties.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: and finished, I think before I was born.
Speaker: What was her degree?
Speaker: I have no idea.
Speaker: Well, it must be something with dietetics because she's a dietician, but I actually don't know the name of the degree.
Speaker: So I'm curious to hear too about how this blue collar upbringing might've affected your course of study at the University of Chicago, which of course is where you did your undergrad.
Speaker: It's my understanding that you went to the University of Chicago on like a firefighter's family scholarship.
Speaker: Yeah, so the university has a scholarship for people who are kids of firefighters and police officers.
Speaker: Some other ones as well, I think.
Speaker: So I went on one of those, which was very nice.
Speaker: As did my older sister, Kim.
Speaker: I went on one of those, which was very nice because otherwise I would not have been able to pay for that.
Speaker: Do you think that not necessarily having any kind of financial pressure surrounding your education influenced your rather...
Speaker: I mean, surprisingly open-ended approach, because I feel like with science people, typically they know that they're, you know, that they're, that they're science before college.
Speaker: But I know that you, you've had this wide range of interests throughout the time that we've known each other.
Speaker: I mean, you love philosophy, you love epic literature from pick your, pick your ancient society.
Speaker: But do you feel at all that that firefighter scholarship and the lack of financial pressure maybe can't
Speaker: kept your mind a little bit more open comparatively in terms of pursuing a course of study upon your arrival to Chicago?
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: So not so much in terms of the course of study per se, but in terms of what to do with it afterwards.
Speaker: So when I started at University of Chicago, I wanted to make sure that I pursued a career that would let me
Speaker: support myself.
Speaker: And I didn't, I didn't quite know what that looked like though.
Speaker: So I, I remember like starting at U Chicago and thinking like the economic school is really good here.
Speaker: Economics means business.
Speaker: Maybe I'll become an economist major.
Speaker: And I took an econ class the last quarter that I was at university.
Speaker: Never, never, never before that.
Speaker: So I like, you know, that was like something I told myself, but never actually did.
Speaker: In terms of like the physics, you know, I thought like, oh, like physics is kind of like engineering and I can, if I'm studying physics and I can get a job as like an engineer, that that's not, I mean, it is sort of true, but it's not really true.
Speaker: The thing where it really helped for the scholarship was going to grad school.
Speaker: It's like if I had left with, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars of student debt, I would not have been able to justify to myself
Speaker: working for six or seven years of my life at $30,000 a year.
Speaker: Whereas leaving, finishing undergrad with no debt because of this full scholarship, let me feel able to pursue other things such as getting a PhD.
Speaker: So I definitely, it definitely like was a very big positive experience for me to have that scholarship.
Speaker: Yeah, that's, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: It's sort of an interesting part too of UChicago's campus is that there's no engineering school, there's no engineering degree.
Speaker: So you kind of had to
Speaker: maybe reverse engineer that, so to speak, pun intended, you know, with a physics degree, that ended up preparing you more for graduate school or more specialized study within physics.
Speaker: And then at that point, things kind of branched out.
Speaker: But how did you just fall into physics?
Speaker: Was there core physics?
Speaker: So UChicago has a core curriculum that you have to take to graduate.
Speaker: So it's a pretty extensive, what, maybe like 21 courses, something like that.
Speaker: I don't remember offhand, but three of those courses, up to three of those courses were physical sciences.
Speaker: And so I figured like first quarter of undergrad, I would start with getting some of that stuff out of the way.
Speaker: And I just took physics and then I was good at, I had no intention of taking all three.
Speaker: You could do like two physical sciences or three physical sciences.
Speaker: I had no intention of doing three, but I took the first one and I was good at it.
Speaker: And I was like, well, I'm good at it.
Speaker: I'll stick with it.
Speaker: And then I took the second and third one.
Speaker: And then come my second year, I was like, well, I don't know what I'm doing, but I might as well keep doing physics until I figure out what it is that I'm doing.
Speaker: That way I leave something open.
Speaker: And then it was my second year when I really started to fall in love with physics and with the math.
Speaker: What in particular about physics, I mean, especially since if you think about the physicists throughout time, of all the hard sciences, it seems like physics is the most whimsical.
Speaker: Albert Einstein was a physicist, wasn't he?
Speaker: I mean, I'm probably talking a lot of nonsense here.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know about whimsical.
Speaker: There is a lot of creativity in it, which I did not appreciate till later in physics and math.
Speaker: For me, the first big draw I had towards it was taking a math for physics class.
Speaker: I wish I remembered this guy's name, the professor.
Speaker: But he was a high energy theory professor who was just a very good teacher and very excited.
Speaker: And he explained the mathematical concepts in a way that really piqued my interest and gave me intuition and understanding.
Speaker: And that's what made me get more excited about it.
Speaker: The second thing that helped me get more excited more throughout my second year of undergrad and further is the ability to really understand the world around me.
Speaker: And that kind of just kept getting growing more and more and more.
Speaker: So in my second year of undergrad, I started working in a lab that did
Speaker: the physics of soft materials, basically like squishy physics, which is what I ended up doing my PhD in as well.
Speaker: And that's very much like the physics of ordinary things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was just like, you know, go to, I remember like going to a talk about ways that like reasons why the growth pattern in a leaf would result in ripples in a leaf edges because of coupling that's like differential geometry and, and metric tensors and strain and stress.
Speaker: And, you know, then walking outside after that and just looking at the leaves and just being like, wow, I know what's going on with these leaves on like a deeper level than I ever thought was possible.
Speaker: And so that kind of thing of like being able to really understand the world around me helped pull me into physics more.
Speaker: So the quantitative, the math, using that to understand the world around me, maybe really in a very precise way, maybe really like physics, really drew me to it.
Speaker: That's quite poetic, just as a side note to knowing that you became very interested in learning how to recognize leaves on site when you were at Cornell.
Speaker: That really puts that in context a little bit more.
Speaker: Yeah, kind of unrelated, kind of the same though.
Speaker: It's like interest in the world around me, right?
Speaker: In terms of the poetic, when I was in high school and middle school, I thought math and science was the opposite of
Speaker: like and like also first year of college was the opposite of poetry and art and that it was very like dry and just memorizing facts and just and that's kind of what drew me to it as a kid is that it was there was no bullshit it was just like learn these facts put in the correct fact of the test get the checkbox but there's one right answer but the actual practice of physics and math is much more artistic and there's a lot of like
Speaker: creativity and beauty in the way that people go about solving problems and the way that people present problems.
Speaker: And so that, that was like, you know, it takes, it's kind of sad because now, now I'm ranting, excuse my rant, but, but you know, I, I feel like lower education doesn't really do justice to that and let, let kids see the beauty and the art of the creativity that really happens in math and physics and, and the hard sciences.
Speaker: I mean, you're talking to a humanities person here and,
Speaker: I work with kids now and they only want to know about what will be on the test.
Speaker: Certainly everyone knows that in the humanities,
Speaker: It's very murky, what's right, what's wrong.
Speaker: You can write a single sentence like Hemingway versus you can write a simple, another sentence like James Joyce.
Speaker: They could say the exact same thing in two completely different ways and that's the point.
Speaker: It's not what you're transmitting, it's how you're transmitting that.
Speaker: Same with music, any of these other like interpretive, creative, expressive arts, which I find your perspectives on that when it comes to math and science, fascinating.
Speaker: I mean, I just learned something.
Speaker: I always kind of thought like, oh, in school, like that's the one thing that isn't really changing.
Speaker: Yeah, I think, I think that is, it's just kind of a broader challenge or problem with the modern education system is like, there is a, it just makes it easier to create things.
Speaker: I think like there's a right way to do things.
Speaker: And then that kind of brings a feedback where like kids learn like, oh, there's the right way to do things.
