Career Advice

The Career Centre has recently moved into shiny new digs in a prominent central place on my campus. It has also expanded its staff and services, and I now get a weekly e-circular from the Centre listing events and opportunities. I presume students receive something similar. If you’re an academic, something similar is likely happening on your campus. This growth is fueled by the angst of students and their tuition-paying parents, coupled with the shift in perspective that emphasizes job placement as an increasingly important role of colleges and universities. “If I go to college, what am I going to get out of it?” increasingly looks for an economic-monetary answer. Public figures take potshots questioning the value of a liberal arts “major” and defenders make their case in the form of books and op-eds.

My college is proposing a graduation requirement whereby students earn “points” if they attend or participate in career-related workshops, experiential learning, networking events, or a wide range of activities that can loosely be tied to expanding student horizons of what they might consider doing after college. The point-system is rather flexible, which is a good thing, otherwise this would never pass muster with the faculty who would see it as an administratively-imposed add-on to our busy and stressed-out students. It might still not pass muster, even though the college administration would really like to see this happen. (Having such a program is a useful talking point for administrators and Admissions folks, when appealing to external constituencies.) I wonder how the administration would respond if the faculty votes down the measure, but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet.

In my department, I was on an ad-hoc committee exploring how classes and other activities within our department go towards satisfying the additional requirement (if passed). I think increased tracking and paperwork should be a minimum, not just in my department, but across the college in general. Thus, we identified courses that already incorporated a number of the desired features so that students taking the class would also receive “points” towards career exploration. For example, a required Research Methods course has traditionally had a representative from the career center conduct a session in one of our class meetings. All our students are required to do research, which counts towards experiential education. We have an alumni seminar series and other networking events that also fit the bill.

I am also on the curriculum committee that is discussing the proposal. To no surprise, faculty agree that it’s good for students to have opportunities and take advantage of offerings from career services, many of which complement our departmental activities. The crux of the question is whether all this should be Optional or Required. I predict that’s where the line will be drawn when it eventually goes to a vote.

All this made me think about my role as an adviser to my students. There’s no requirement that I specifically talk about career options with my students, although it’s a subject that comes up relatively often with my first-year academic activities – since we have to talk about class schedules and potential majors. For upper-class students, the conversations may steer towards jobs and careers, two things that are not synonymous.

I’m reminded of the chapter ‘Career Advice’ in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. At Hogwarts, fifth-year students are required to have a conversation with their Head-of-House about possible career options, and how these might impact which classes they take in years six and seven, and what grades they would need to secure in their O.W.L. exams for advancement. When Ron and Harry peruse the pamphlets beforehand, they learn that Healing requires top grades in a variety of advanced-level N.E.W.T. subjects; I suppose that’s akin to applying to medical school in our world. On the other hand, working in Muggle relations only requires a sunny disposition and passing Muggle Studies at the standard O.W.L. In his meeting with Professor McGonagall, Harry vaguely indicates interest in being an Auror. (Perhaps he saw a pamphlet like this one from acciomagic – they also have the other side of the pamphlet.

Government jobs (Ministry of Magic) require certain paper qualifications. This is akin to how the civil service functions in many countries around the globe. The British empire exported its civil service structure to its far-flung colonies and protectorates. The imperial/civil service exams in China go back two millennia – thriving in their modern incarnation as the gaokao university entrance exams. Having the qualification (denoted today by the degree) served as a proxy that a candidate was fit or prepared for the civil service. Working at Gringotts Wizarding Bank (akin to private sector investment banking?) requires a sense of adventure, but also Arithmancy (which I’ve argued is P-Chem). A number of my fellow computational chemists took this route after their Ph.D., presumably for adventure and income. I instead chose the less lucrative profession of professoring. Presumably one needs a qualification to be a teacher or a professor. Then again, perhaps expertise in an area is sufficient. Hagrid teaches Care of Magical Creatures and clearly has the knowledge, and although his pedagogy might be questionable, he certainly has a practical hands-on approach.

But how is expertise measured? It can be recognized by the employer directly in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. The wizarding community in England seemed to all know each other, and be inter-related particularly if trying to keep the bloodline pure. In a larger community where you don’t know everybody, how do you separate the competent from the huckster? You could prove yourself by taking a test-exam-interview. You could have a qualification (degree, certificate, badge, etc.) that serves as a proxy that you are knowledgeable in some area. You could be recommended by someone known to the employer, either personally or by reputation. All three of these and more take place in our globalized and hypercompetitive environment. Don’t forget the HR bots that may scan your resume/cv before any of the rest is even looked at, further driving the rise in credentialism.

