Advice

How to Make Educational Videos with a Tablet

We’re well into the Biggest Ideas in the Universe series, and some people have been asking how I make the actual videos. I explained the basic process in the Q&A video for Force, Energy, and Action – embedded below – but it turns out that not everyone watches every single video from start to finish (weird, I know), and besides the details have changed a little bit. And for some reason a lot of people want to do pedagogy via computer these days.

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | Q&A 3 - Force, Energy, and Action
Brief video tutorial starts at 44:45, but note that details have changed since this was made.

So let me explain my process here, starting with the extremely short version. You need:

  • A computer
  • A video camera (webcam okay)
  • A microphone (computer mic okay)
  • A tablet with writing instrument (e.g. iPad Pro and Apple Pencil)
  • Writing app on the tablet (e.g. Notability)
  • Screen capturing/video editing software on the computer (e.g. Screenflow)
  • Whatever wires and dongles are required to hook all that stuff together.

Hmm, looking over that list it doesn’t seem as simple as I thought. And this is the quick-and-easy version! But you can adapt the level of commitment to your own needs.

The most important step here is to capture your writing, in real time, on the video. (You obviously don’t have to include an image of yourself at all, but it makes things a bit more human, and besides who can possibly talk without making gestures, right?) So you need some kind of tablet to write on. I like the iPad Pro quite a bit, but note that not all iPad models are compatible with a Pencil (or other stylus). And writing with your fingers just doesn’t cut it here.

You also need an app that does that. I am quite fond of both Notability and Notes Plus. (I’m sure that non-iOS ecosystems have their own apps, but there’s no sense in which I’m familiar with the overall landscape; I can only tell you about what I use.) These two apps are pretty similar, with small differences at the edges. When I’m taking notes or marking up PDFs, I’m actually more likely to use Notes Plus, as its cutting/pasting is a bit simpler. And that’s what I used for the very early Biggest Ideas videos. But I got numerous requests to write on a dark background rather than a light one, which is completely reasonable. Notability has that feature and as far as I know Notes Plus does not. And it’s certainly more than good enough for the job.

Then you need to capture your writing, and your voice, and optionally yourself, onto video and edit it together. (Again, no guarantees that my methods are simplest or best, only that they are mine.) Happily there are programs that do everything you want at once: they will capture video from a camera, separately capture audio input, and also separately capture part or all of your computer screen, and/or directly from an external device. Then they will let you edit it all together how you like. Pretty sweet, to be honest.

I started out using Camtasia, which worked pretty well overall. But not perfectly, as I eventually discovered. It wasn’t completely free of crashes, which can be pretty devastating when you’re 45 minutes into an hour-long video. And capture from the iPad was pretty clunky; I had to show the iPad screen on my laptop screen, then capture that region into Camtasia. (The app is smart enough to capture either the whole screen, or any region on it.) By the way, did you know you can show your iPhone/iPad screen on your computer, at least with a Mac? Just plug the device into the computer, open up QuickTime, click “new movie recording,” and ask it to display from the mobile device. Convenient for other purposes.

But happily on Screenflow, which I’ve subsequently switched to, that workaround isn’t necessary; it will capture directly from your tablet (as long as it’s connected to your computer). And in my (very limited) experience it seems a bit more robust and user-friendly.

Okay, so you fire up your computer, open Screenflow, plug in your tablet, point your webcam at yourself, and you’re ready to go. Screenflow will give you a window in which you can make sure it’s recording all the separate things you need (tablet screen, your video, your audio). Hit “Record,” and do your thing. When you’re done, hit “Stop recording.”

What you now have is a Screenflow document that has different tracks corresponding to everything you’ve just recorded. I’m not going to do a full tutorial about editing things together — there’s a big internet out there, full of useful advice. But I will note that you will have to do some editing, it’s not completely effortless. Fortunately it is pretty intuitive once you get the hand of the basic commands. Here is what your editing window in Screenflow will look like.

