In this edition of the Friday Physics Newsletter we look at a large new grant attracted by our newest Assistant Professor. We celebrate the successful completion of the “third-year review” by our other two Assistant Professors. And we remind everybody how they can go back and check out those great seminars and colloquia they missed during a busy academic year.
Contents
CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
“Final Exams”
My final exam was this morning. It was the usual mix of vaulting joy and crushing sadness. And that was just for the instructor.
I can’t speak for the students. I can only speak for myself. What did I see on this last assessment instrument of the Introduction to Mechanics course I co-taught with Prof. Jodi Cooley this semester? In many ways, it was the usual mix of things … a strangely typical set of experiences for an atypical year.
There are the appeals (the night before the 8am final exam) for being allowed to turn in all late homework and being allowed to make-up an exam that happened weeks ago. All faculty see something like that at least once a year. It breaks my heart. In a year that has been soul-crushing to faculty and students alike, robbed of mental health days, opportunities to talk face-to-face, with more academic pain and misery than I have ever seen in 11 years of being a faculty member … these appeals are particularly hard. They are a final sign of students who’ve been struggling all along, who need more than any one instructor can offer them, and who ask more of that instructor than is actually possible … even if we wanted to bend the rules a little.
There are the students who break down in tears near the beginning of the exam. Those crush my heart, too. It was especially painful because the case I saw today was a student who is so bright, so capable of problem-solving and thinking through a mathematical challenge … but the weight of the time- and content-pressure of a final exam is just too much to bear. In the end, they got past the moments of fear and went on to dominate the final exam. As an instructor, it’s hard to watch this process unfold. You know these students are capable. You are confident they will triumph. You have all the evidence of their past accomplishments in your grade book. But for them, on the wrong side of the last hill, they cannot yet see the steady, easy, downhill part that lies just ahead and over the crest. They are so close to the peak and an easy descent, and all you can do is watch the pain while trying to encourage them to keep going.
There are many more good things in these final exams than there are tough things, though. There are the students who just obliterate … and I mean crush … the exam. As you’re grading their pages, knowing how hard they have worked and how successful they have been so far, it is just so deeply satisfying to see them lay waste to your exam.
It’s not just about the answers. In fact, in my class the right answer is only worth 10% of the credit on a problem. The rest is thought process and work and demonstration. Did you identify and apply the physics concepts correctly? Did you explain those concepts clearly in words, drawings, or both? Did you execute the mathematics correctly? Did you comment on your answer, comment on the overall process, etc.? The students that obliterate an exam do it with drawings, and words, and an elegant flow of detailed calculations. All of it culminates in a flourishing final answer, complete with commentary. The real icing on the cake is when the structure, drawings, and handwriting are immaculately well-organized.
It just makes me want to whoop for joy at the end.
Highs and lows. That’s what final exam period brings, and that’s where we are now as students and faculty. Exams continue through next week, followed by graduation. This is an intense, but strangely quiet, time. As I continue grading, working toward those final grades that have to be submitted in just under 72 hours, I take some solace in the fact that everyone else is distracted with the same chore right now. As I click to the next exam quiz object in Canvas, scroll down to the file upload question, load their work in a PDF editor, mark it up, upload the markup as a comment, and enter their grades with a rubric object, I take some comfort in knowing the whole university is engaged in this terrifying final exercise of both joy and fear.
A quiet time like this means a quieter Friday newsletter. We have some marvelous things to celebrate in this edition, our penultimate one for the academic year. We look at a large new grant attracted by our newest Assistant Professor. We celebrate the successful completion of the “third-year review” by our other two Assistant Professors. And we remind everybody how they can go back and check out those great seminars and colloquia they missed during a busy academic year.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Catch up on the whole Department Speaker Series for 2020-2021
You can go back to any talks you missed (while you were studying, we suppose) during the Academic Year 2021 Physics Speaker Series! Explore the muon g-2 anomaly, supermassive black holes, the new Electron-Ion Collider, Higgs particle physics, and new ideas about dark matter or other novel particles or forces … all from your personal devices! Enjoy our archive of the Physics Speaker Series Talks below.