We don’t know what other careers Hogwarts students might have considered and how those conversations with the Head-of-House might have transpired. If the Weasley twins had declared that their career goal was to open a joke shop, how would that have gone down? Clearly the parents were concerned – but in this fictional case, the Weasleys become successful start-up entrepeneurs. No qualification needed. Would any of the teachers at Hogwarts even be able to advise them? Take ECON 101?

This is partly why Career Services is useful, particularly if some folks in that area have had multiple and wide-ranging job experiences. This is why we bring back alumni or have industry experts come back to give seminars, workshops, and most important have lunch or a networking event with the students. Universities are increasing the budgets of Career Centers, not just to hire staff, but also provide exploratory internships, job site visits, and more, for the students. My own experience as a professor (with limited job experience in other roles) means recognizing my multiple and huge blind spots with regard to career advice, more so as technology accelerates the change in careers and blends the realms of work and play. In the meantime, I should remember to engage my students in deeper questions about the meaningfulness of life and work even though they might just be looking for career advice.

Productive Failure

Designing an educational activity aimed at failure seems counter-productive. Unless, of course, it can somehow lead to improved learning that may not easily be elicited otherwise. That initial failure leads to productive learning in the long term, thus Productive Failure. No, I am not talking about making your first exam really, really, really hard so that the students do very poorly to thus motivate them to work really, really, really hard the rest of the term. While a tiny fraction might be so motivated, for the majority of the class I think this would be Unproductive Failure. If there can be Productive and Unproductive Failure, could there also be Productive and Unproductive Success?

Yes, according to Manu Kapur, a professor of cognitive studies who has been developing a framework for these four categories. A good summary article can be found in his 2016 article in Educational Psychologist (see picture below for citation and abstract).

Let’s take the extreme categories first. Productive Success, according to Kapur, involves designing learning activities that “maximize performance in the shorter term and maximize learning in the longer term.” Whether or not one can maximize both arenas independently is an open question. Unproductive Failure results in the opposite and the oft-cited example is pure “discovery learning” or “unguided problem solving” at least for novices. There is evidence that for experts, learning is enhanced by reducing structural elements that tend to hinder by constraint.

Unproductive Success is an interesting category. Performance is maximized in the short-term, but long-term learning remains elusive. Cramming for an exam is a common student strategy in this category. (For a summary of evidence-based student strategies, see this previous blog post.) Teaching approaches in this category might include drilling techniques. Some might consider ‘lecturing’ in the college classroom to also be in this category, but the evidence is not so clear cut. The cartoonish example of the droning professor who pays no attention to whether the students are paying attention, perhaps, if the students are there primarily to record the necessary information they need to regurgitate on the exam. But, there are many examples where direct or explicit instruction leads not just to better immediate learning of introductory material, but provides the necessary scaffold for more advanced material. However, its effectiveness is unclear for ‘far transfer’ – being able to abstract deeper principles and apply them to a wide variety of interesting problems. There is evidence both for and against this idea, and the devil is in the details of the experimental setups.

Kapur cites much of the work on Productive Failure carried out mainly in the last five years. Designing an activity involves two phases. According to Kapur: “(First) the problem-solving phase affords opportunities for students to generate and explore the affordances and constraints of multiple solutions to novel, complex problems. (Then) the consolidation phase affords opportunities for comparing and contrasting, organizing, and assembling the relevant student-generated solutions into canonical solutions.” The students may flail and generate incorrect or inconsistent solutions in phase one, but the consolidation phase somehow solidifies deeper conceptual learning that may also improve ‘far transfer’ at least in the examples given. There is clearly more work to be done in this area, but it is nevertheless intriguing.

Like many other instructors, I have mainly designed my classes around what I think lead to Productive Success. This includes a combination of lecturing, in-class group work, quizzes, class discussions, homework, reflections, exams, projects. Depending on the class, the students, the topic of the day, the classroom physical arrangements, I might do different things. While I’m good at assessing short-term knowledge learned by my students in my class, I’m not sure how to assess ‘far transfer’ effectively and thereby iteratively improve my classes for Productive Success. I do, however, have one prominent example of inadvertently designing an activity for Productive Failure.

Four years ago, I designed an Alien Periodic Table activity. (Former students reading this who experienced this in Fall 2013, thank you for being the guinea pigs!) It covers a week’s worth of in-class activity with four hours of in-class time. Basically, I invented a bunch of new elements and their physical and chemical properties, and dreamed up an underlying Periodic Table structure, similar in some ways to the actual Periodic Table in our known universe but different in other ways. The activities were designed to cram the experience of fifty years of historical floundering into a week-long experience. The names of the elements and their properties (including judiciously introduced “errors” and in some cases simply lacking in information) mirrored the actual messy history.