Main panel at the top left, and all of your tracks at the bottom — in this case (top to bottom) camera video, audio, iPad capture, and static background image. The panel on the right toggles between various purposes; in this case it’s showing all the different files that go into making those tracks. (The video is chopped up into multiple files for reasons having to do with my video camera.) Note that I use a green screen, and one of the nice things about Screenflow is that it will render the green transparent for you with a click of a button. (Camtasia does too, but I’ve found that it doesn’t do as well.)

Editing features are quite good. You can move and split tracks, resize windows, crop windows, add text, set the overall dimensions, etc. One weird thing is that some of the editing features require that you hit Control or Shift or whatever, and when exactly you’re supposed to do this is not always obvious. But it’s all explained online somewhere.

So that’s the basic setup, or at least enough that you can figure things out from there. You also have to upload to YouTube or to your class website or whatever you so choose, but that’s up to you.

Okay now onto some optional details, depending on how much you want to dive into this.

First, webcams are not the best quality, especially the ones built-in to your laptop. I thought about using my iPhone as a camera — the lenses etc. on recent ones are quite good — but surprisingly the technology for doing this is either hard to find or nonexistent. (Of course you can make videos using your phone, but using your phone as a camera to make and edit videos elsewhere seems to be much harder, at least for me.) You can upgrade to an external webcam; Logitech has some good models. But after some experimenting I found it was better just to get a real video camera. Canon has some decent options, but if you already have a camera lying around it should be fine; we’re not trying to be Stanley Kubrick here. (If you’re getting the impression that all this costs money … yeah. Sorry.)

If you go that route, you have to somehow get the video from the camera to your computer. You can get a gizmo like the Cam Link that will pipe directly from a video camera to your computer, so that basically you’re using the camera as a web cam. I tried and found that it was … pretty bad? Really hurt the video quality, though it’s completely possible I just wasn’t setting things up properly. So instead I just record within the camera to an SD card, then transfer to the computer after the fact. For that you’ll need an SD to USB adapter, or maybe you can find a camera that can do it over wifi (mine doesn’t, sigh). It’s a straightforward drag-and-drop to get the video into Screenflow, but my camera chops them up into 20-minute segments. That’s fine, Screenflow sews them together seemlessly.

You might also think about getting a camera that can be controlled wirelessly, either via dedicated remote or by your phone, so that you don’t have to stand up and walk over to it every time you want to start and stop recording. (Your video will look slightly better if you place the camera away from you and zoom in a bit, rather than placing it nearby.) Sadly this is something I also neglected to do.

If you get a camera, it will record sound as well as video, but chances are that sound won’t be all that great (unless maybe you use a wireless lavalier mic? Haven’t tried that myself). Also your laptop mic isn’t very good, trust me. I have an ongoing podcast, so I am already over-equipped on that score. But if you’re relatively serious about audio quality, it would be worth investing in something like a Blue Yeti.

If you want to hear the difference between good and non-so-good microphones, listen to the Entropy video, then the associated Q&A. In the latter, by mistake I forgot to turn on the real mic, and had to use another audio track. (To be honest I forget whether it was from the video camera or my laptop.) I did my best to process the latter to make it sound reasonable, but the difference is obvious.

Of course if you do separately record video and audio, you’ll have to sync them together. Screenflow makes this pretty easy. When you import your video file, it will come with attached audio, but there’s an option to — wait for it — “detach audio.” You can then sync your other audio track (the track will display a waveform indicating volume, and just slide until they match up), and delete the original.

Finally, there’s making yourself look pretty. There is absolutely nothing wrong with just showing whatever office/home background you shoot in front of — people get it. But you can try to be a bit creative with a green screen, and it works much better than the glitchy Zoom backgrounds etc.

