Women in physics

The APS site has a section called Female Friendly Physics Graduate Programs, where they survey various physics programs and have collected statistics on things like faculty and student male/female ratios, availability of maternity/family leave or family health insurance, etc. One question they asked all of the schools was, "Please describe why someone applying to graduate school who is interested in a female-friendly department should choose your department." The responses were provided by (or at least requested from) the department chairs, and some were a little...tongue-in-cheek?

Here's an excerpt from Harvard's response to the previous question:

"Harvard is Harvard. The physics department is full of very active and highly motivated people. It is not a good place for shrinking violets, female or male... After Harvard President Lawrence Summers made his well-publicized remarks about "innate differences," a number of the physics professors, female and male, were among the leaders in marshalling an appropriate response. Physicists were also well-represented on the "task forces" set up to address the concerns of women in science, and their recommendations are a useful blueprint for further improvement. You should apply to Harvard in [sic] you are interested in being where the action is, both in physics and in women in science issues!"

Grad school update

Nobody told me that the most stressful part of applying to grad schools would be this part, where I have to pick one. I applied and was accepted to many schools with excellent reputations, but since I've started visiting them, it's become clear that they're all...really excellent. How am I supposed to narrow down my choices, let alone pick one school, by April 15?

It's looking like I'm going to have to tackle some of the Big Questions I had been secretly hoping to avoid, like: Materials Science, or Applied Physics (or Electrical Engineering, for that matter)? Hands-off advisor with a big group, or hands-on advisor with a small group? New professor, or someone who's older and more established? And, of course, could I survive 5 years in Ithaca?

Going to all of these schools has made me realize that, for every interesting research topic that I know a thing or two about, there are at least five that I know pretty much nothing about, but that sound potentially just as interesting. I would love to be able to go to a school and spend a semester getting to know potential advisors and their work before I make up my mind. Some places really seem to support and encourage this, while others don't seem to understand the sentiment.

I'm waiting to hear back from national fellowships, too. Of course, bringing my own funding with me would make it a lot easier for me to shop around, and would make it a lot less likely that I would be refused by my eventual advisor of choice. In some ways, waiting to hear from these fellowships is worse than waiting to hear from grad schools was, because there's a narrower time window when I could conceivably hear from the fellowship committees (and I'm right in the middle of it!). However, not getting a fellowship is a whole lot better than, say, not getting in to grad school, but that's a tough perspective to keep when I don't have to worry about getting in to grad school anymore.

I'm not sure how much importance I should place on location/weather, but there are some pretty big contrasts between my various options. In California, they were apologizing for sunny, 50 degree weather - in March. On the other hand, I'm going to visit Cornell this weekend, and...

Brr.

On an unrelated note, Atlas Shrugged is actually getting better as it goes. It's also an excellent travel book, being interminable and all, as I've discovered during all of these grad school visits.

A book review?

I've started reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read The Fountainhead a couple of summers ago, and was surprised at the reactions I could provoke just by carrying the book around with me. They ranged from the kid who lent it to me, who said something like, "Ohh! You'll read The Fountainhead, and you'll love it, and then you'll read Atlas Shrugged, and then you'll become...an OBJECTIVIST!!" to others, whose reactions were more along the lines of, "How can you get through two pages of that THING."

Long books have never bothered me - I was perfectly happy all through Anna Karenina, where they spend a few hundred pages skipping through the countryside before getting around to the actual, you know, plot. (Oddly enough, it's rare that I can sit through a movie that's more than two hours long.) On the other hand, I can't say I came out of the experience of reading The Fountainhead touting Objectivism to the world. In reality, Rand's philosophy is pretty well-aligned with my own, but it seems to me that it's more important to actually get out and live it (the same goes for feminism, for that matter) than it is to sit around and discuss it. Ultimately, I spent my childhood watching older and more interesting people than me read Atlas Shrugged, and I would be disappointed if I never got around to reading it myself.

I'm about 100 pages in (out of 1000+). It took me a good 20 or 30 just to keep myself from laughing at the book, which definitely takes itself too seriously at times. And it's a little frustrating how similar the caricatures characters in Atlas Shrugged are to those in The Fountainhead. On the other hand, it's fun to read, because it's fun to daydream about a world where people spend a lot of time dramatically posed on top of cliffs and skyscrapers, where they bask in the power of their accomplishments, or lament the human condition, or whatever. It would be nice if everyone's personalities and motives were so clear-cut. Also, if this sort of thing were to take place today, it would be much less interesting because they could just go and look up John Galt on Wikipedia, and figure out who he was once and for all.

One thing that's never sat well with me is how Rand portrays completely man-made things as being more awe-inspiring than anything natural. (Here's the beginning of Atlas Shrugged: there used to be this really spectacular tree in Eddie Willers' front yard, until it rotted out and was struck by lightning and DIED, and he was crushed and never trusted nature again. Or something like that.) I've always thought that our most spectacular creations are those that mesh with their environment perfectly, merging the natural and the man-made...and I'm not sure the philosophy in these books is totally against that, either. But passages that extol the beauty of subway tunnels ("She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.") are a bit much.