Speaker: I should do it this way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, I remember that same experience of people just wanting to know what's on the test when I was TAing, especially pre-meds, you know, they're very focused on getting the best grades so they can get into the best med school, but
Speaker: not it's not really what it's about right it's about like kind of understanding the the system that you're looking at so i guess this leads to another question too about about practicality and why we learn the things that we do so you're you're at chicago you fell into physics because hey this was something that you know you were good at and you started working in a lab i'm sure your professors encouraged you and maybe were pulling you aside and saying hey brian
Speaker: Have you thought about grad school?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And because you had this, you didn't have the financial pressures to worry about paying off student debt.
Speaker: Were you thinking to yourself independently at that point, or was it kind of because of your professor's influence about grad school, which is a decidedly not necessarily practical career track, although certainly at the time.
Speaker: it may seem like it because you think, oh, I'm going to professor training school.
Speaker: I'll be a professor.
Speaker: That's what I'm going to do.
Speaker: So I guess, were you thinking about practicality at all when grad school came on the table and how did grad school come on your radar in the first place?
Speaker: Yeah, good question.
Speaker: So I guess in general, just my personality isn't very like kind of heads down and focused.
Speaker: And so like, you know, when I was an undergrad, I was very focused on
Speaker: just working on what was in front of me and I wasn't so much thinking about the next step.
Speaker: So I was like, focused on what are the course I need to take now?
Speaker: What are the things I need to do now?
Speaker: Uh, what is, what's, how do I do all those courses now?
Speaker: How do I do all the lab now?
Speaker: And then, so I, I kind of didn't really have a plan for when I graduated.
Speaker: I, I kind of, you know, I, maybe this is something that will come up later as well, but I, I never really like, I don't know.
Speaker: I was never really like a hundred percent sold on anything.
Speaker: I was like, maybe I'll go to grad school.
Speaker: Maybe I won't go to grad school.
Speaker: I don't think I'll go to grad school.
Speaker: And so when I, when I got towards the end of my fourth year of undergrad, I wasn't quite sure what I would do.
Speaker: I was working in a lab.
Speaker: I figured, well, I'll work in a lab, keep working in this lab and I'll like do this for a year.
Speaker: I know this is what grad school is like.
Speaker: It's actually research in the physical sciences.
Speaker: And so I was like, if I like this for a year, then I can maybe like this for seven years or six years for PhD.
Speaker: And then I'll, I'll do that.
Speaker: So I, um, just did that, that I ended up there.
Speaker: So like the, there was a, there was a couple of seeds planted, planted in my head for, for grad school.
Speaker: Some, some more embarrassing than others.
Speaker: Uh, you know, some of them, some of them were definitely my lab mentor, like my lab PI being like, oh, Brian, you should go to grad school, you should go to grad school.
Speaker: So that was, that was, that was one.
Speaker: Another one was.
Speaker: One of the experience of doing research in the physical sciences is like you're just grinding over and over and over again.
Speaker: And it's just like tedium and hard.
Speaker: And you're just like methodically, slowly hitting your head against the wall over and over and over again.
Speaker: But then once in a while, you get like a flash of insight.
Speaker: And it's like, oh, I just learned something about the world that nobody else knows and nobody else on the planet has ever figured out.
Speaker: and like when you get like those are it so you go from this like ow ow ow to like oh my god hi uh and so so some of like getting getting some of those and getting exposed to some of those uh that made me that made me realize i liked doing research and i would like going to grad school also you know a lot of the that like hitting your head against the wall part some of it's not actually just hitting your head against the wall some of it's pretty fun um
Speaker: And some of it is creative and playful and problem solving.
Speaker: So I remember like one particular time I was trying to, this was a very long time ago and I was very, very young in my math and science experience, but I was trying to find the minimum of some function via a computer.
Speaker: And now there's like much better ways that I would do this.
Speaker: And I did something and it wasn't so great.
Speaker: And I just like, I remember like lying down to go to sleep and I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Speaker: And I just like, was like, fuck this.
Speaker: And I just got up and I just started like working at like, I don't know, middle of the night is what it was in the middle of the night, undergrad time.
Speaker: I have no idea what that actually was.
Speaker: It might've been three in the morning or might've been like 10 PM.
Speaker: But, uh, so I just remember like getting up and working on that and then like thinking like, huh, like if I like this so much, or I'm like getting up in the middle of the night to do this, then maybe it'd be fun if I, maybe I would enjoy grad school.
Speaker: And so that, that was one of the things that.
Speaker: Yeah, that speaks to, I think, this almost the monk-like asceticism that almost serves as an appeal for some of us when we think about graduate school, like dedicating your life to something that might be obscure or basically to the intellectual frontier.
Speaker: And this idea of being so married to your work that you're willing to get up in the middle of the night and figure it out.
Speaker: And you're so jazzed about what you're doing in one way or another that you're willing to focus on it.
Speaker: There is a romanticism to that.
Speaker: Yeah, there for sure is romanticism to the long nights and to the like struggling against things for the sake of something much bigger than yourself.
Speaker: For me, like as like a scientist, as a physicist, I felt like I was one brick layer putting down one brick at a time in this giant edifice that has human knowledge.
Speaker: There was also like part of it too was that
Speaker: It can also be fun sometimes.
Speaker: That's what I was trying to say with that story as well.
Speaker: Like, you know, it wasn't like I had to get up in the middle of the night to fix this.
Speaker: Otherwise I would get like, not get something done on time or like not get paid.
Speaker: It was like, I wanted to get up in the middle of the night to work on this particular problem.
Speaker: And so it's, you know, it's, it's fun, right?
Speaker: Like solving those problems is fun.
Speaker: Figuring those things out is fun.
Speaker: Learning those things is fun.
Speaker: So this was, was this during the year between undergrad and grad school?
Speaker: Oh man, I should be able to figure this out.
Speaker: I think it was, it might've been before, might've been like my last year of undergrad, but it was about that time.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So in between grad school and undergrad though, you did work, you worked at the same lab, right?
Speaker: I worked, I worked at the same level as I did in undergrad.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that was when you were figuring out, okay, if I like it this year, then maybe I could do it, you know, for seven years in a PhD program.
Speaker: But obviously you have to apply to grad school pretty much that fall.
Speaker: So were you just thinking, I'll keep my options open, then I'll see what happens, see if I get in?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I wasn't really, I wasn't thinking that's the actual answer to your question.
Speaker: But that's, that's what I did.
Speaker: So I also figured like, you know, an extra year
Speaker: of research is still more than I would know.
Speaker: Like it's still more information than like just going straight off of classes, right?
Speaker: But yeah, so like that I had to get that ball rolling to like, you know, physics GREs and stuff like that maybe three months after, three, four months after I started, after I finished undergrad.
Speaker: So it was not that much extra time working.
Speaker: When you apply to graduate school in the physical sciences, are you looking at programs that have advisors that you want to work with?
Speaker: Is that what you look for?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker: So yes, and.
Speaker: So I applied to schools where the type of stuff that I wanted to do was strong.
Speaker: So that was partly like schools that are traditionally good and partly schools that are traditionally not as good, but had particularly strong programs in the things that I was interested in.
Speaker: Or where I knew like particular people there who I would like to work with, right?
Speaker: I don't know if this is jumping ahead, but when I actually made those decisions, I decided based off of like when I chose Cornell, I chose based off of both the strength of the program overall and the strength of like
Speaker: what it is that I wanted to do there.
Speaker: And I remember at Cornell in particular, I remember having a very good experience where during the visit weekend, you know, the Cornell physics department structured things such that incoming students always stayed with first year grad students.
Speaker: They give really a feel for what, at first when I was visiting, I was like, oh, they're cheap.
Speaker: And then when I was there, I realized they were doing it to like, to like make sure that we get, we got an introduction to what it was really like to be a grad student.
Speaker: And then I remember after some visit weekend function going to a bar, I think it was the basement of Rulof's, and rest in peace.
Speaker: Rulof's?
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: Rulof's was in College Town, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, with the $2 pitchers of beer on Wednesdays and the shitty burgers.
Speaker: So I think it was in that basement.