Students, post-docs, and faculty are encouraged to submit suggestions for speakers for the 2021-2022 Department Speaker Series. Send your suggestions to the Department Chair!
FACULTY NEWS
If you have something to share please feel free to send it along. Stories of your activities in research, the classroom, and beyond are very welcome!
Professor Krista Lynne Smith receives NASA funding for application of TESS data products to Active Galactic Nuclei science
Prof. Krista Lynne Smith was one of just seven investigators whose proposal for a large program to utilize Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data products was approved for funding. The grant from NASA provides $215,000 over two years for applications to Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) science.
As Prof. Smith noted in the abstract of her proposal, “Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are among the most extreme objects in the universe: galaxies with a central supermassive black hole feeding on gas from an accretion disk. Because accretion disks are challenging to image, variability is among the only direct probes of this physics.”
The funded program aims to use the TESS exoplanet-hunting telescope to study a variety of aspects of accreting supermassive black holes in AGNs, including whether black holes that emit radio jets have different accretion geometries, the high energy processes at work in blazar jets, and the physics of so-called “changing-look” AGN, which show dramatically varying optical spectra on short timescales. The experiment will collect high-precision optical light curves of thousands of AGN with different black hole masses, accretion rates, and host galaxy properties, which may enable the discovery of scaling relations of variability properties with black hole mass, leading to a new mass measurement probe effective out to high redshifts.
You can see all of the proposals funded for year four of the TESS mission here: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/tess/approved-programs.html
Learn about the TESS mission from the above NASA video,
Third-Year Review Successful for Profs. Allison Deiana and Joel Meyers
The department is pleased to announce that Assistant Professors Allison Deiana and Joel Meyers have successfully concluded their “third-year review,” a process that all tenure-track Assistant Professors go through ahead of a formal review for tenure. Even given pandemic-available extensions to the tenure process, both of our review-eligible faculty elected to proceed this academic year. The intermediate process provides valuable feedback on research and teaching ahead of the formal tenure review. Congratulations to Profs. Deiana and Meyers on the passage of this important milestone!
Prof. Allison Deiana 
Prof. Joel Meyers
As noted in the University Policy Manual,
As specified in the initial three-year contract at the time of employment, a review of an assistant professor’s progress toward tenure is conducted during the spring semester of the candidate’s third year. These reviews are conducted internally within the schools according to their own internal policies. Candidates that have successful third-year reviews are awarded a second contract.
UPM section 2.11.4
In Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and then in our Department, this policy is refined further. The steps for the process are clearly articulated, and the standards against which all faculty are measured are explained.
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of May 10
The in-office staff schedule for the week of May 10 is nominally as follows:
- Monday: Lacey
- Tuesday: Lacey
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Lacey
- Friday: Michele
You can reach staff during regular business hours using Microsoft Teams, email, or phone.
Full staff in-office calendar for May:
STUDENT NEWS
If you have something to share please feel free to send it along. Stories of students in research, the classroom, internships or fellowships, awards, etc. are very welcome!
ALUMNI NEWS
If you are an alum of the doctoral, masters, majors or minor programs in Physics at SMU, or have worked in our program as a post-doctoral researcher, and wish to share news with the community, please send your story to the Physics Department and we’ll work with you to get it included in a future edition.
THE BACK PAGE
May Physics Challenge!
This is our final offering of the academic year!
SPS Faculty Advisor and our department’s informal “Puzzle Master,” Prof. Randy Scalise, invites you to try to solve this month’s physics challenge from The Physics Teacher. The first correct solution he receives (scalise@physics.smu.edu) from a student member of our Society of Physics Students will be awarded a prize. The winner will get to select from the following four books,
- Gleick, J. “Chaos: Making a New Science“.
- Crease, R. P. and Mann, Charles C. “The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics“.
- Thorne, K. “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy“.
- Greene, B. “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality“.
Solutions must be complete enough to understand your strategy, reasoning, and methods; providing answers with no explanations are not acceptable. Dr. Scalise urges submitters who believe they have the correct answer to, of course, also submit their solution to The Physics Teacher using the email address challenges@aapt.org. Make sure to follow the journal’s guidelines for submissions (see below). The deadline is the last day of this month.