Bad news is, you’ll have to actually purchase a green screen, as well as something to hold it up. It’s a pretty basic thing, a piece of cloth or plastic. And, like it or not, if you go this route you’re also going to have to get lights to point at the green screen. If it’s not brightly lit, it’s much harder to remove it in the editor. The good news is, once you do all that, removing the green is a snap in Screenflow (which is much better at this than Camtasia, I found).

You’ll also want to light yourself, with at least one dedicated light. (Pros will insist on at least three — fill, key, and backlight — but we all have our limits.) Maybe this is not so important, but if you want a demonstration, my fondness for goofing up has once again provided for you — on the Entanglement Q&A video, I forgot to turn on the light. Difference in quality is there for you to judge.

My home office looks like this now. At least for the moment.

Oh right one final thing. If you’re making hour-long (or so) videos, the file sizes get quite big. The Screenflow project for one of my videos will be between 20 and 30 GB, and I export to an mp4 that is another 5 GB or so. It adds up if you make a lot of videos! So you might think about investing in an external hard drive. The other options are to save on a growing collection of SD cards, or just delete files once you’ve uploaded to YouTube or wherever. Neither of which was very palatable for me.

You can see my improvement at all these aspects over the series of videos. I upgraded my video camera, switched from light background to dark background on the writing screen, traded in Camtasia for Screenflow, and got better at lighting. I also moved the image of me from the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the screen, which I understand makes the captions easier to read.

I’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot. And probably put more work into setting things up than most people will want to. But what’s most important is content! If you have something to say, it’s not that hard to share it.

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So What Do You Do?

Kieran Healy has dusted off and re-posted some very good advice about attending academic conferences. It’s the advice you really need — who to go to dinner with, how not to embarrass yourself when introducing people to each other — rather than boring stuff like how to give a good talk. The spirit of the approach is captured by this quote:

As with teenagers, conference attendees secretly and falsely believe that other groups are having a much better time… Your conference strategies should therefore be geared towards counteracting the tendency to re-live your teenage years.

It’s surprising to realize how much “smart ways to behave at conferences” are really just “smart ways to behave in life.” (Though probably it shouldn’t be that surprising — academics aren’t the special flowers we like to think we are.) This bit of advice in particular struck me as useful:

[If] you worry someone will ask you what you work on, have something to say that’s three sentences long and takes fifteen seconds to get through. Write it down and practice it if you like.

I think every person should do that all the time. As you go through life, there will be multiple occasions on which people ask you “What do you do?” (If you’re in academia or an otherwise creative field, it will be “What are you working on?”) A high percentage of the time, questions like that elicit an awkwardly long pause, or something deflecting like “Oh, you know, lots of things.”

It makes sense. In your mind, “what you do” or “what you’re working on” is this incredibly rich, diverse, tightly interconnected set of things, and here is someone you don’t know asking you to instantly distill it down to a pithy phrase. Outrageous! And what’s worse, if you actually give a substantive answer, you’ll inevitably be leaving something out. You think, “Well I could mention this one thing that I’m mostly thinking about, but it’s not really representative of what I’m usually doing, so maybe I should mention this other thing…”

It’s not really a good look. Think about your own feelings when you ask someone what they do, and they respond with “Oh, I don’t know” or “Oh, lots of things.” Really? You don’t know what you do? Are you a spy whose memories are wiped at the conclusion of each mission? I’m sure you do many things, but perhaps picking out one would provide me with more useful information? At a conference in particular, it’s not the best first impression.

It’s important to come to terms with the fact that there are no perfect answers to the whatdoyoudo/whatareyouworkingon kinds of questions — and yet, we should have answers ready. Ones that are confident, short, and convey just a bit of the necessary flavor, so that more detail can emerge over the course of further conversation, which after all is the point of these well-meaning interrogations. This is especially true if you’re going to academic meetings, but it holds for life more generally. As adults, we should be better at these everyday skills than we were as teenagers.

