When I was a graduate student, my ambition was to redo a full sequence of the physics core courses as a TA.
Really. Truly.
I was sick.
I TA'd freshman physics my first year, sophomore quantum my second year, and had planned to request either Ph 106 (Classical) or Ph 125 (intermediate Quantum) for my third year, when I suddenly realised that there were only 168 hours in a week and I also was supposed to be doing research.
So I repeated sophomore quantum. This time I "got to" do some of the lectures.
For some bizarro reason that felt like a reward at the time...
Here you should realise that TAing a Caltech physics class is harder than merely taking it - since the TA is expected to actually be able to do (almost) all the assignments, correctly.
You'd think that having "done it before" would be an advantage, but this is offset by the undergrads typically being smarter than the grad TAs...
For my fourth year I TA'd graduate General Relativity and Cosmology, now that was a course.
One time some uppity first year grads actually showed up to my office hours and asked for help.
It was a tricky problem, I actually had to look up my old answer. One of the 1st year turkeys then challenged me since I had received less than 100% on the assignment back then, he was not impressed when I noted that my grade had actually been the highest.
I never did check to see if he became more impressed after he got his grade...
For that class my main achievement was to find a shorter and more elegant proof for one of Preskill's homework problems on quantum cosmology. Actually my real achievement was to convince John that it was a valid proof - since my initial attempt when I gave him the solution was to glance at his solution and pronounce "Oh. They're equivalent!".
For my fifth and final year I conceded that an RA might be a good thing, so I could actually write and stuff.
But, and my point is: Chris is Sooooooo lucky that he got out before getting me as a TA for Ph 12!
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Heh, nyah! As my daughter would say: "ha ha you can't catch me!"
But seriously, my students got a kick out of seeing my grades, and said "More professors should do that!"
I have had more than one undergraduate student come to me during their first year and say "I got a C in my physics class, so I guess I'll have to major in something else." It's worth showing them, I think, that you can have a screwup here or there and still have a career in science....
Ah, the good old days.
Ph 12 was a breeze compared to the one term of Kip Thorne's graduate General Relativity that I took. My students get no sympathy fro me when they complain about two page homeworks they turn in considering I pumped out a fifty plus pager for that class.
I hear ya about TAing being a lot of work. I learned elementary particle physics from TAing it, with minimal help from the prof. *That* was much more than the 5 hours or so it was supposed to take!
I was a rare TA who manged, to make a long story short, to get the Chairman for whom I TA'd demoted by a faculty vote of no confidence. But that was Grad School. This thread is obviously about Caltech. So let me extol a classmate of mine from CIT undergrad days. No, not Dave Brin, whom I saw at our 35th anniversary alumni event this past weekend (after he skipped dinner with me to hang out with some geezer named Fred Pohl at the Eaton Conference). No, I mean J. Michael Shull.
As you can see from his official web page, from which this is blatantly cribbed, he was educated at Caltech (BS 1972, Physics) and Princeton (PhD 1976, Physics). Following a one-year postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley (1976-77) he arrived at the University of Colorado in fall 1977, He received College awards for teaching (1986) and research (1996), CU Distinguished Research Lecturer (2001), and President's Teaching Scholar (1994). He wrote an undergraduate Physics textbook (with Ted Snow) and has been co-editor of 7 Conference Procedings, including three of the well-known 'Tetons Conferences on Astrophysics'. In 2005, he was elected Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).
His recent scientific projects involve searches for the "missing matter" (baryons and metals), studies of chemical enrichment of the intergalactic medium and galactic halo, and the thermal and ionization conditions of atomic, ionized, and molecular gas in the ISM and IGM. He is a member of the NASA Science Team for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), a powerful ($75M) ultraviolet spectrograph planned for installation on the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2008. COS will study the spatial distribution of primordial and shock-heated intergalactic gas and heavy elements expelled into intergalactic space by massive stars and supernovae. Some of the expected topology of the intergalactic gas (and "Cosmic Web" of dark-matter filaments) spans millions of light years across intergalactic space.
See the press release about his work at:
Missing Matter Of Universe Found; Cosmic Web Discovered.
I fear you miss two of Mike's most important attributes:
he is modest to a fault;
and, he bought me a beer last time I saw him.