But the most important question at this point is: Who is Dagny going to sleep with? The female protagonist in The Fountainhead, Dominique, really got around, and I don't expect any less from Dagny. There are at least 4 or 5 men so far who I could definitely see her with at some point, and really, anyone but her brother is fair game. Time will tell...

Lettuce rant.

I hate iceberg lettuce. This is something I would enjoy on a sandwich:

(from Wikipedia)

This is something I might use for bedding in a hamster cage:


I'm not sure that there are too many people out there who find shredded iceberg as repulsive as I do, but I am sure that they don't live in Philadelphia. Ok, the shredded stuff is cheaper, but I'd be hard-pressed to find a sandwich shop on campus that actually used Romaine (and made sandwiches that were less expensive than, say, $7).

Whatever, that's just my opinion. But what really pisses me off is when I'm forced to eat the stuff, or pick out the individual shreds, because people don't seem to understand that no lettuce means no lettuce.

Here's a (dramatic reenactment of a) conversation I had last night:
"What would you like on your burger? Tomatoes, lettuce, onions...?"
"Tomatoes, and onions, but no lettuce."
"No lettuce?! Are you sure?"
"No lettuce."

I bet you can see where this one is going. Shredded iceberg lettuce does not belong on a burger (and there were no onions either, by the way), so I had to pick it out, ketchup-covered shred by shred.

There's another place I order from sometimes, that makes the most amazing portobello mushroom wraps. They're filled with warm and juicy grilled vegetables and they melt in your mouth. Yum. Except that the last couple of times I've ordered, they've added...shredded iceberg lettuce. I really don't get this. When you them order online, you have to explicitly ask for lettuce. I don't. This means that someone at the restaurant must see my order, notice that I didn't ask for lettuce, and make a conscious decision to add it anyway. Some people like iceberg on their burger, fine, but lettuce of any sort on a sandwich like this is repulsive, hands down.

I apologize for writing one of the most boring things ever written, but there has got to be someone out there who's just as frustrated about this sort of thing as I am, and they will understand.


While I'm at it, I'm also frustrated about the really stupid comment someone made today in psych class. We're learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment. The premise of the whole thing was: if you take a bunch of otherwise completely normal guys and stick them in a prison environment, will the randomly-selected "guards" become sadistic and the "prisoners" feel hardened and hopeless? The answer is...yes. A resounding yes. They had to shut the experiment down after 6 days because everyone had gotten way too wrapped up in their imaginary prison world, and the everything had spiraled out of control.

So after we watch a video about this, I'm walking out of class and the girl in front of me says to her friend, "Wow, I bet the guards were really glad they weren't picked to be the prisoners instead."

No. You fundamentally misunderstood the experiment. If the "guards" had felt any sympathy for the "prisoners" at the time, would they have made them strip and do push-ups and piss in a bucket and stay locked in a closet for hours on end? Do you bring your brain to class?

Sigh.

Waiting it out

Things I check while I'm waiting to hear back from grad schools:

• My email. I didn't think I could possibly check my email more often than I used to, but it turns out that's not true.
• The Spam Folder, just in case the good (or bad) news somehow didn't make it to my inbox. Since I don't know the names of the people I'll be getting emails from, I'm forced to open anything with a vaguely promising subject, although I draw the line at, There will be no stopping you after this. Your powers are soon to be unleashed.
• My (snail) mailbox. Rumor has it that some schools actually send out admissions decisions this way, without emailing first. Certainly, good news by email is generally followed up by something in the mail. I used to check my mail once every couple of weeks, and I'd be lucky to get anything. Now, I check it every day, and sometimes twice a day (maybe they hadn't delivered the mail the first time?).
• Thegradcafe.com. It's a website where people post grad school admissions results, along the lines of, "Stanford's Electrical Engineering PhD program rejected me on 1/31 by phone." I doubt I could glean any sort of accurate information from it, since it represents such a small sample of applicants, but that doesn't stop me from checking the site every 5 minutes. When I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I'll look at all the rejections from MIT in years past. They have forums, too.
• School websites. Just in case I missed some key piece of information, but usually, I end up re-reading the vague promises in the graduate admissions FAQs, like, We make our final decisions in late February or early March, or We're not telling you what the average GPA/GRE/research experience of our admitted applicants is, because we like to look at the whole picture (yeah right!).
• The stats on my personal webpage. Ok, now I'm getting desperate, but they are a legitimate indication of who has been Googling me lately. Not that I'm even sure what it would mean if somebody had. Perhaps they could be really, really interested in my application. Or, maybe they would want to have a laugh at the crazy girl who was naive enough to think she actually had a shot of actually getting into their institution. Or, perhaps they could need more information about me because my application was on the fence (given the current state of my website, I think my application would be hastily rejected by anyone who stumbled across it). This is all hypothetical, of course, because my website is still getting the usual 10-20 hits a month, most of them through my boyfriend's page.

A few more weeks, and I'll know about most places for sure, but the wait is painful.