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Unsolicited Advice: Becoming a Science Communicator

Everyone who does science inevitably has “communicating” as part of their job description, even if they’re only communicating with their students and professional colleagues. But many people start down a trajectory of becoming a research scientist, only to discover that it’s the communicating that they are most passionate about. And some of those people might want to take the dramatic step of earning a living doing such communication, whether it’s traditional journalism or something more new-media focused.

So: how does one make the transition from researcher to professional science communicator? Heck if I know. I do a lot of communicating, but it’s not my primary job. You’d be better off looking at this thread from Ed Yong, where he coaxed an impressive number of science writers into telling their origin stories. But lack of expertise has never stopped me from offering advice!

First piece of advice: don’t make the tragic mistake of looking at science communication as a comfortable safety net if academia doesn’t work out. Not only is it an extremely demanding career, but it’s one that is at least as hard as research in terms of actually finding reliable employment — and the career trajectories are far more chancy and unpredictable. There is no tenure for science communicators, and there’s not even a structured path of the form student → postdoc → faculty. Academia’s “up or out” system can be soul-crushing, but so can the “not today, but who knows? Maybe tomorrow!” path to success of the professional writer. It’s great to aspire to being Neil deGrasse Tyson or Mary Roach, but most science communicators don’t reach that level of success, just as most scientists don’t become Marie Curie or Albert Einstein.

Having said all that, here are some tips that might be worth sharing. …

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Last-Minute Shopping List

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a post on “Books You Should Read,” but I put it off until the last minute (of 2011), so now it’s a shopping list. I’m sticking to books that came out in the last year or two, on subjects vaguely related to what we often talk about here on the blog, since I know people get grumpy when we deviate from the prescribed topics of conversation. And I’m trying to highlight books that aren’t already bestsellers, but deserve to be; I’m assuming you don’t need me to tell you about recent books by Lisa Randall, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, or Brian Greene. (Or me, or my lovely wife.) Note for late shoppers: Amazon will get you all of these in plenty of time for Christmas. And pre-emptive apologies to anyone whose book I didn’t include — probably because I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown. My Caltech colleague Mike Brown is the person most responsible for getting Pluto demoted from planetary status, by discovering Eris and other Kuiper-belt objects. For a long time I thought it was silly to go to such trouble to re-classify a celestical body, but this book convinced me otherwise. Part of the reason is that Brown (or plutokiller on the Twitter) is an enormously engaging writer; few quasi-autographical science books have managed to mix the personal side with the science so effectively.
Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, by Carl Zimmer. My sleeper pick for book of the year, Carl Zimmer’s compendium of science tattoos is a real delight. I’m not especially fascinated by tattoos or their own sake, but the beautiful photography here is matched by Carl’s fascinating descriptions of the science behind each one. This would make a great gift for just about anyone.
The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, by Owen Flanagan. Western atheist/naturalists are occasionally criticized because we speak disapprovingly about traditional Western religions, while not paying attention to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. Here’s the book that redresses the balance, but in a very sympathetic mode. Flanagan is a thoroughgoing naturalist, but appreciates some of the insights into human nature that Buddhism has to offer. In this book he offers a careful philosophical examination of Buddhist beliefs and practices, in the light of modern scientific understanding of humanity and our universe.
The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, by
Frank Close
. “Quantum Field Theory” is the scientific concept that, in my opinion, features the largest ratio of “people should be familiar with” to “people are familiar with.” Frank Close looks at the historical development of the subject, one of the great intellectual triumphs of the 20th century. I could nitpick (Ken Wilson isn’t even mentioned once?), but this book is full of great insights.

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Unsolicited Advice: Non-Academic Careers

Since I know nothing very useful about the job market outside academia, I solicited suggestions for specific pointers and helpful websites. A bushel of useful advice and thought-provoking comments resulted.

My original idea was to summarize what I thought was the best advice, and turn it into a single post. This idea has been undermined by (1) me not knowing which advice is best, and (2) a wide variety of occasionally-contradictory advice, presumably all applicable in different circumstances.