In the first 90-minute session (after a pre-class activity on how one would measure the relevant physical properties), students were given Element Cards and had to try to organize them in some fashion. There was no communication between students in different groups. Midway through class, we held a “science conference” where each group presented what they knew so far. They realized at this point that while they had a common set of cards, each group had some cards that others did not. I then doled out the new information (new cards for new discoveries!), and they went back to work in their groups. This time they were allowed to send one representative to another group to learn what was going on, share information, and bring that back to the home group.

Not surprisingly, by the end of the class session, no group had come anywhere close to the underlying structure, but there were multiple solutions and some clever (but wrong) ideas. The subsequent class was an hour lecture (with some interactive discussion) on the history of how our Periodic Table was discovered, leading up to the modern version found in textbooks. We also discussed the power of the table in displaying trends and ‘explaining’ properties. The pre-reading included selections from Eric Scerri’s The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. (Here’s my review of his more recent book.) Before the lecture started I showed the students the slide below (for fun).

In the second 90-minute session, the students were given photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) data. After figuring out how to correlate the PES data to a Bohr shell model of the atom, they were ready to take another stab at the Alien Periodic Table with the PES data for the Alien Elements. After the activity, each group had to turn in a final report presenting their periodic table arrangement, suggesting any missing elements (and coming up with names and physical properties), and reflecting on the experience. It was a lot of work for the students (inside and outside of class). It was a lot of work for me. It took me 80-100 hours to prepare a week’s worth of activity. Since then I’ve tried several pared-down versions on subsequent groups of students, making minor tweaks here and there. (I used it as a scaffold in my general chemistry New Elements project last year.) But I’ve never assessed the activity for ‘far transfer’ or whether these students better understood the deeper underlying concepts surrounding the Periodic Table compared to other students who did not do this activity. I did however inadvertently follow Kapur’s two-phase structure for Productive Failure.

Reading Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom gave me an idea for a more tractable activity that might be more straightforward to assess. Here’s what I learned from the book. When J. J. Thomson first discovered the electron, he had to puzzle over the fact that the relative mass of the electron was roughly two thousand times less than the hydrogen atom. This led to the suggestion that the hydrogen atom was made up of a thousand negatively-charged electrons paired up with a thousand corresponding positively charged particles, each the same mass as an electron. It’s rather strange that the electron is 1/1840 times less massive than the proton that makes up most of the mass of the hydrogen atom. Why is that? We have no idea.

I’m envisioning an Alien Discovery of the fundamental particles that make up matter, the so-called ‘atoms’ of the Alien Universe. I can modify the quantities, names and particle types, and expand the set of ‘experiments’ to cover a range of work by Thomson and other colleagues working on the problem. Hopefully this will emphasize the strangeness of the subatomic particles. Every year, I try to impress upon the students this very strangeness. I think they sort-of-hear what I’m saying, but because most of them have had high school chemistry or physics, and have had the ‘information’ drilled-in, they’ve lost an appreciation for the creativity of the experiments and the strangeness of our fundamental knowledge of atoms, the building blocks of matter. I’m looking forward to fleshing this out and trying it on my general chemistry class next year.

One thing I’ve learned from reading cognitive science and education research, and trying out different things in my classes, is that there is no surefire best practice in the art and science of teaching and learning. So much depends on the instructor, the students, the relationships, the materials, the facilities, the resources, etc. It does keep things interesting, and I enjoy the flexibility to be creative and try new things.

We Have No Idea

Most popular science books aim to explain ideas and answer questions. This is not the approach taken by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson in their book, aptly titled We Have No Idea. Many questions are posed in their book, to which they answer (yes, you know it!) “we have no idea”. The point of the book is to explore the edge of our knowledge in physics (and cosmology, in particular). The authors tell us the many things they do know – but the edge, where knowledge and ignorance meet, is where things get interesting! The authors are enthusiastic about figuring out what we don’t know rather than throwing up our hands in despair – even though we have no idea what’s actually going on.

Readers might be familiar with Jorge Cham through PhD Comics – highly recommended reading for academics of any stripe. Daniel Whiteson is a physics professor at UC-Irvine. Their book is funny and engaging! Cham & Whiteson use both the text and the illustrations to great effect. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had learning about the edge of physics research. They also got me thinking about two familiar concepts – mass and charge – and what we know and don’t know about them. More on that in a moment.