Speaker: I remember the whole conversation, we were just talking about physics stuff for like
Speaker: four hours.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I was like, Oh, this, if I go here, then this is a place where I will talk with my colleagues about physics and I will like get better at physics because I'm, this is going to be like, well, we're all interested in.
Speaker: Um, and so it was just, I mean, that, that that's different to any place else, but I just had a very good experience with that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That you felt that you, that you could see yourself there, not just as a physicist, but as a human.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that, that those two would be together.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like that.
Speaker: So that might, that might, like, I wouldn't be just there putting in a nine to five.
Speaker: to do physics, that it would be part of my life.
Speaker: And because it'd be part of my life, then I would really get a chance to grow in it.
Speaker: And boy, oh boy, is that wish always fulfilled with grad students, where it's like, yeah, it's a part of my life to the extent that I can't turn it off and it's driving me insane.
Speaker: But later on, around dissertation time, but at least that was how a lot of us felt across the way in music.
Speaker: So you arrive at Cornell in 2010.
Speaker: And what is the grad program structure like for physicists?
Speaker: Do you have to do core, core, coursework?
Speaker: Do you have to TA?
Speaker: What's the deal?
Speaker: Another thing that was very nice to me, that appealed to me a lot about Cornell was that it was very, like, there was some soft structure, but it was very unstructured in terms of requirements.
Speaker: So for the physics PhD program at Cornell, there's actually only one required course.
Speaker: Same with music.
Speaker: Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker: Just like an experimental lab class, which it was one of the dumbest.
Speaker: No shade to the people who taught me that.
Speaker: Experimental lab classes are always a little bit silly.
Speaker: But that was the only required course.
Speaker: So then other than that, you were kind of expected to have knowledge in, say, like four or five more courses.
Speaker: But how you got that knowledge was kind of up to you.
Speaker: like if you had taken those courses as a so i i just took those courses while i was at cornell so i took three courses my first semester three courses my second semester and ta'd both semesters taing isn't required i don't think i don't remember maybe it is but um paying the bills is required so but the way that your funding works
Speaker: And might I just add just as a quick thing about Cornell, especially since you and I have this interesting thing in common, which is that we have the exact same educational credentials, different courses of study, obviously, but we both went to UChicago, which is very core heavy.
Speaker: Like you were saying, there's what, 22, 23?
Speaker: core classes, everyone has to take humanities, everyone has to take science, everyone has to take math, everyone, you know, unless you pass out, right?
Speaker: Foreign language, yeah.
Speaker: Right, foreign language, exactly.
Speaker: So obviously we went from a place that was super core heavy to a place that I think across the disciplines in grad school, it was like, here's one required class.
Speaker: And because they figured by the time you arrived,
Speaker: And it's something I'm super grateful for on the other side of grad school, hearing about other programs where they have two years of core classes as PhD students.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's nasty.
Speaker: Right, it is nasty.
Speaker: At Cornell, it seems like they figure, look, you've already done that work.
Speaker: You've done your preliminary work.
Speaker: And now you're a graduate student, which is by its very nature, much more self-directed, much more independent.
Speaker: So at Cornell, in the music department, I'll just say the one required course that we had was like so...
Speaker: such a clear testament to this because it was a bibliography course.
Speaker: And it wasn't just like, here's all your bigger bibliography, per se, although we did go over, what are the standardized ways to cite sources?
Speaker: Most people use Chicago format.
Speaker: Most people don't use MLA unless you're in Britain.
Speaker: And oh, here are the big music journals.
Speaker: Here's where to find them in the library.
Speaker: And at the time, I remember thinking like, this is kind of strange that this is a class, but it immediately proved to be a like a bonding experience with the rest of my cohort because it was just like this fun time and be so extremely practical that it was like almost blowing my mind at that point in time.
Speaker: Like I'm taking a class that's literally telling me how to research as opposed to a class that's teaching me all this theory stuff.
Speaker: And I think Cornell's highly interdisciplinary atmosphere where you have all these different schools interacting with each other.
Speaker: you know, arts and sciences versus engineering versus CALS, the College of Art and Life Sciences, and even the hotel school, just that interaction between the schools, I thought was just a really fascinating juxtaposition from Chicago that maybe I'm extrapolating a little bit much now that we have this 2020 vision of retrospect, but maybe, you know, appealed to us too, because we came from such a rigid intellectual environment to one that was so open-ended.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't think about that when I joined, but I really appreciated that when I was there.
Speaker: So when I was visiting Cornell, my advisor, my future advisor told me like, oh, you should come here because, oh, exactly what you said.
Speaker: Cornell has a very broad, like very broad schools, right?
Speaker: Like lots of engineering and applied things.
Speaker: And those, they let you collaborate across disciplines in a way that's like different than at say University of Chicago where everything is a little bit more theoretical.
Speaker: Where now, like since we left
Speaker: they added one engineering department, Institute of Molecular Engineering, which was like maybe three-ish or four years after I left there.
Speaker: So like, whereas Cornell, just departments that I collaborated with, mechanical engineering, material science engineering, chemical engineering, like, and then there's many others after that that I didn't collaborate with.
Speaker: So there's a lot of stuff to do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, one of the strengths of Cornell is that they have, it's simultaneously broad and highly specialized at the same time.
Speaker: and being able to have those collaborations.
Speaker: I mean, similarly in music, my entire second year in my program, I think I only took one music seminar.
Speaker: I spent the rest of the year in anthropology and Asian studies taking seminars there.
Speaker: And all of that, I think this whole tangent was because I was inspired by how at Cornell too, I think every graduate student across the board makes the same stipend.
Speaker: It might've come from different places, but I think we made the same amount.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't remember if it was exactly the same, but I think it was almost exactly the same because there are some things with external fellowships and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Cornell actually pays pretty well for the graduate students, which was nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: But in terms of money, as a physicist, you start TAing right off the bat, because you have to pay the bills.
Speaker: And of course, that's how a lot of PhD students do
Speaker: earn their wages.
Speaker: Like at Cornell, certainly in humanities, and I'm very curious to know how this lines up in physics.
Speaker: I just can't articulate the exact question.
Speaker: Our first year was technically a fellowship where we just had to focus on our courses.
Speaker: And then second, third, we had guaranteed funding for three years of teaching.
Speaker: And then another fellowship that we could take typically when writing our dissertation.
Speaker: So we had three years of guaranteed teaching funding, two years of guaranteed just fellowship money for writing.
Speaker: And then for our first year, which was mandatory.
Speaker: But for physicists, isn't your other way of getting
Speaker: money from working in the lab?
Speaker: I don't, I don't remember what the actual formal thing was, but you know, there were kind of three ways you could get money, um, as a, as a physics grad student.
Speaker: One was TAing, uh, one was working in a lab and your research advisor would pay for it.
Speaker: Uh, and one was, um, internal or external fellowships.
Speaker: So for me, I TA'd my first year, then I
Speaker: I think it was my first year.
Speaker: I applied for a fellowship, an external, yeah, I applied for an external fellowship my first year and I got it.
Speaker: So my second year, my, that was, it was a three-year thing, the NDSEG.
Speaker: And my, so my second, third and fourth years were paid for by that fellowship.
Speaker: It's like through the DOD.
Speaker: And then my fifth and sixth years were paid for by like grants to my advisor who then paid for me.
Speaker: So that's kind of, you know, I don't want to say pretty typical because everybody's experience is different.
Speaker: But for like an experimental physicist, that's like, that kind of covers what typically what somebody would pay.
Speaker: For the people who are theorists, my friends who are theorists, they TA'd much more.
Speaker: So like they would TA basically every semester.
Speaker: Whereas my experimentalist friends, we TA'd maybe in the beginning, like our first year and that was it.
Speaker: Because you're more experiment focused.
Speaker: You're more, you're focused on, you know, researching in a lab, correct?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, uh, it's easier to get grant money for doing experiments for whatever reason.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: For those professors to then pay their students to then do the work in the lab.
Speaker: Probably let's see.