So instead here I’m just going to link to some of the most promising-looking resources that were mentioned. I encourage you to read the comments on the original post to get more ideas, and chime in here to keep the conversation going.

Collections of Online Resources

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Soliciting Advice: Non-Academic Careers for Ph.D.’s

While the previous post bemoans the lack of simple world-changing ways to make the career path for aspiring academics more pleasant (other than bushels of money falling from the sky, of which I would approve), there is one feasible thing that everyone agrees would be good: better career counseling for Ph.D. students, both on the realistic prospects for advancement within academia, and concerning opportunities outside.

I always try to be honest with my own students about the prospects for ultimately landing a faculty job. But like most faculty members, I’m not that much help when it comes to outside opportunities, having spent practically all my life within academia. I’m happy to give advice, but you’d be crazy to take it, since I have no idea what I am talking about.

But that’s a correctable state of affairs. So: I’m hereby soliciting good, specific career advice and/or resources for students who are on the track to get a Ph.D. (or already have one) and are interested in pursuing non-academic jobs. This might be particular jobs that are Ph.D.-friendly, or websites with good information, or relevant fellowships or employment agencies, or just pointers to other resources. (For example: do you know the difference between a CV and a resume?) The more specific the better, and including useful links is best of all. General griping and expressions of bitterness should be kept in the previous thread; let’s try to be productive. And there’s no reason to limit it to physics, all fields are welcome. Advice that is useful for only a tiny number of people, but extremely useful for them, is certainly sought. We’re looking for things that have a nontrivial chance of actually helping some specific person at a future date.

Most of all it would be great to have input from people who actually got a Ph.D. and then went on to do something else. But it’s the internet, everyone can chime in.

I will take what look like the most helpful suggestions and collate them into a separate post. Spread the word, let’s get as much input from different sectors as we can.

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How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University

[Update: added a couple of useful points.]

This is the time of year when prospective graduate students are visiting different universities, deciding where they will spend the most formative years of their scientific lives. Amidst the enthusiastic sales pitches, I try to make sure to remind everyone that the odds of success are long — there is a bottleneck that shrinks as you go from grad school to postdoc to junior faculty to tenure. Probably the biggest hurdle is the leap from postdoc to junior faculty; it’s easier to get tenure once you’re a professor (statistically speaking) than to become a professor in the first place.

But it’s not guaranteed! As many of you know, I was denied tenure myself. This actually puts me in a pretty strong position to talk about the ins and outs of what it takes to succeed, having seen lack-of-success (is there a word for that?) up close and personal. I’ve avoided talking too much about this topic, partly because armchair psychologists have trouble resisting the temptation to take anything general I would say and attempting to match it to specific people and aspects in my own case, despite a pretty thorough lack of familiarity with the facts. On the other hand, maybe I can offer some actually useful guidance to people who are trying to do something difficult and important for their future lives.

So here goes: how to get tenure. But first, caveats. My own experience from grad school on has been at top research places, so those are the only ones I can speak usefully about; the situation will generally be very different at places that put more of an emphasis on teaching, for example. So really I’m talking about places that think of themselves as being in the top 10 or so in their research fields. And of course, to every set of rules there are exceptions; it’s not hard to find people who violated one or more of these guidelines, so don’t take them as written in stone. Every case, and every department, is different. Finally, don’t think of these as too bitter or cynical; I’m simply trying to be honest, with perhaps a small slant to counteract some of the misinformation that is out there. (This misinformation doesn’t usually arise from willful lying, but from the slightly schizophrenic nature of the mission of research universities; see The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People.) I’m generally in favor of the tenure system; like democracy, it’s the worst system out there, except for all the other ones that have ever been invented.

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. Here is the Overriding Principle: what major research universities care about is research. That’s all. Nothing else. But even once you recognize that, there is still some craft involved in shaping your research career in the right way. This isn’t the place for me to pass judgment on this principle; I’m just elucidating its consequences. This is a how-to manual for the real world, not a roadmap for Utopia.