Last week I read a lot of physics. Besides finishing Cham & Whiteson’s book, I also read Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and go-to-guy for explaining astrophysics to the general public. Tyson is a good communicator both on video and in text, and if I hadn’t read Cham and Whiteson first, I would have enjoyed his book more. The first half of Tyson’s book has overlapping material with Cham and Whiteson, and the latter duo are more engaging on the topic – they’re hard to beat. I’m not sure why Tyson’s book has his name displayed more prominently than the book’s title. Maybe the publisher thought his name would be a bigger draw (in generating sales) than seeing the word “Astrophysics” in a title. Tyson’s book is much shorter and can be read in maybe two hours. A much longer book that I just started reading is Helge Kragh’s Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom, a denser academic treatise very unlike the other two books written for a popular audience. (I will discuss Kragh’s book in a future blog post when I’ve made more progress.)

Let’s return to mass and charge. In chemistry, I take these quantities for granted, while Cham & Whiteson emphasized their strangeness. We don’t really know what these two ‘things’ are and yet my students and I use them ubiquitously in chemistry class. For example, today we talked about oxidation numbers and using them to identify redox reactions. A perceptive student asked me midway through class: “So what are oxidation numbers exactly? Are they charges?” The answer is no, they’re not charges. They’re just convenient book-keeping labels that we use. Cham & Whiteson go a step further: Fundamentally, charge is just a label, as far as we know. Why does the electron have a charge of –e (where e = 1.60 x 10^-19 Coulombs)? Where does that charge reside? Or is the whole electron just the charge? We haven’t successfully broken down any leptons (electrons are in the family of leptons) into further elementary particles. We have no idea what exactly they are, but we can balance redox chemical equations by making sure the appropriately labeled plusses and minuses balance out.

The last two weeks in my general chemistry course was on stoichiometry. Students balance chemical equations and then calculate amounts of reactants, products, and leftover reactants. There is a protocol. First, convert all amounts into number of moles. Then figure out everything in terms of moles and then convert the amounts back into whatever the problem asked for, usually in terms of mass. Why this convoluted scheme? Because it’s easy to measure mass. You weigh out reactants when designing a chemical reaction, and you weigh the products after the reaction is complete. But chemistry is about exchanging atoms through the making and breaking of chemical bonds. Unfortunately you can’t count the atoms directly. (You can weigh the substance as a whole and deduce the number of atoms if you know the chemical formula of the substance.) To avoid astronomically large numbers, chemists use the mole as the unit for atom-counting. The convoluted scheme is compounded by masses having non-integer values, and we have no idea (at the deepest level) why they have the exact numerical masses that they do.

If the previous two paragraphs sounded complicated, that’s because when we dig deep enough, we reach the point where… (wait for it…) we have no idea! Charges are just labels that tell us something about inter-particle interactions. Masses are what we can measure easily even though they are not the crucial underlying factor that organizes the world of chemistry. When the Periodic Table was being first formulated, mass was used as an organizing factor. Mendeleev used mass in his influential version of the periodic table, but it was an unknown Dutchman (Antonius van der Broek) forty years later, who influenced the giants in the field (Rutherford and Bohr) to adopt nuclear charge (rather than mass) as the organizing principle. This better approach was later confirmed by the X-ray work of Henry Moseley.

As messy as it is, this is what I find fascinating about chemistry – the elements are idiosyncratic. The periodic table at first glance looks like a wondrous organizing principle (and indeed it is) but it is full of idiosyncracies, exceptions and niggly details – to the dismay of my students when they start to realize this. The alchemists were secretive about their mysteries; today we are no longer as secretive but many mysteries remain.

I leave you with one photo I took from Cham & Whiteson, and if you want some old fun reading, here’s my blog post on Magicians, Mutants, Midichlorians.

Inflexible Knowledge

Dan Willingham’s excellent article Inflexible Knowledge: The First Step to Expertise (American Educator, Winter 2002) opens with the following question.

“So often, even if I inventively present new material or emphasize applying the new knowledge in various situations, what I get back from my students seems ‘rote’. Why is this? What can I do about it?”

If you’ve asked yourself this question as an educator, I recommend reading the article in full. But here are the highlights!

Willingham defines three types of knowledge in his article: rote knowledge, inflexible knowledge, and flexible knowledge. He begins by distinguishing rote knowledge (parroting without any understanding) from inflexible knowledge (a seeming inability to apply knowledge learned). Willingham uses an example from the book Anguished English to illustrate rote knowledge. A student, asked to define equator, writes “a managerie lion running around the Earth through Africa”. The student has memorized not even the right words, but sounds, such that ‘imaginary line’ has turned into ‘managerie lion’ perhaps subconsciously associating Africa with the king of the beasts.

