In this article I intend to share some of my personal experience as a PhD student and a teacher starting his career in teaching physics. I completed my PhD in 2014 from the US and started my career as a teacher at a liberal arts college in the US. The six years of my PhD was a life changing experience as it is for every graduate student. My field of research is theoretical particle physics although I am interested in a wide variety of topics.
Life as a graduate student can be very challenging in the US. Graduate students typically start their PhD by first fulfilling a course requirement and passing a qualifying exam. The next step which is the most important one is to choose a field of research and an adviser to pursue a career in research. Graduate students are usually quite confused at this stage and this confusion does not subsides even after a choice has been made. Choosing a research adviser is the most sensitive decision a graduate student makes. This decision not only affects a student's experience in research but also after graduation when key career decisions have to be made.
I was fortunate enough to traverse these stages to complete my PhD in 2014. Following are some of my personal observations about physics students and education:
Students are not provided opportunities to be creative. Creativity is a skill graduate students expect to use the most during research but in most cases it turns out to be the least they would use. It might come in handy to solve preassigned problems but not to discover new ideas. We should therefore encourage an atmosphere where students are allowed to take risks in order to boost their creativity.
There are a lot of students who do not necessarily score good grades but would perform excellent in research. An atmosphere encouraging creativity can help them discover their skills at a much early stage of their career as well. Students have to wait a long time in order to test their skills in research. There should be a way to demonstrate one's research skills without attaining an "expert" level in a particular field.
There are a lot of students who do not necessarily score good grades but would perform excellent in research. An atmosphere encouraging creativity can help them discover their skills at a much early stage of their career as well. Students have to wait a long time in order to test their skills in research. There should be a way to demonstrate one's research skills without attaining an "expert" level in a particular field.
The methods of research are not helpful in many cases. The adviser typically expects the student to work on very specific topics instead of providing the student the freedom to search for an idea and guiding the student along with his or her choice. From the adviser's perspective this is needed since they need to get their grants approved for which progress needs to be shown.
There should be a journal for senior undergraduate and graduate students which would provide the students a forum to test their skills. The editors of this journal should not expect the students to be experts in a particular topic but would expect them to be creative in the subject the students are addressing. For example, the students should be encouraged to describe and develop new models to explain known effects in physics.
There is of course the problem of a build up of pseudo scientific ideas. This journal should provide a forum to channel these ideas in order to put them to test properly. Currently, there is a large community of people who would email senior physicists to comment on an idea they have. There are very few senior physicists who are very helpful but most of them are busy enough to ignore such requests. Students and other individuals would be able submit their ideas and a panel of experts can debate on whether a particular idea is pseudo science or not. A particular idea should pass through different phases in order to be assigned a label. For instance, the first phase can involve young experts in the field and if it passes through this phase the second phase can be a more senior and advanced level of scrutiny.
The young people in physics and in any other field are the future of that field. In my view there should be an atmosphere of educating students where they are encouraged to be more creative and forthright in challenging standard understanding of ideas.