You’ll be pleased to learn that there are actually two different routes to getting tenure, so you can choose which one works better for you. The first one is simple to describe, and comes down to a single suggestion:

  • Be a productive genius. This deserves to be classified as a separate technique because, for the small number of easily-recognized true geniuses out there, the rest of the suggestions below are beside the point. Do whatever else you like, as long as you are revolutionizing the field on a regular basis. It’s worth stressing the word “productive,” though. The trash heap of history is littered with geniuses who thought it was beneath their dignity to actually produce anything; that won’t fly, generally speaking, in this game. So if the genius thing is working out for you, great; just be sure to put it to productive use, and you’ll be fine.

The rest of us schlubs, on the other hand, need a more explicit checklist. So here’s what ordinary people should try to do if they have a junior faculty job at a major research university, and would like to get tenure. …

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School Decision Time

The day is approaching fast when grad-students-to-be need to be making decisions about where to choose. Probably undergrads, too, although I confess that I have no real idea what the calendar for that looks like.

So, good luck with all that decision-making! Here are links to our previous posts about the topic.

Not too much to add to the discussion there, but here’s an opportunity to chat about the process. My own strong feeling is that how successful you are in school (grad or undergrad) is much more up to you than up to the institution. Most places have more good opportunities than anyone can hope to take advantage of in a limited period of time. Take the initiative, don’t wait for good things to come to you, and have fun!

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A Conversation on the Existence of Time

You know, other people talk a lot about time, too — it’s not just me. Here’s a great video from Nature, featuring a conversation between David Gross and Itzhak Fouxon about the existence of time. (Via Sarah Kavassalis.) Itzhak plays the role of the starry-eyed young researcher — he opens the video by telling us how he originally went into physics to impress girls, although apparently he has stuck with it for other reasons. Gross, of course, shared a Nobel Prize for asymptotic freedom, and has become one of the most influential string theorists around. David plays the role of the avuncular elder statesman (I’ve seen him be somewhat more acerbic in his criticisms) — but he’s one of the smartest people in physics, and his admonitions are well worth listening to. He gives some practical advice, but also advises young people to think big.

Unfortunately the video doesn’t seem to be embeddable, but you can go to the video page and click on the “David Gross” entry. (The others are good, too!)

davidgross

You all know my perspective here — time probably exists, and we should try to understand it rather than replace it. But I’ll agree with David — let’s not ignore more “practical” problems, but not be afraid to tackle the big ideas!

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Unsolicited Advice, Part Nine: Choosing a Postdoc

Early January, and time for another entry in our unsolicited advice series — this one on choosing a postdoc. For non-academics, a “postdoc” is that lovely several-year period in between getting a Ph.D. and (hopefully) landing a faculty job, during which one establishes some independence and concentrates on doing research to the exclusion of all the other delicious aspects of professordom. And for reasons that have never been fully explained, a lot of postdoc jobs are offered and accepted in December/January/February, even if they don’t start until September. So now is the time to make yet another one of those choices that will dramatically affect the entire rest of your life.

Here, we’re not telling you how to get a postdoc; we’re presuming you already have more than one offer in hand, and need to choose between them. (Yay you!) At some point we should write about applying for postdocs, but that season is largely passed. Note that postdoc situations vary wildly from field to field, and my experience is largely in theoretical physics; there is more advice at Dr. Isis’s place, and I’m sure elsewhere — as usual, leave links in the comments. Free advice on the internet is worth what you pay for it, but if you get a variety of different perspectives a nugget of wisdom might sneak through.

To decide which postdoc position is right for you, it makes sense to think about what your goals are in being a postdoc in the first place. Generally they look something like this:

1) Do some good science.

2) Learn new things and grow as a scientist.

3) Put yourself in a good position to land a faculty job.