Much more often, we encounter the situation where the student can correctly produce a newly learned definition but seems unable to use it. According to Willingham, “cognitive science has shown us that when new material is first learned, the mind is biased to remember things in concrete forms that are difficult to apply to new situations.” This is inflexible knowledge and, Willingham argues, an important first step in the learning process. Why does this happen? If something is unfamiliar, we automatically consider surface features first checking if they resemble anything else we already know.

Abstracting the deep features from the surface features is what distinguishes the expert from the novice. This is flexible knowledge – the ability to apply our understanding of the deeper structure to a variety of concrete situations, and not just the situation where the concept was first learned. As educators, we want to move our students from surface-level thinking to deeper thinking, leading them down the rabbit hole. You might think that we can teach deep structure and abstraction directly to novice students, but that turns out to hugely difficult. Willingham writes: “… cognitive scientists have tried to [use it] many times. But, the problem with such direct instruction is that the mind much prefers that new ideas be framed in concrete rather than abstract terms.”

Reflecting on all of this reminded me of an office hour session with one of my students three weeks ago. She told me she was having trouble keeping straight all the different periodic table ‘trends’ we had learned. When I asked her the definition of ‘Ionization Energy’ she struggled to parrot the answer, at which point I asked her to stop and think about the words ‘Ionization’ and ‘Energy’ meant. A moment later she was able to give me the correct definition. But then she seemed to be guessing whether the first ionization energy increased or decreased across a row or down a column, and unable to use the definition to help her. I moved the conversation away from ionization energy back to something she could more easily concretize – atomic size. She could correctly tell me the size trends, and with a bit of delving, eventually able to explain her answers in concrete terms. Then I asked her the definition of ‘Effective Nuclear Charge’ and this time she was able to figure it out and then use the concept to explain the size trends. At this point we returned to ionization energy and she was now able to determine and explain the trends. Success!

Next she asked me about electronegativity. I asked her for the definition and got a garbled response. She looked up the definition and was able to repeat it to me, but then together we parsed the definition carefully to make sure she paid attention to all the attendant parts. I asked her how electronegativity might connect to effective nuclear charge, and with a bit of (mental) prodding, she could now explain the trend. To tie it together, I had her summarize all three trends and connect them to each other. The whole process probably took at least 30 minutes one-on-one. It takes time and energy for those disparate pieces of information to click together as an integrated whole. In a classful of students, I had actively connected the definitions and trends, and had the students think-and-reason through the process. That may have clicked for some students, but clearly it did not for others. In this one particular case, I hope I successfully increased the student’s knowledge flexibility at least for this one concept.

How might one overcome the bias to “remember things in concrete forms that are difficult to apply to new situations”? Willingham suggests it “seems best overcome by the accumulation of a greater store of related knowledge, facts, and examples.” He ends the article with suggestions for teachers.

(1) Use multiple examples and encourage students to see what the examples have in common, preferably leading them to the deeper structure.

(2) Distinguish rote knowledge from inflexible knowledge, not despairing from the latter, but using it as a building block to flexible knowledge.

(3) Appreciate that learning facts can be helpful and encourage students’ growing their knowledge even if it’s inflexible. “Knowing more facts makes many cognitive functions (e.g., comprehension, problem solving) operate more efficiently.”

The last point is important especially with the recent popularity of emphasizing broad skills over facts/content in education circles. While we’d like for students to acquire those deeper ‘critical thinking’ skills, the road to it is paved with facts and content. Thanks to cognitive science research, we now have good evidence that higher order abilities are domain-dependent. The more you know about something, the better you are able to turn that knowledge from inflexible to flexible. Content and critical thinking are not opposed to each other. The more factual knowledge you have, the more able you can think about the area critically.

What Will You Do With That?

It’s an old saw, but in the form of a question. “Whatcha gonna do with that?” It is posed when a college student declares an interest majoring in some ‘liberal arts’ area. Images of burger-flipping or barista-tending come unbidden to the mind of the inquirer; perhaps also to the mind of the one being interrogated.

You Can Do Anything is the answer provided by George Anders’ latest book. The book’s subtitle is The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education. Part feel-good and part self-help, it is aimed well at students and recent graduates with majors in the humanities and social sciences who are not pursuing professional graduate education. (Perhaps also aimed at their worrying parents.) The book has four parts (“Your Strengths”, “Your Opportunities”, “Your Allies”, “Your Tool Kit”) and does what most articles do when defending a liberal arts education: Use anecdotal vignettes to tell an engaging story. Hearing uplifting narratives – sprinkled with appropriate tension, angst and drama – about recent graduates who take circuitous paths and eventually find their dreams along with ever increasing paychecks, provides a dose of validation, hope and encouragement.