Speaker: So of the other people in my lab, of the other experimental students in my lab, most of them had some sort of like ended up winning some sort of NSF or, or NDSEG or something like that, or NIH grant or something like that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So yeah, definitely.
Speaker: I'm trying to think of exact numbers.
Speaker: So of the like, maybe five people that I can think of, uh, at least one, two, uh, three, four, five.
Speaker: So maybe like five or maybe six of six or maybe seven in my particular lab, that's a little bit more
Speaker: more than normal, but typically it's probably like maybe 50% of people in the experimental physics would end up getting an outside fellowship.
Speaker: So you're at Cornell and it seems like things are kind of lining up for you, right?
Speaker: You're in a lab where you're in a field where you're getting funded, your research is sparking interest, your advisor's successful.
Speaker: In terms of thinking about a career, were you sold at this point on being a professor?
Speaker: Is that what you wanted to work for?
Speaker: So this is an interesting question.
Speaker: So I don't know that I ever, so no, no one because I could do math.
Speaker: So like while I was at Cornell, each incoming graduate student class was roughly 30 people.
Speaker: And we hired, Cornell hired, not so many while I was there.
Speaker: They did one faculty search a year.
Speaker: and hired, I think while I was there, like maybe two faculty members and then like two more the last year that I was there.
Speaker: So ballpark, say one every three years.
Speaker: There's 60 PhD students being made for every one person going to be a professor at Cornell, right?
Speaker: And yeah, so I knew that the kind of odds were against me and I knew that going into grad school.
Speaker: So I didn't really let myself consider that as an option.
Speaker: So when I started grad school, I was like, it doesn't matter if I want to be a professor or not.
Speaker: I have to, the end goal for the next like five, six years is the same.
Speaker: Just keep my head down and do good research and like live it one day at a time.
Speaker: And in physical sciences anyway, being a professor isn't necessarily the only way to be in academia, right?
Speaker: You can be a researcher, you can work in a lab.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I actually, and so I was exposed to some of that as well.
Speaker: So the lab that I worked in at the University of Chicago as an undergrad and as an intergraduate was a
Speaker: Also doing stuff at Argonne national labs.
Speaker: So I like I had an Argonne national lab badge.
Speaker: And so that, that like, you know, there's a big national lab community, right?
Speaker: Many national labs that hire a lot of physical scientists.
Speaker: Then there's also some researchers as well that are at a university, but not professors.
Speaker: So actually my, my PI in undergrad was not a professor.
Speaker: She was a researcher at Argonne and university of Chicago.
Speaker: So like that gave me an idea that there was more than, you know, there's more things to do than just being a professor that are even sort of still staying in academia or staying in research at least.
Speaker: Forgive my, forgive my ignorance.
Speaker: What's PI?
Speaker: Principal investigator.
Speaker: So it is sort of like private investigator.
Speaker: I'm like, what could that possibly stand for?
Speaker: Principal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Principal investigator.
Speaker: So that's the person who runs the lab, the head honcho.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, so like the professor, basically, the ones like
Speaker: mentoring the students, helping pick projects, like helping write grants and get money, you know, helping, depending on everybody's a little bit different in their style, what it is that they focus on, sometimes helping solve problems, sometimes like, you know, giving talks about people's work.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: So a PI could be a, a professor isn't, a PI isn't necessarily a professor, but...
Speaker: They could be, it's just the person who's in charge of the lab.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's just, it's wild to me how different the worlds are.
Speaker: And plus two, literally for us at Cornell music, all like our building was literally across the street.
Speaker: It's just so crazy to me that our experiences are similar, but also radically different in that way.
Speaker: And I'm finding those differences to be, to be particularly fascinating.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Okay, you put your head down and you just thought, I'm going to focus on the next seven years.
Speaker: You never went in with any idea that you were guaranteed any sort of job on the other end.
Speaker: You just thought, I'm here.
Speaker: I'm going to make the most of what I can do.
Speaker: I figure if I do good research, then the rest will fall into place.
Speaker: Is that accurate?
Speaker: Yeah, that's about how I approach things, yeah.
Speaker: During the course of your time at Cornell though, did you start to question, even though the scope of academia is different for a physical scientist as I'm learning today, did you start to question at all, wait a minute, is academia at all?
Speaker: Like, is this a place for me or should I start to think about private industry?
Speaker: And if so, if you did start to question that, what were the parameters of those questions?
Speaker: So it's an interesting set of questions because it's like I was saying, going into grad school,
Speaker: I just assumed that by probability, I would not end up being a professor.
Speaker: And then the longer that I stayed in it, the more that I considered it as like a possible option.
Speaker: I realized the odds weren't quite as bad as I had estimated, you know, because not everybody wants to be a professor.
Speaker: I realized that
Speaker: I did like doing this kind of stuff, but I also still was never sure.
Speaker: So I always kind of like always looking a little bit on the side.
Speaker: So I think, I think again, physics is very different from musicality, right?
Speaker: So we would, we would get occasionally spam emails.
Speaker: I remember from like quant finance firms that were being like, Oh, come work for us.
Speaker: I remember one, one saying, I remember one quant finance firm saying something like,
Speaker: come work for us, our starting salary is something.
Speaker: I remember like $300,000 a year and I was just like, God, do you have it like here?
Speaker: I'm making a tent of that.
Speaker: Um, but, but I never like, so those kinds of things, like those kinds of fantasies that are in my head, but I didn't, I like, I didn't really think about them until later.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: Cause I was just trying to keep my head down and get stuff done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, this is, this is another part here too.
Speaker: I didn't let myself think about whether I would become a professor, whether I wanted to become a professor, because I didn't think that I was good enough.
Speaker: And so the longer that I was in grad school, and then my postdoc as well, the more I realized that I was good enough.
Speaker: And then the, or at least like
Speaker: good enough to be, to, to think about it.
Speaker: Uh, and then, then like, I started thinking more and more about, um, what it is that I actually want, but that was, that was kind of later.
Speaker: So like, as a, as a grad student, I was just kind of keeping my head down and, and focusing.
Speaker: And then when I defended, I was just kind of like, again, the same place after undergrad, like, uh, what do I, what do I do now?
Speaker: Now, now it's time to have my head up, but I need to have something planned like six months ago.
Speaker: Was that
Speaker: Was that kind of a typical attitude you would say?
Speaker: I mean, I guess it's hard to gauge, but amongst your peers were people also just like, I want to focus on my research or were your peers, you know, in the basement of Rulofs having different conversations?
Speaker: Like, wait a minute, where is this all leading?
Speaker: Were you kind of an anomaly or was this?
Speaker: I don't know if I was an anomaly, but it definitely wasn't typical.
Speaker: So some people knew from the beginning, like when they started grad school, they didn't want to be professor or professor.
Speaker: knew like two years and they didn't want to go down the academia route.
Speaker: And then for them, they, then by the time they started finishing their maybe fourth or fifth years, they started doing things to make sure that they could have experiences outside academia.
Speaker: You know, others, I feel like it was the default.
Speaker: Everybody coming in was like, I want to be a professor.
Speaker: Um, all, all 30 kids.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Uh, yeah.
Speaker: Uh, and so others like really knew the entire time and then just kept, kept going.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: For me, it's also hard to know because I didn't really let myself ask myself that question.
Speaker: What is it that I actually want?
Speaker: And then because of that, I just kind of, my answers when people asked me that question were avoiding the question basically.
Speaker: So I don't really know like how many other people were like, kind of like, I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker: I'm just like keeping my head down and working.
Speaker: I did, again though, I did really like doing research.
Speaker: And so that aspect appealed to me.
Speaker: I'm just curious what motivated you
Speaker: this non-committal, I don't want to call it, it wasn't flippancy, but, or putting up blinders, but I'm wondering what motivated this,
Speaker: a single track mind, I guess, about, I just want to focus on my research.
Speaker: Do you think there was fear at all?