The very good news is that these goals are not in conflict! You can do good science while learning new things, and you can do both of those while positioning yourself to apply for faculty jobs. Indeed, you’ll be in much better position (obviously) if you have done some good science. However, it’s possible to do some good science and nevertheless end up in not such a good position.

Before we unpack that, we should say a word about other considerations. You might care about geographic location, or proximity to a loved one, or easy access to jazz or martinis or gambling or whatever your favorite vice may be. (Personally, I can’t decide.) I’m all about the other considerations, and would never tell you to discount them. Life is short, and the years you spend as a postdoc are just as truly years of your life as any other years. However … if you were thinking that it would be worthwhile, at some point in your life, to sacrifice on your other considerations for a bit in order to concentrate on doing the best science you can — now is the time! Of all the hurdles and bottlenecks along an academic career path, the jump from postdoc to faculty is probably the hardest, just in terms of raw probabilities. (There are a lot fewer faculty jobs than there are postdocs looking for them.) At the same time, the transition from the comforting embrace of graduate school, where (at least in principle) you have an advisor looking over you, to the naked Hobbesian individualism of being a postdoc, where your personal initiative counts for everything, can benefit from a certain amount of increased focus. I know, “comforting embrace” isn’t the first phrase that comes to mind when you think of graduate school. But there is more structure there, and a sense of belonging to something bigger. (Often, as a postdoc, the department won’t even list you in any sort of directory.) So, while there’s nothing wrong with taking other considerations seriously, this temporary phase of your academic trajectory is arguably the best time to put those on the back burner while you concentrate on your job, hoping that sacrifice will pay off later. How much you balance those competing considerations is up to you.

(The extent to which personal initiative counts varies wildly from academic field to field; in a big lab, the role of a postdoc may be little different from that of an advanced grad student. For theorists, the role of a postdoc is little different from that of a beginning professor — you are expected to come up with your own ideas and carry them to fruition.)

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s tackle those above goals. First, you want to choose a postdoc position that will help you do good science. This criterion is actually relatively straightforward, but there are some subtleties. Of course it will help if you go to a place that is chock full of good scientists doing the kind of science you would like to be doing yourself. But you still have to ask some of the same kind of questions you asked when choosing a grad school — at the most basic level, would you yourself be able to productively work with these people? Do you like them, are they supportive? What do the other postdocs who are currently there — or even better, were there recently and have moved on — think about the experience?

Here is an excellent little diagnostic. Of the different places you are considering, have a look at some of the papers they have written over the last three years. Now ask yourself: which of those papers would I have been most pleased to be a co-author on? That’s a direct way of separating vague feelings that “this place is good” from “they are doing what I want to do.” But then, to kick it up a notch, look again at those papers, and in particular at the author lists. Are there any postdocs there? Is this the kind of place where the postdocs collaborate frequently and directly with the faculty and each other, or are they more on their own, or have they still collaborating with their old groups from grad school? Different departments have different personalities, but the evidence of how postdocs generally fit in should be easy to gather.

Next, you want to learn and grow as a scientist. This one is a bit trickier. You definitely do want to grow — it’s unlikely that, as a grad student, you did enough different kinds of work that you would be happy to stay confined within those disciplinary boundaries for the rest of your life. Your postdoc years are a great chance to define yourself (see below), so you should think long and hard about how you want to be defined. On the other hand, it is possible to grow too much. If your degree is in string theory, and your first postdoc is in molecular biology, and your second postdoc is in inorganic chemistry, you’re sort of just being incoherent. You’ll have fun along the way — and if that’s your goal, that’s great — but if you are planning on moving to the next level, you want to be broad without losing coherence entirely. You want to challenge yourself with new things, but you want to challenge yourself productively. You certainly don’t want to think of your postdoc as another round of grad school, where you start from scratch. You are now a professional scientist with some established expertise, and you would like to build on that expertise.