Are these tales representative of what might transpire for most students who chose a major in the humanities and social sciences? Anders tries to pick a reasonably diverse spread of protagonists, although they do skew towards those who had the opportunity to attend “elite” liberal arts colleges. My alma mater is viewed positively through several interviews with recent graduates, so I’m glad at least a few of these students seem to be thriving. Also rather nebulous is how exactly those humanities and social science classes do that prepare one for a life of adaptability to the changing landscape of career opportunities. There is a sense that the open-endedness of questions wrestled with in such classes trains one to deal with complexity and uncertainty. There are also the usual references to critical thinking along with writing and oral communication skills. Pre-college backgrounds of the students weave themselves into the narrative, but then cloud the value of the liberal arts college education, since the inner drive, perseverance, curiosity, may well reside in the profilees regardless of their choice of major.

While there is just one tiny example of chemistry as a field being mentioned in opposition to the “liberal arts”, You Can Do Anything mainly contrasts the liberal arts with engineering, business, and other professional degrees. Like many other apologists for the liberal arts, STEM is mentioned as part of the Other. As a chemist, who went to a liberal arts college, I take issue with that characterization. The sciences, in my opinion, provide students the opportunity to wrestle with complexity, exercise critical thought, and communicate in writing and in speech, among other things. Are there science classes that resemble robotic information-spewing from instructor to student? Likely so, but I think they would be in the minority at liberal arts colleges – at least in chemistry departments, since I have many friends and colleagues who teach in such places. I think my students who are science majors get the best of both worlds, combining both the technical and the liberal arts.

A second book along the same vein, and also published in 2017, is A Practical Education by Randall Stross. This book’s subtitle is Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees. (The book cover is amusing, see above.) Stross has an interesting background. While he has written several books on Silicon Valley startups, his Ph.D. is in East Asian history and he is currently a professor of business at San Jose State University. His book also takes the vignette route but focuses only on Stanford students. Stross acknowledges the limitations of his work on page 2; that the students profiled mainly come from privileged and financially secure backgrounds, they are academically excellent, and are a competitive bunch.

Stross further qualifies: “I don’t make a blanket claim that every student, at every college or university, who elects a liberal arts major will, ipso facto, make an outstanding employee upon graduation by dint of enrolling in the courses and earning passing grades. But those students who do choose for a major an academic field that is not tightly connected with a particular career and who do well in those courses, who demonstrate a sponge-like capacity to absorb new knowledge, whose academic record shows drive and diligence and a capacity for thinking hard and communicating well, should be seen by prospective employers at the multicapable candidates they are.”

That’s a good summary of the main argument made by both Stross and Anders, and for that matter all other proponents of a liberal arts education at the college level. The authors also acknowledged the disconnect between what top-level CEOs say they want in employees (that jibe well with the qualities Stross mentions) and what actually happens at entry-level hiring. In a larger company, top-level CEOs aren’t doing the hiring – and middle managers who have responsibilities they need to fill are doing what they think they need to do to fill those positions, i.e., looking to fill a niche technical expertise. In a number of the vignettes, graduates find their opportunities at small start-up companies where you might not be hiring to fill a particular niche, but you need to cover multiple areas – so it matters less what previous technical skills you possess as long as you are a fast learner and both independent and adaptable. Interestingly though, having some tech skills helps greatly in getting one’s foot in the door. Thus many of the Stanford undergraduates profiled have a computer science class or two or three under their belts.

Two things make A Practical Education very different from You Can Do Anything. First, it does not have a strong self-help vibe. Second, and much more interesting, Stross weaves in a history of Stanford throughout the book (in almost alternating chapters). The book’s title stands out even more from this lens, because the idea behind the founding of Stanford was to focus more on a “practical” rather than “classical” education. The tensions between the founders, early presidents, faculty and students come alive in the interweaving narrative. Leland Stanford and David Starr Jordan, both strong personalities, have significant page time – and their stories are both interesting and relevant to the “liberal arts crisis” today. Lewis Terman, pioneer for the Stanford academic test for admission, makes his appearance midway; chapter 12 “A Mania For Testing” is an essential read in our assessment-laden culture today. I did not know about Raj Reddy and the Stanford 2025 retrospective, but the chapter on “A History of the Future” was fascinating; that subject requires its own blog post.

