Part 2

With only three external visitors, Mike, and a couple of his students and post-docs, the mini-workshop was planned to be exceedingly relaxed, with a few short talks planned each morning to inspire discussion throughout the day, scheduled around the university’s Welcome Week and Mike’s meetings with the new students.  I was still in the process of the trial-by-fire learning experience of an exclusively student-led project, and so progress was slow, plodding, and only advanced through significant banging of one’s head on the problem, and the elegance and foresight of a broader, sweeping view, of simplifying and simplifying until that one, absolutely necessary calculation revealed itself was years in my future.  Correspondingly, my talk was little modified from what I had said that spring, with a couple of slides at the end on some new thoughts and results that we thought were interesting enough to eventually motivate another paper on the topic.  Talks by other students were of a similar spirit, more a collection of thoughts and overly detailed calculations tied together by some minimal and mostly glossed-over motivation, all of which had the consequence that rather little conversation sprouted during those free and open hours we had in the afternoon.

The benefit of a student’s talk as a student in the audience, however, is that even if the topic is well outside your own narrow area of burgeoning expertise, the limited elapsed time since starting graduate school means that the speaker simply cannot be that far ahead of your own education.  So, while there may be missteps, incorrect conclusions, and a lack of context or historical citations, a talk by a student is relatively easy to follow.  A talk by one local student fit this formula perfectly for me, as while I had attended a summer school, religiously went to seminars multiple times each week at home, and had started traveling to the relevant conferences, there really was no one locally where I was a student who was an expert in the field that I had started wading in to.  I had maintained a permeable membrane to absorb any stray bit of knowledge and insight from whoever and wherever, but this osmotic approach can only possibly pick up on those things that have a non-zero concentration in your immediate vicinity.  I had become well-versed in supersymmetry or models and motivation of dark matter, but those are of little help for interpreting and predicting the data in your face, that is mostly not anomalous and for which we have a solid theoretical framework.  To see a student of a leader in this field work through a calculation, even if I couldn’t follow the motivation nor understood the import or impact of the outcome, provided a glimpse of a skeleton I could apply to my own work.

There is a limit to osmosis and diffusion if the concentration is too high, and nodding one’s head in assumed agreement with the point presented on the slides is actually not the way to learn.  To his credit, Mike treated all of us, roughly 20 years his junior, as colleagues, peers, who had years and years of calculations in their past, who had seen the strange but non-pathological circumstances under which expectations fail, and had been confused enough over the past decade that they devoted their careers to understanding it.  Words I had never heard before were tossed around, jargon but of a technical precision that simply their statement was a complete explanation and justification, sketches of diagrams were obvious enough to be translated losslessly into an exact mathematical expression, and their evaluation was clearly observed to be utterly inconsistent with the theorems or at least accepted lore on the topic.  It wasn’t Mike’s duty to hold our hands through it all or shine a light along every step of the path, for, if he had, nothing of substance would have been covered in that half hour, it was my own responsibility to question and prod and challenge when I was confused and in that I had failed.  For the rest of the week, I worked to start a conversation about next steps during lunch or passing by his office, presenting some blended collection of words I had heard him use in his talk, but once he had started to reply I was completely lost, and never understood it until much, much later, once I had honestly and humbly dived deep into books and papers.

Us three foreigners were nearly always left to our own devices for dinner, though Mike organized one group banquet early in the week that enabled more casual and personal introductions, and practically this meant asking around for recommendations or sleuthing on the internet ourselves for something that seemed good and, equally importantly, was cheap enough.  The latter requirement wasn’t too challenging to accomplish as we had been supplied with a per diem upon arrival, a stack of bills totaling £300, and I had taken out the same amount from an ATM in the airport, so our palates were free to range throughout the city, from a bangers and mash place just off the University, to Indian and Pakistani food on Curry Mile, to more upscale Italian or steaks and Yorkshire pudding downtown.  Just dinner was usually never enough and morning discussions or meetings never started before 10 am, so along with an evening stroll, we kept an eye out for a place to drink until the universal 11 pm close, and thankfully rather early in the visit stumbled across Marble Bar, a place that specialized in high gravity beers.  On more than one night, we found ourselves seated at tables on the sidewalk, the last agreeable weather of summer clinging to life just for this week, pouring a Rochefort 10 or something similar into a snifter glass, and toasting to physics.

The process for applying to post-docs in theoretical physics had become standardized some years earlier, and shared some qualities with applying to graduate school, but diverged significantly in most respects.  Similar to graduate school, a post-doc application required three letters of recommendation from faculty who could comment on your strengths as a researcher, and, ideally, one would want a letter to be able to provide specific, unique examples of your brilliance, cleverness, maturity, originality, and whatever other qualities make a good physicist, and definitely not just a bland, boilerplate regurgitation of vacuous platitudes.  Also similar to graduate school, one must write a research statement, a personal account of who you think you are as a physicist, of your own identified strengths (probably a good idea to skip the weaknesses, however), and what questions and problems you are most interested to dive into in the future.  The grad student-to-post-doc transition version of this statement would be significantly less banal than that of the undergrad-to-grad, because one actually has something meaningful to say with now a few honest years of research in the past.  Beyond that, post-doc applications shared no qualities with grad school applications: applying for a post-doc is completely free of application fees, there is a near-universal application website so you and your letter writers only need to upload documents once, and, of course, there are no standardized tests.  Application deadlines are also near-universal because the deadline for accepting an offer had been fixed by a common accord, at the time anyway, to January 7, to prevent the earlier and earlier creep of institutions strong-arming applicants to accept before all of their options were known.

Networking was the way that you received post-doc offers, and your network was represented by the people you selected as letter writers.  One was, naturally, your Ph.D. advisor, who should have deep and far-reaching connections with groups around the world, as a famous physicist themself.  I found another letter writer in my local institution, someone who was familiar with my work, having seen me give a talk or two and had served on the committee for my advancement to candidacy, but could also speak to a broader context and how my research would influence their community.  After that, I had no obvious letter writers, as three letters from your own institution starts to smell of parochialism and lack of engagement with the wider world of physics, but I had a couple potential options to consider.  One was a researcher at CERN who I had first met at a conference two years before, and had maintained a relationship through connecting my early grad school research to their current portfolio and we had just begun the initial stages of a collaboration.  However, we had no results yet, and that early work hadn’t received much interest from the field, at least as measured by citation count.  My other option, of someone who was familiar with work that had made an impact, that had seen me give a talk, and had even invited me to an all-expenses paid workshop, was Mike, and so, on one quieter afternoon, I gathered up my courage and dropped by his office to ask.  He said yes.