Speaker: I mean, you did mention earlier that you thought, in retrospect, you could see that in the beginning of grad school, you maybe thought, oh, I'm not good enough to be a professor, so I'm not even going to go there.
Speaker: Then, of course, that possibility became more open to you as you faced down your imposter syndrome, right?
Speaker: And realized, oh, no, this is something that I'm clearly, this could be an option for me.
Speaker: It's interesting to hear, though, that even at the end of grad school for you,
Speaker: you kind of found yourself in the same place that you did, what, seven years earlier, eight years earlier as an undergrad, you know, wait, now what?
Speaker: And what did you end up doing after grad school?
Speaker: What do you think influenced you keeping the blinders up?
Speaker: Like the blinders up was in the beginning of grad school, like say my first year, my second year, I was like, it doesn't matter what I want now because I
Speaker: in four years, I might want something totally different.
Speaker: So I might as well just keep, keep working.
Speaker: And then by the time I got to my fifth year and sixth year of, of grad school, I, I was just like, I need to finish.
Speaker: Like, I need to make sure that I get up.
Speaker: And then, and then, you know, and then I finished and then I was like, Oh, well now what are, what am I doing?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, so then, so then what did I do after?
Speaker: I guess I'll answer that question now.
Speaker: So during, during grad school,
Speaker: I had this fantasy of getting away, especially at the end.
Speaker: So at the end, I started planning out a motorcycle road trip to Alaska.
Speaker: So when I finished grad school, I defended July 15th, six years after I started.
Speaker: And then two weeks later, I was on my motorcycle going to Alaska.
Speaker: So I went to that for a month.
Speaker: It just kind of took a month to not think of anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, so it was, it was a lot of fun.
Speaker: So that, that was, that was interesting.
Speaker: So that was it.
Speaker: That was an interesting experience before I left.
Speaker: I had, I had worked out slash bargained with my advisor that, uh, I would come back after I went to Alaska and work in the lab to wrap some projects up.
Speaker: Um, so I think, I think like I submitted my dissertation, uh,
Speaker: like maybe end of June 2016, whenever it would need to be submitted.
Speaker: And then got the feedback when I defended July 15th.
Speaker: And then, you know, they're like, you passed, but please fix these things to the dissertation.
Speaker: So I like threw those together in two weeks and then wrote out.
Speaker: Writing, taking that trip was an interesting experience because I, you know, there was a lot of like post PhD, immediately, immediate post dissertation, like angst and frustration and negative feelings that had like stood inside me for a while that were coming out.
Speaker: But then also, like, I remember, I don't know where I was, sitting on a mountainside, looking at some river flowing someplace and thinking, like, oh, well, like, these erosion patterns.
Speaker: Can I explain these by, like, this simple model, this, like, physical model of, like, how the water is flowing?
Speaker: It was just, like, you know, I just remember, like, looking and realizing, like, yeah, even though I don't, even though there's kind of a lot of the other stuff,
Speaker: that's, that's involved in academia.
Speaker: Like I do really like the research and I do really like the science.
Speaker: So that was kind of where I was after that, uh, that trip.
Speaker: So I, um, went back to that lab, uh, after that trip and I was wrapping stuff up and I told myself, like, I would wrap stuff up while I looked for a job, um, either a postdoc or an industry job.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: I just went back to my same pattern of just like keeping my head down and working and focusing on the next day.
Speaker: And then so I realized I was doing that.
Speaker: So to help myself not do that, I just kind of abruptly quit my postgraduate school postdoc.
Speaker: Not like super abruptly, but I just told my PI, like, I don't have anything lined up, but I'm just going to stop because I need to focus on getting something else lined up.
Speaker: So that was like maybe March of the year after I defended.
Speaker: So nine months after I defended, give or take.
Speaker: And then I applied for and talked to some people about postdocs.
Speaker: So there, I did apply to, to some industry jobs, maybe five or so, and then applied, like talks to several people about doing postdocs as well.
Speaker: The Alaska trip, the poetics, not to hammer in a theme here, but the poetics of the Alaska trip and sitting on, on, you know, on some rocks and looking at the river flowing
Speaker: And again, not to draw like too many neat parallels, but it just seems really reminiscent of you leaving the lab at Chicago and seeing the leaves and just being in awe of
Speaker: being able to understand and look at nature through this way that's just so like simultaneously practical and romantic regarding your research.
Speaker: It seems like maybe at that point you thought, all right, I do love my research.
Speaker: I'm not totally ready to just leave this all behind.
Speaker: That's not the point of what I just did.
Speaker: It's not the point of what this is all about.
Speaker: Go back to Cornell, buy myself, you know, nine more months and figure out what's, what's going on next.
Speaker: And then ultimately,
Speaker: And plus, before we get too far ahead here into your postdoc, which I know is what comes next.
Speaker: Sorry, spoiler alert.
Speaker: I just want to know if you can explain in layman's terms, which I know you used to try to explain to me, you know, soft matter physics.
Speaker: And I used to try to trick people out at the bar that like I was a physicist.
Speaker: PhD students getting their kicks.
Speaker: But what exactly what what was your research as a squishy physicist?
Speaker: Yeah, so I, in my PhD, I spent a lot of time studying colloidal particles.
Speaker: So a colloidal suspension is like a liquid with stuff in it.
Speaker: And so the system that I studied was that stuff would be hard physical particles.
Speaker: So like I've spent so long since I've given this spiel that I've forgotten how it goes.
Speaker: So let me rewind my spiel.
Speaker: A liquid with stuff in it, what's special about a colloid, or what I would say is special about a colloid,
Speaker: is that that stuff is bigger than atoms or bigger than small molecules.
Speaker: So it's not like a solution, but it's small enough where it still feels the effects of Brownian motion.
Speaker: So the classic example of chlite in your everyday life is milk.
Speaker: If you were to take a droplet of milk and put it under a microscope, you'd see a bunch of little small droplets, spherical droplets of fat and protein that are about one micron in diameter.
Speaker: A micron is about one one hundredth the width of your hair.
Speaker: And so those things at that scale, they're still much, much, much bigger than an individual atom.
Speaker: So like things like quantum mechanics don't matter so much.
Speaker: And they're still, but they're still small enough where they feel the effects of individual atoms kind of jostling into them.
Speaker: And so they kind of move around randomly.
Speaker: So I studied colloidal suspensions.
Speaker: The particular thing that I studied was colloidal suspensions where those particles were hard.
Speaker: and then rod-like so like kind of like long stuff um and uh you know phd you've got to add several qualifiers to anything to get to the actual image you're studying so qualify so the qualifier number number three i think is um dilute so just like a like one or two particles in that in that fluid say like or like you know they're not really interacting and qualifier number four is uh under shear so like the liquid is flowing
Speaker: So that was what I studied.
Speaker: That was the main thing that I studied.
Speaker: I did end up as well doing some work on some peripheral things, which was very fun.
Speaker: So one thing that I did some work on which I really liked was what I called liquid crystals.
Speaker: So a liquid crystal is somewhere in between a liquid and a crystal.
Speaker: So this is a fun, if you don't mind me giving a five-minute science lecture, I can go down this road.
Speaker: what this is this is amazing yeah and then you can edit this out if you want you know yeah yeah or just speed it up the people listening can just like you know put it on put on triple x passport so so uh you know when i was a kid and remember like in in grammar school there's three phases of matter solid like what a gas and then uh being like older oh there's like more phases there's like plasma and bo sine sine condensate uh but but that both those are like
Speaker: Not, not, there's many, many, there's like hundreds of phases of matter.
Speaker: And so one of the ones that people don't talk about is the group of phases of matter called liquid crystals.
Speaker: So typically it has some degree of order.
Speaker: So a crystal is something where all the atoms are ordered.
Speaker: A liquid crystal is something where there's some degree of order, but not perfect order.
Speaker: So the simple example is a pneumatic, what's called a pneumatic liquid crystal, which is like rod-like,
Speaker: molecules again, where the molecules all point the same direction, but they're not, their positions are random.