Coincidentally, I received both these books on the same day (in early October) that I read The Life Shaping Power of Higher Education by Martin Krislov in InsideHigherEd. I’ve read many of these articles before; maybe that’s why I found it bland and uninspiring, with its familiar anecdotes. But perhaps part of the problem is that in today’s unhealthy culture of emphasizing counting and measuring, and prizing the quantitative over the qualitative, we need to be reminded that not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts. Krislov writes: “Successful careers and financial gain are just part of the value of a liberal arts education. Its true worth is measured not in dollars but in meaningful lives well lived.” The gospel being preached here is what? You can have your cake and eat it too? Krislov undercuts his own argument by going on to list the accomplishments of the institutions he has led almost exclusively in terms of numbers and counting. I was disappointed.

Much more sobering is a 2010 article by Howard Doughty in College Quarterly: Restructuring the Pleas for the Liberal Arts in an Age of Technology and Ascendancy. Here’s the abstract: “Education is many things, but it is primarily the mode of production and reproduction of socially sanctioned knowledge, including the technical skills and sustaining ideology needed to maintain cultural continuity while adapting to social change. To teach creatively and to explore and shape knowledge amidst vast technological changes is the test of contemporary educational success. Part of that test involves the protracted assault on the liberal arts in the presence of transformational information technology, an increasingly competitive global economy and the neoliberal market mentality. Liberal arts defenders have confronted disparaging critiques with three basic types of argument: autonomy (the liberal arts are inherently valuable); service (the liberal arts support vocational training); and complementarity (the liberal arts properly balance marketable skills).”

Doughty then proceeds to explain why the three defenses remain unconvincing, before giving you his approach by trying to scare you with a dystopian future. The last part of his abstract reads: “A fourth position is that humanity’s precarious position in dangerous times provides the liberal arts’ principal rationale: The liberal arts are essential for ecological sustainability, social survival, the future of our species.” He might be right about the future, but he might not. Even if he is right, it’s unclear that a liberal arts education would help turn the tide. Perhaps Krislov is closer to the mark when he remarks about the liberal arts: “Is it for everyone? Of course not. But for those who pursue liberal arts education, it can be life transforming.” And perhaps that is what Anders, Stross and others have shown in their books and articles. For some, certainly those profiled but many more whose stories are not publicly known, it can be life transforming.

Ring of Protection

Since physicists made progress toward an invisibility cloak, I’m pleased that chemists are taking initial steps towards a different “magical” object – in this case, a ring of protection. It’s actually a ring of detection that alerts you if invisible yet dangerous fumes or liquids are close by. You still have to run away to protect yourself!

Hot off the press from the journal ACS Sensors is “Wearable Ring-Based Sensing Platform for Detecting Threats” by a group in the department of NanoEngineering at UCSD. The citation is ACS Sens. 2017, 2, 1531-1538, for those who want to read the article in full. Here’s a snapshot of the abstract complete with a picture of the ring. The ring itself is not the most fashionable wearable out there; attaching the device to a hat or coat would be less obtrusive. But the ring does illustrate the engineering feat of miniaturization that went into this multi-detector system.

The ring was tested with two types of potentially explosive material, 2,4-dinitrotoluene (DNT) and hydrogen peroxide, and one nerve agent, methyl paraoxon. It can detect these compounds in both the liquid and vapor phases. These hazardous substances were distinguished from other common vapors – there were no false positives or negatives – but the size of these interference-samples was small. Clearly more work needs to be done to expand the scope of its detecting capabilities. The detector sends output via a Bluetooth signal that can be read by a mobile device alerting you of the threat (along with appropriate data).

No, this isn’t the ring of power that the world would covet. But if you could combine invisibility with a wearable ring, it might start to resemble a famous ring of power. If octopi were reading The Hobbit, Bilbo’s disappearing trick would be less dramatic. It’s just a wearable device that signals a chemical cascade triggering a response in chromatophores on the skin. How exactly the device signals the cascade is not so obvious. If it sent out some sort of electromagnetic signal that cells near the surface of the skin can react to, this might be workable. Coincidentally, the same research group has a recent paper titled “Edible Electrochemistry: Food Materials based Electrochemical Sensors” in Adv. Healthcare Mater. 2017, 1700770. Perhaps there is a way to combine edible sensors that initiate a biochemical reaction. Or one could design a camouflage potion, as two groups did in my non-majors chemistry class last semester. The groups took different approaches, but both involved extracting chromatophores from octopi. (Nautilus, in its October “Monsters” issue, has a cool article on octopi including pictures of chromatophores.)

