Student Apprentices

Contents

Summary

Unaffiliated students meet ~1 hour per week with faculty mentors to work on problem solving and related skills, rotating through as many faculty as feasible so they get to know everyone in the department.

What Happens in a Meeting?

Example Interaction

Student S. and professor P. schedule a meeting Monday’s from 1-2pm in professor P’s office. In the first meeting S. & P. introduce themselves, and discuss their background and plans. S. briefly describes their education and career plans, while P. briefly outlines their research, emphasizing areas that might overlap with S’s skills and interests.

S. might then choose a homework problem where they are currently stuck, describing in front of P. the problem, what they have tried, and why that has not worked.

P. emphasizes that the goal of this exercise is to fail, emphasizing failure as a good thing — it means there is an opportunity to learn and improve. (This is not to say that failing should feel good, but it should be recognized as desirable.) P. then asks questions, trying to figure out why S. is stuck. Has the student misinterpreted the problem? Are they missing some important knowledge? Does progress require some creativity?

P. then helps S. try to understand what is missing, and how S. might approach resolving the issue. P. might explain how they would attack similar problems, and what learning strategies worked for them when they were trying to learn similar material. This portion might not end with a solution to the problem, but S. should have a series of steps they can go and work through to try to make progress. Successes and failures can be discussed the following week.

In the second half of the session, P. might present another problem for S. to work on. This gives P. a chance to tell students about things that they think are important, but which might not be covered in the standard curriculum. S. works through this task with guidance from P., who is again trying to understand the types of problems S. runs into so that they can help S. get unstuck.

S. & P. continue meeting until S. is no longer making major improvements, at which point S. moves on to the next available mentor.

Comments

These interactions are a chance for each mentor to pass on their wisdom, especially tricks of the trade that have helped them succeed. What worked for one mentor might not work for a given student, but hopefully, by meeting with a wide variety of mentors, the student will find a good match and strategies that work.

Mentors should also feel free to discuss whatever they think is important: For example, M. Forbes might discuss programming; B. Collins might discuss working on experiments; V. Baldasarre might discuss how to get astrophysical data; K. Vixie might discuss mathematical proofs; A. Guy might discuss learning strategies. Discussions need not be restricted to physics: anything relevant for a successful career and life is fair game. Mentors should try especially hard to unlock specific strategies for each student. This is the benefit of one-on-one interactions: generic advice can be disseminated in classes, whereas these meetings should focus on transferring wisdom person to person.

Of course, these sessions will help establish compatibility between the student and mentor, which inform both when it comes to affiliating later, but mentors should make a conscious effort to not let the performance of the students affect affiliation. If this program is successful, students will have learned how to surmount the difficulties demonstrated here by the time they affiliate, so any performative assessment should take place only later, at the time of affiliation.

Important

It is crucial that these meeting be purely focused on helping the students succeed. There should be no assessment, and performance should have no impact on students grades, or other aspects of their progress through the program beyond directly trying to help the student. Mentors should repeatedly emphasize this.

The Need

In recent years, incoming students have demonstrated difficulty solving general problems, and especially seem to have difficulty working in front of others. This seriously impacts their ability to learn. The idea here is to give students a low-stakes opportunity to practice the art of doing science with faculty members. With one-on-one interactions, mentors can help identify and remove the roadblocks impeding our student’s ability to master the art of physics.

True mastery requires many skills that cannot be taught in a classroom. The apprentice model, where students work directly with their mentors to see how successful faculty members actually practice their art can be immensely valuable.

To Ponder

How did you come to master your profession? What strategies did you ultimately find worked well to learn new material? How do you come up with ideas in your research? What do you do when you are stuck? As you work with your apprentices, notice the similarities and differences: what techniques are likely to work similarly, and what techniques will need modification because of individual differences?

Benefits for Students

  • One-on-one mentoring allows students to quickly identify their shortcomings, and, with expert help, figure out how to fix these.
  • Each student has a particular learning style. By maximizing variety, students will hopefully find mentors who “get them”, and whose experience is most directly applicable to their style.
  • Students meet with prospective advisors, facilitating research affiliation.

Benefits for Faculty

  • Faculty meet with students early, facilitating later research affiliation.
  • Faculty can emphasize things they think are important — especially topics which might be neglected in some of the course work.
  • Faculty get to know all students in our program, making it easier when it comes to annual reviews, voting on extensions, etc.
  • Faculty will see first-hand where students are getting stuck, giving them invaluable information (thick data) to improve their teaching, improve the programs (undergraduate and graduate), and improve the culture in the department.

Logistics

  • Faculty and students willing to participate in the program should submit their names to the program director (currently Michael Forbes).
  • Faculty and students will be paired up and sent an email asking them to schedule weekly meetings for 3 weeks.
  • At the start of the third week, faculty/student pairs will be send a followup email asking if they wish to extend their interactions 2-weeks at a time, or if they should rotate.