Speaker: So think like, think like kind of like a box of spaghetti, right?
Speaker: The spaghetti is all pointing along the box, the direction of the box, but they're just kind of jostled around inside.
Speaker: So they're all pointing this way, but they're kind of randomly turned around.
Speaker: Ooh, sort of weird.
Speaker: And then there's like,
Speaker: many, many, many other things you can get on top of that.
Speaker: So you can get like chiral pneumatics where that direction, they all point, the molecules all point in the same direction locally, but that direction changes as you move throughout the liquid in a periodic way.
Speaker: And that's like the ground state.
Speaker: You can get what are called like blue phases, which is a chiral pneumatic where that direction changes, but it changes in a doubly periodic way.
Speaker: So you get a crystal that's like a crystal of changing direction fields.
Speaker: And you can get
Speaker: other things like smactics, lots of fun stuff.
Speaker: So I did lots of stuff.
Speaker: I did a little bit of stuff with that.
Speaker: That was pretty fun.
Speaker: And then I also did some stuff with optics and computer vision as part of my work, both for my normal project as part of some projects in other of themselves.
Speaker: Another question too, what does a PhD thesis look like for a physicist?
Speaker: It looks like this.
Speaker: Just get it up and show it to you.
Speaker: It's this big, big giant book.
Speaker: 200 and I think it's 256 pages.
Speaker: So it's basically, so for, for writing a PhD, the actual thesis itself, that was not so difficult because as part of a PhD program, typically you're publishing papers.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, so I published, I don't know, a lot of papers as a grad student or like, not a lot, but multiple.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: Writing that thesis is basically taking a stapler and stabbing those papers together with a little bit more work than that.
Speaker: I remember you mentioning that because I think our processes of writing dissertations are different in the humanities versus the hard sciences.
Speaker: Yeah, I had four first author publications that I just stapled in there and then some other like
Speaker: middle author publications where some of the stuff I put in there as well.
Speaker: So I had a couple of the middle author publications.
Speaker: I mean, typically like in the physical sciences, I'm trying to think of some of my lab mates, you know, anywhere from like one or two or my friends, one or two to like many, uh, depending on the person that research, some things take, like, you know, some people I know, uh, were working on a project that took like
Speaker: multiple years, like multiple PhD projects to build the apparatus.
Speaker: And so then it's like, well, you're probably not going to get a paper from this, but it's not, or like many papers from this, but it's not like a statement about them.
Speaker: It's just like the system you're working on.
Speaker: So, but regardless, it does seem like the processes were quite different for writing a dissertation and then also a defense.
Speaker: What does your defense kind of look like?
Speaker: It's not like you're defending like this idea that you've presented and synthesized like in the humanities, but more
Speaker: I mean, this is research that I'm guessing that your PIs over the years and your advisors are probably like familiar, not that they aren't in the humanities, but what does your defense look like as a physicist?
Speaker: So my defense was, I just, it was pretty similar to the thesis in the sense of each of those things I had worked on, I'd also given talks on.
Speaker: And so I basically just stapled those talks together with lots of like, you know, you can't staple, like you can't staple papers together to make a book.
Speaker: You can't staple talks together to make a talk, right?
Speaker: So both of those
Speaker: There's lots of like adjusting to the writing, adjusting to the writing, adjusting of the flow of the talk to make sure that it goes smoothly and leads from one idea to the next that you're building up in a sequence.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And, you know, trying to do that in a way that paints an overall coherent story about what it is that I spent six years working on.
Speaker: That sounds sufficiently stressful.
Speaker: I'll hand it to you.
Speaker: It was, I was not,
Speaker: as stressed as I would have expected to be like when I started my PhD program.
Speaker: So my A exam, my admission to candidacy exam, that was more.
Speaker: So there was like qualifiers for physics and then an admission to candidacy and then a B exam for your defense.
Speaker: So my A exam was more stressful.
Speaker: Yeah, the A exams were brutal.
Speaker: They were, yeah.
Speaker: I think that varied super much from department to department.
Speaker: So there was like physics and applied physics at Cornell.
Speaker: And applied physics had a really brutal qual and an easy A exam.
Speaker: And physics had a pretty easy qual and a pretty brutal A exam.
Speaker: So it was just like kind of flip of a coin.
Speaker: And then some, of course, some of my unlucky friends were applied physics students who then had an advisor in the physics department.
Speaker: So they had to do both the brutal quals and the brutal A exam.
Speaker: Yeah, there are all these like different hurdles that you have to clear as a PhD student that
Speaker: I don't think anyone really knows the nature of what they're signing up for when they're in it, but now you're at the end, right?
Speaker: You've bought yourself this time at Cornell and you cast your net out to a couple jobs in industry and postdocs.
Speaker: But again, the spoiler alert is that you ended up at a postdoc.
Speaker: And where was that again?
Speaker: So I did a postdoc at Harvard doing stuff.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: So the stuff, was it like a continuation of your research?
Speaker: What made you choose that over going into industry?
Speaker: I did not have any offers from industry.
Speaker: Like I said, I only applied for a couple jobs in industry.
Speaker: I did spend a lot of time
Speaker: I spent time like negotiating with my postdoc, my future postdoc, one of my future postdoc advisors, like what it was that I'll be working on to make sure that it was something that we thought would be a good project and fruitful rather than just like jumping into something.
Speaker: So that was something that I'm happy that I did.
Speaker: This is sort of going back to our money discussion.
Speaker: This was like a long-term advantage of UChicago giving me a full ride is that it meant that not only did I graduate undergrad without debt, but I also graduated grad school without debt.
Speaker: And as you know, I'm pretty cheap.
Speaker: So I was able to save money as a grad student, which meant that I could afford to like live like cheaply unemployed for a few months while I figured out what it was that I wanted to do.
Speaker: And so, yeah, so one thing that I felt like when I was doing
Speaker: physics is that everything was done.
Speaker: So it's not, it's not true.
Speaker: Like, you know, you can open up physical review letters and every week there's like 70 new papers, but I felt like all the, like, I felt like there were like not so many big open questions and the things that I was interested in.
Speaker: And I felt like the things that were unsolved were a little bit, a little bit different.
Speaker: So, so two of those things that I felt were unsolved was biology and biophysics.
Speaker: I felt there were some interesting problems there.
Speaker: especially evolution.
Speaker: I talked to some people about doing postdocs when I was a grad student and like studying experimental evolution.
Speaker: And then the other one that I really liked was, I don't know what the right phrase for it would be.
Speaker: I guess I would say computational imaging or computational microscopy, but I don't know, it's kind of a little bit different.
Speaker: So when I,
Speaker: one of the things that I always liked as an undergrad and as a grad student was I did a lot of programming and I also liked that programming I was doing for microscopy to do like essentially scientific computer vision which is very different from normal computer vision and so I liked that and one of the last projects that I worked on as a grad student was writing a
Speaker: some software to identify very precisely where something was in a microscope image.
Speaker: And one of the things that was interesting to me about that was that, you know, just doing some basic math, me and my colleagues realized that
Speaker: you could do much better than people were typically assuming you could, which meant that you could maybe, we could maybe use ideas like this to do some more interesting science that maybe enables some interest, more interesting science.
Speaker: So one of the things that I wanted to work on was imaging latest stuff as well.
Speaker: So like interface between imaging and inference and using a computer or computer vision stuff to do both of those together.
Speaker: And so that's, that's what I ended up settling on for my postdoc
Speaker: before I started it.
Speaker: So we were chatting back and forth what a good project was.
Speaker: One of the things that we chatted about was building an imaging method for viruses.
Speaker: So viruses are very small.
Speaker: Typical viruses are very small, much smaller than the wavelength of light, which means that if you want to image them, you can't really use a light microscope.
Speaker: You have to use electron microscope or something like that.
Speaker: So this, the person who I was working with was using a light microscope to do some very, you know, the imaging is sophisticated, but you get very simple information about the virus.