The ring of protection is a staple of fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. (Coincidentally, there was a fun article this week about how D&D is like academia in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Wearables are associated with protection – perhaps that is not surprising since medieval knights used heavy armor against sword and spear. But to protect yourself against magic, that’s where you need a ring! Designing a compact quick-deploying protective device, though, is not easy. And you don’t want to be walking around in a spacesuit. Perhaps the closest familiar analog is the airbag in vehicles, although it can only be deployed once before replacement is needed. A ring is likely too small to house an airbag, but a ring that called a drone that carried the necessary protective equipment could work well. The drone would have to not be too far away, but not intrusively close either. A day might come when we are all walking around with personal drones overhead and wearing rings of summoning instead.

The Chair's Dilemma

Harry Potter and the Chair’s Dilemma. It could have been the name of a new series of Harry Potter books, featuring an older Harry as a professor at a university of magic. Instead, the title is clickbait for readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education such as myself. The actual article is about the chair of an English department getting a request from a faculty member to teach a Harry Potter themed course.

The author hesitates in making a quick yes-or-no response (standard strategy for a chair) and mulls over the idea. Should the English department be offering creative writing courses in the sci-fi/fantasy genre? Such classes would certainly be appealing to students, particularly at a time when enrollments and majors in the humanities are decreasing. Other colleges are doing them. Would young adults will steer clear of “tougher” stuff (cognitively and analytically) given a choice between classic literature and popular escapist Young Adult fiction? Or might fans of Harry Potter actually learn more due to intrinsic motivation? They might delve deep into critical discussions and analyses that resemble themes you would find in classic literature. Furthermore, such students might opt to take subsequent classes offered by the English department, now that they have tasted the work and found it to their liking.

There’s an excellent several-paragraphs-long comment to the article (by username Jody Bower) that is worth reading in full. I’m going to quote parts of it. “I’ve heard the argument that science fiction and fantasy are not based on the world we know… Those who like and those who write science fiction and fantasy often use the label ‘speculative fiction’ instead. The point of these stories, to them, is to ask ‘what if?’ What if, Ursula Le Guin asks in The Left Hand of Darkness, people were hermaphroditic? What if, she asks in The Dispossessed, we lived in a true anarchy? What if, Frank Herbert asks in Dune, there was a revolution against computers and a subsequent movement to train people to use all of their minds’ capacities? What if, asks CJ Cherryh, Edgar Rice Burroughs, CS Lewis, and the creators of Farscape, a single human or small group of humans was suddenly transplanted to an alien world? What if we could travel in time, change the past, read minds, talk to animals, fly without machines?... The best science fiction and fantasy asks the question ‘what does it mean to be a human?’ It may take us away from the world as it currently is, but it brings us closer to ourselves. This is the opposite of escapism.”

What does it mean to be human? That is the bedrock question of why we require our students to take courses in the humanities as part of their liberal arts education. If the adventures of Harry Potter sparks interest in pondering the deep questions, that seems like a good outcome.

Could chemistry courses benefit from a Harry Potter theme? I tried a potions theme in my chemistry for non-science majors course with mixed success, but I don’t think it would work as well for general chemistry aimed at science majors. The former is potentially the last science course a student takes, while the latter is usually the first in a sequence of classes and therefore requires coverage of certain material (i.e., less flexibility) pre-requisite for more advanced courses. There is more flexibility in the non-science majors course where I was able to spend 3-4 weeks on introductory organic chemistry. An upper-division medicinal chemistry course could align well with a strong potions theme.

But maybe integrating the theme isn’t so crucial, and the theme simply serves as a hook to draw one down the rabbit hole. In my general chemistry class this semester, I started strongly on the theme (“Hiding in Plain Sight: Elucidating the Secret Structure of Matter”) early in the semester when we spent several weeks discussing the interaction of light and matter. As we moved into chemical bonding, I made references to structure determination (e.g. using x-rays to probe the structures of solids), but in most other cases there is just the occasional one-minute connection. There will likely be even fewer as we have started a section on stoichiometry and calculations. I have a problem set that has the students working on “real world” problems, but they’re just stoichiometry problems in disguise – and none of them relate to the magical world. I think my most successful integration of theme was last year’s design-a-new-element scaffolded final project

I suppose I could try experimenting with different themes to see what else works. Or, having served as department chair, I could start writing Harry Potter fan fiction. Maybe I could call it Harry Potter and the Chair’s Dilemma. Now I just need to think about a dilemma that I could spin into a worthy story.