But at the same time — and here’s the crucially important part — you don’t want to just repeat yourself. That’s why everyone always tells you to go somewhere else for your postdoc, not to stick around the same place you were a grad student. It sounds like good, solid advice, but when the moment of decision comes, far too many people choose to play it safe, and either stay where they are (if that option is available) or move over to some group with whom they were already collaborating. It’s hard to appreciate until you’ve been around the block a few times, but different departments are truly different in their approach to doing science. One of the absolute best features of the postdoc system (and there are a lot of crappy features) is that you get an invaluable opportunity to be exposed to the idiosyncrasies and habits of mind of a completely different set of senior researchers. That can be a truly eye-opening experience, and you should try as hard as you can to take advantage. Find people with whom you can work and be productive (you want to write papers, not just take classes or sit at the feet of masters), but who will challenge your preconceptions and open your eyes to new ways of thinking about your field.

Finally we have the money goal: you’d like to put yourself in good position to land a faculty job. (That’s what we’re assuming, anyway; if not, standard disclaimers apply.) Of course this is as much art as science, and there’s a tremendous amount of noise in the system — but you control what you can.

With that in mind, recall that our advice for being a good grad student was to “Be the kind of grad student that people would like to hire as a postdoc.” Guess what? As a postdoc, you will strive to be the kind of postdoc that people would like to hire as an assistant professor. And what kind is that? If you’re honest with yourself, you can probably hit upon the right answer by contemplating the kind of applicant you would be most likely to hire, if you were already a faculty member sitting on a hiring committee. The basic rule is that you’re not going to get hired as a faculty member by being talented and smart; you’re going to be hired because the department sees that you are doing awesome things. When people hire postdocs, the applicants are still charmingly unformed as mature scientists, and their letters of recommendation will often weigh more than their lists of publications. But when it comes to hiring a faculty member, it’s rarely done purely on promise — they want to see that you’ve done something.

So when you’re choosing which postdoc to take, choose the one that maximizes your chances of actually doing something. Writing papers, and (more importantly) writing good papers. And (most importantly) by “good” we do not mean “technically competent.” We mean interesting, even to people outside your immediate circle of friends. Papers you would want to read, even if you hadn’t written them. Those are the kinds of papers you want to be writing as a grad student.

The need to write interesting papers should be obvious, but sometimes it gets lost in the excitement. Writing papers as a grad student can be like having sex as a teenager — you’re amazed that it’s happening at all, and not so concerned with excelling. But at some point, as you mature, it becomes important to do it well. It is deadly, as a postdoc, to fall into the trap of writing papers just because you can write them. Like it or not, there are many people like you competing for a scarce resource in the form of faculty jobs. You have to distinguish yourself. If you are working within any field where there is a nontrivial chance of getting hired as a faculty member, there will certainly be other people writing papers in the same field. What is it that will make your papers better?

And it’s not only good papers — it’s papers that define who you are. That’s a question you will literally be asked when you are applying for faculty jobs — what are you really? What do you do? And the appropriate answer has to be well-defined (like it or not) in terms that are comprehensible to a faculty hiring committee. “I work on models of dark energy” is a bit narrow; “I am a theoretical physicist” is a bit broad; “I work on field theory and particle physics applied to cosmology” is about right. (You can always, and in fact should, continue to broaden your scope all throughout your career.) But you can’t just proclaim it; your list of publications has to proclaim it for you. You won’t want to work on the same thing over and over again, but you do want the work you do to tell a coherent story. Each paper is a dot on a map of possible problems one could be thinking about, and you want your set of dots to form a sensible picture. A postdoc period is a good time to fill in what you might think of as gaps in your toolbox, if you will excuse a terribly mixed metaphor. Become the scientist you would want to hire.

Figure all that out, and then choose the postdoc position that will maximize your chance of writing the papers that make it happen. Easier said than done, I know. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?

Unsolicited Advice, Part Nine: Choosing a Postdoc Read More »

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