Speaker: But the advantage of doing it with a light microscope is that you can do it in a little bit more physiologically realistic environments.
Speaker: And so we were talking about ways to do that better.
Speaker: And so we were talking about that.
Speaker: And then right when I was about, when we were about to join, I was like, well, you know, just thinking about funding reasons, it might make sense.
Speaker: Like I have a funding opportunity, but instead of doing that, we can do that for like, for viruses, we can do it for in vitro fertilization.
Speaker: And so that's, that's what I ended up.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Starting my postdoc, yes.
Speaker: Which very quickly became two separate postdocs, one with microscopy and one with in vitro fertilization.
Speaker: That was, you were at Harvard for three years total?
Speaker: So I was there for just shy of four years.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I didn't realize that was for whatever reason.
Speaker: I think I just remember talking to you in 2020 about how you were thinking really seriously at that point about moving into industry.
Speaker: And I'm curious, I mean, it seems like the overall...
Speaker: trajectory of your time as an academic, both undergrad and grad and post postdoc, is that you put your head down and that the doors kept opening for you.
Speaker: But ultimately, obviously, here you are on academic defectors, you know, whatever defector means that you ultimately chose to leave.
Speaker: What were the
Speaker: what were the reasons behind that choice?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker: So I guess there were, there were a couple of things.
Speaker: Part of this that like sort of imposter syndrome, I guess, as you could call it, that I didn't really let myself ask what it was that I wanted.
Speaker: Part of it, part of it was, I really do love, I really, I really do love reading and learning this stuff and doing the research, but just my personality, I'm very, I'm very results oriented and
Speaker: And so I just take things too seriously, you know?
Speaker: And so what I would, what I would end up doing is I would push myself to do the part of the work that maybe wasn't necessarily the most fun for me, but was the most beneficial for the project.
Speaker: And so, you know, part of it, you know, asking myself, what is it that I really want and realizing that most of the actual day-to-day work that I would be doing if I stayed down the academic route wouldn't be the, it'd be the bullshit.
Speaker: The stuff that needs to be, needs to get done.
Speaker: That's not necessarily like doing science, like writing grants.
Speaker: Administrative stuff.
Speaker: It's there is that everybody complains about them as being terrible.
Speaker: They're not, they're not that bad to write.
Speaker: They're kind of fun.
Speaker: They can be fun sometimes.
Speaker: And then also like a lot of it is, you know, my, my postdoc, uh, it was very interdisciplinary and, um, sometimes for some of the projects I was working on, I found myself in a position where I was like managing, you know, like coordinating, you know, different parts of the collaboration.
Speaker: And of course you only do more of that as a professor and, uh, that I definitely do it because it needs to be done, but it's not something that I like enjoy doing it.
Speaker: I'm not getting out of bed excited, like, oh, I get to sit on this, sit in this meeting today.
Speaker: You know, that's not something that really makes me super excited.
Speaker: So that was, that was part of it.
Speaker: The other thing is, you know, going back to this money conversation.
Speaker: So two things happened to me while I was doing my postdoc in a, maybe a seven hour period.
Speaker: Um, one was I proposed to my now wife who had $230,000 in debt at the time, student debt.
Speaker: Uh, she's a veterinarian, so she had debt from medical school, from veterinary school.
Speaker: And the other one was that seven hours later, I herniated a disc in my neck and was like in, and like terrible pain and ended up needing to get surgery for that.
Speaker: And I, you know, I, I don't, I don't need a lot of money.
Speaker: I don't really live a lavish lifestyle, but I just kind of had this realization that I, I just couldn't
Speaker: live the life, live a normal life if I stay down this road.
Speaker: Maybe this is just, I mean, I don't think this applies to everybody, but I just felt that it applied to me at least.
Speaker: You know, I was like living in the Boston area, which is a very high cost of living.
Speaker: You know, I save aggressively and spend nothing, but... Cabbage soup.
Speaker: Yeah, cabbage soup, as you remember from 100 days, cabbage soup and like cabbage soup and rice.
Speaker: was my undergrad, undergrad survival.
Speaker: But, uh, obviously as a postdoc, I had, there was no way I could support my wife's student debt.
Speaker: And I was like, if I ever want to start a family, I'll, I can't do it.
Speaker: And then I also felt like, uh, you know, one of the reasons that I herniated the disc in my neck was, was it's, it's hard to know, you know, causality.
Speaker: Um, but, uh,
Speaker: It was like bad work ergonomics because I was working at a desk that was like a crappy desk with a crappy chair.
Speaker: I mean, it's still, this neck still bothers me.
Speaker: And I was kind of like, man, for one to like a hundred dollar desk, I'm going to like have this neck pain for the rest of my life.
Speaker: I don't, it was just kind of like this, this career path isn't going to take care of me.
Speaker: That's profound.
Speaker: And so that, that's kind of what started making me think about this.
Speaker: So I remember distinctly like ranting to somebody about, about
Speaker: this, but at that time I wasn't, I was still thinking that this was the right path, you know, sticking on the, on the postdoc route and sticking on the academia route.
Speaker: But then the, the kind of the longer that I stayed on it, the more that I felt like I was just putting my life on pause, you know, that I was able to, to survive, but I wasn't really able to live.
Speaker: And so that was, that was part of it.
Speaker: Then, so it's kind of this combination of the realization that the research is fun.
Speaker: the bullshit is not most of my time is spent doing bullshit.
Speaker: If I'm going to spend my time doing bullshit, I might as well get paid to do bullshit, get paid better.
Speaker: And then also like, you know, this surviving versus like living a life that I, that I can choose, you know, it all makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, and also going back to this idea that being in academia is requires like a monk, like aesthetic lifestyle, because, you know, obviously the compensation isn't,
Speaker: isn't the best, especially as a postdoc and grad student.
Speaker: I mean, maybe if you become a senior researcher or certainly a, well, even professors, I will say, you know, professors, depending on the school, don't make that much.
Speaker: We're talking $50,000, 60, and that's obviously, I don't think that that's commensurate to experience, but anyway, I mean, your story here does have a happy ending.
Speaker: because you did end up realizing, okay, I have to move on with my life.
Speaker: And going back to this monk analogy that I keep kind of coming back to, it would have been fine for one person, but you were getting married.
Speaker: And of course, congratulations.
Speaker: It wasn't just one person anymore.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I just want to push back a little bit on the monk analogy.
Speaker: One of the great things about being at Harvard for a while was you get to meet a lot of really great people and really great scientists.
Speaker: And there were
Speaker: there were a few people in particular who both at Cornell and at Harvard who really just kind of approached it like play and were just not that they were like slacking off or goofing around but they would just do what they would thought was interesting and just chase it just because it was interesting and and like have a lot of fun with it and then still work all the hours that they could but they weren't really working at all they were just playing you know
Speaker: For me, I don't know.
Speaker: I think this is just something about my personality.
Speaker: For me, I'm like, why should I be playing?
Speaker: I should be working at this thing that is just more productive instead of having fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Ultimately, you did take the leap into industry.
Speaker: How did that transition feel for you?
Speaker: How was it getting a job?
Speaker: How have you felt personally, professionally about this new life that you have?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So getting a job is a different, is a different thing because, uh, there was some other economic things going on in 2020 and 2021 when I, when I decided to leave, uh, speaking of viruses, but, uh, uh, I, so right now I am a data scientists.
Speaker: Uh, and in particular, I do, I do computer vision stuff for, uh, for a logistics company.
Speaker: And I really like what I do for a couple of reasons.
Speaker: So one things, things move so much faster.
Speaker: than they do in academia.
Speaker: Turnaround time is not six years for things in the industry, which is nice.
Speaker: Two, it's not that I still don't do bullshit, but I actually do less of it.
Speaker: I thought I would be doing more of it.
Speaker: It's not worth it to have somebody like me do the bullshit tasks.
Speaker: So like as a grad student, you're making like $30,000 a year.
Speaker: So if the option is do this or pay somebody money, it's almost always going to be the grad student is cheaper.
Speaker: But in industry, it's kind of the opposite.
Speaker: The other thing that I really like is, well, there's a couple other things.
Speaker: One is for my particular job that I do.
Speaker: Typically, most of the stuff that is most effective to get something done, it ends up being a little bit more interesting work, talking to people or visiting someplace to see what's actually going on on the ground or stuff like that, rather than just sitting down and mindlessly clicking on images.
Speaker: And then there's the other thing too, which is
Speaker: I don't feel like my job has to be my entire life because it's a job.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: There's something, this sort of monk analogy you were making where it's like, it's not just supposed to be like what you're doing to get food in academia.
Speaker: It's like all you do and all encompassing.
Speaker: It kind of sucked the fun out of the research for me a little bit because I always felt guilty reading about new things.
Speaker: So I would get some, like say, interesting math book and half the time I'd read it.
Speaker: And half the time I'd be like, I shouldn't be reading this because if I'm going to read something technical, there's other technical things that I should read instead.
Speaker: Whereas now there are some things that I feel like I should read this for my job, but I don't feel guilty if I pick up a technical book that I'm interested in.
Speaker: Whereas in academia, there's just so much knowledge that there's so much knowledge.
Speaker: The more knowledge that you have, the more effective you can be on.
Speaker: There's just so much to accumulate.
Speaker: And so now I can
Speaker: play a little bit more as I learn and explore.
Speaker: Do you feel that you use the skills that you gained in academia in your current job?
Speaker: For sure, I use the skills.
Speaker: I don't use a lot of the knowledge.
Speaker: Of all the classes that I've taken, like actually taken, zero of them I've used for my job.
Speaker: Of the research that I've done, maybe a tiny little bit of it I've used for my job.
Speaker: But most of the stuff that I've used is kind of the like
Speaker: technical skills to get something to work that were part of the project that I'm doing as part of my current job now.
Speaker: Some examples would be like, I mentioned I do computer vision.
Speaker: I never took a class in that.
Speaker: If you get a physics PhD at no part in your coursework, is there anything about programming?
Speaker: But I learned that kind of stuff by just doing the research work and just picking up skills to do things.
Speaker: I mean, I like that distinction you made between skills and knowledge, how you do use your skills, but not your knowledge and
Speaker: I just have to say that really resonates with me too.
Speaker: And my post PhD journey were the skills that I, of course, my journey is different because I transitioned out of academia and into being like a creative.
Speaker: I didn't transition into any particular industry.
Speaker: I transitioned into artistry.
Speaker: So it's sort of different, but I do use my skills are what make me my, you know, my money.
Speaker: The knowledge though, is what ultimately shapes our life path and the way that
Speaker: the way that we've ended up where we are.
Speaker: The knowledge that you've gained along the way seems to have been what pushed you through these different iterations of your career journey, through your educational journey, and ultimately made you where you are now.
Speaker: And with that knowledge, you're able to separate work time from play time and valuing playing and something else you said way back about going on this motorcycle trip and having to work out that
Speaker: dissertation angst.
Speaker: I mean, man, oh man, like you just get so wound up.
Speaker: Actually, my partner's dad has a PhD in computer science by way of geology.
Speaker: And he's in his 70s and he did this a long time ago.
Speaker: And I remember when we first met, we talked about, oh, PhD, so you have one too?
Speaker: Yeah, oh, cool, cool.
Speaker: And something came up about the dissertation and he just paused and he said, and he's from the South and he was like, man, I was a basket case for about six months after that, wow.
Speaker: completely different fields, but like that angst is real.
Speaker: But I think that how we learn to restructure our lives with the knowledge and not necessarily the knowledge that we've learned in academia, but in pursuit of that knowledge, we get this new spiritual knowledge, if you want to call it that, that helps us demarcate leisure from work and find like a life path that feels more in line with who we are, as opposed to
Speaker: you know, there's almost total sacrifice that seems like it's required from academia, even if in humanities it's like this, you know, you have to show your complete dedication in order to get a job.
Speaker: And the only job that you're training for is say an ethnomusicologist is to be a professor.
Speaker: You're not training to be anything else.
Speaker: And as a physicist, obviously there might be a little bit more slippage room, but you still are required.
Speaker: There's still this dedication that's required for you to live like in a very particular way without very much money that it seems like in rejecting, not rejecting, but in moving on from, I'd say in your case,
Speaker: indicates like this new kind of knowledge that you've gained along the way.
Speaker: So skills versus knowledge, man, that's very profound.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the other thing that one of the skills, probably the most useful skills that I picked up in my education broadly, as you mentioned, is the skill of learning, of like knowing how to know, knowing how to learn.
Speaker: You know, that was one of the fun things I liked about getting a PhD is I had to learn so many things.
Speaker: In addition to doing physics, I had to do optics.
Speaker: I had to do programming.
Speaker: I had to do, you know, like computer vision.
Speaker: Like I mentioned, I had to do, uh, I spent a lot of time in the machine shop machining stuff.
Speaker: I did chemical syntheses.
Speaker: I did like all kinds of stuff, right.
Speaker: I learned how to write, to write papers, learned how to give talks.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Um, that's like breath and that ability to like, kind of get shit done and like figure shit out that I, that is the most useful for me.
Speaker: And that has kind of served me the most, um,
Speaker: And that, you know, that kind of started out in Chicago as an undergrad.
Speaker: That was kind of one of the main things that I got from University of Chicago was learning how to learn and then taking that to Cornell and really like being forced to run with that.
Speaker: You know, most of the stuff that I needed to know was not really taught in classes.
Speaker: And that's like a skill that really serves me well in my life now.
Speaker: And also makes life more fun because I can teach myself about trees in the world around me and
Speaker: Yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker: So to close up here, I have just one last question.
Speaker: Is there anything that you miss about academia?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, getting a chance to explore and learn new things.
Speaker: I do like the breadth.
Speaker: And I liked being able to explore broadly.
Speaker: I also miss being around other academics.
Speaker: When I didn't realize that was something to be missed when I was at Cornell and Harvard, where everybody around me is someone who's like also a scientist or an academic.
Speaker: And I can just end like, I'm always just having technical conversations, but that's not like everywhere in the world.
Speaker: So of course I still keep up with my friends, but it's not a hundred percent of my life now.
Speaker: I, I miss that, uh, the real discovery.
Speaker: I'll say also what I don't miss.
Speaker: I don't miss the sense of self-pressure.
Speaker: I don't miss the feeling like I have to be the best in the world if I want to get a job.
Speaker: Now I can just do what I want.
Speaker: Of course, it's interesting too, because as PhDs, I also think one of the biggest takeaways we get, and you did touch on this, but is this ability to be self-directed.
Speaker: and this ability to, you know, if you have an intellectual interest to actually pursue it, because we're experts at that, you know, no matter what we, no matter what we study, we become experts in taking it to the limit and, and entering new territory and exploring it and synthesizing it.
Speaker: But yeah, it's, it's great to hear what you miss.
Speaker: You're the first person I've asked what they miss about academia.
Speaker: Most people have different narratives so far.
Speaker: So it's just, it's,
Speaker: It's been fascinating to chat with a physicist and might I add to just how grateful I certainly was about having you on campus because yes, I miss academics and is kvetch the word I'm looking for, kvetching with one another.
Speaker: And as a musicologist, you know, I do miss being able to talk about the Western canon with people and they get it.
Speaker: You know, no one in Brooklyn is listening to classical music.
Speaker: But having you in the mix was always a breath of fresh air because you're a physicist and you did something completely different.
Speaker: And we had parallel but very different experiences that being able to hear about today has been so illuminating and just so interesting.
Speaker: So thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: This has been wonderful.
Speaker: Yeah, ditto.
Speaker: Thanks, Jay.
Speaker: And to listeners, thank you for tuning in to episode five of Academic Defectors with Brian Leahy, PhD.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jillian Marshall, also PhD.
Speaker: Catch you next time.
