ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question:
You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?"
It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame:
What is one thing in your professional life that you do especially well?
Leave your answer in the comments. One exceptional skill per comment, please (JVP, this means you).
My answer: I'm good at telling stories.
I fit half of the original frame for the question, being an academic scientist, and teaching is a big part of my job. My best lectures are the ones in which I can construct some sort of coherent narrative around the topic. In modern physics, this often takes the form of historical anecdotes, but it doesn't need to be. It can be built around a particular class of problem, or a new technique--I tend to do this a lot in intro mechanics, posing some question that can't easily be solved with Newton's Laws, and then showing how energy or momentum make the solution simple.
My weakest lectures are ones in which I need to convey some relatively disconnected set of facts and definitions. Without a good story to provide a natural flow from one topic to the next, I struggle with the transitions, and the whole class ends up being a little disjointed.
This affects my research career as well as my teaching. I tend to gravitate toward research topics that lend themselves to narrative, and I struggle with areas that are thick with abstract formalism. My worst grade ever in a physics class came in a Solid State class I took in grad school-- I never really got my head around "reciprocal lattice vectors," and as a result had a hard time with pretty much everything that followed. My weakest area in my own field of AMO physics is the zone where atomic physics shades into condensed matter (the BEC-BCS "crossover" regime, for example).
My understanding of high energy physics is also very limited, in large part because I've never been able to get a good feel for what goes on behind the formalism of symmetry groups and the like. This is due in large part to never having had a class on the subject to help bridge the gap between pop-science and high energy theory blogs.
I trust that the connection between skill at telling stories and the book-in-production is obvious.
So, anyway, that's what I do well, or at least what I think I do well. What do you do well?
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I am well aware of my own limitations, so I have worked to make the groups of fishes I studied well known enough that colleagues with a bigger tool chest would become interested in them. I think I was fairly successful.
I speak, therefore I am. And I have an unusual knack for explaining complex government environmental regulations in ways even particle physicists can understand.
Two things: I understand what things people (esp. students) find difficult, which means I teach and give talks relatively well. I'm also good at programming and manipulating data, which makes me much more efficient than lots of other researchers.
My strength is being able to do the impossible (and, making it look easy in the process). Else why would the company dump so many impossible projects on me, and end up with so many successes? ;-)
Dave
In research, I'm good at finding simple but interesting questions that haven't been asked. In teaching, I'm good at stripping something down to its essentials and not doing elaborate stuff that doesn't matter. In administrative matters, I'm good at seeing 2 steps ahead and asking "And then what?" because that's where the seemingly good ideas falter.
I'm good at visualizing, particularly in 3D. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist (only in geology, everything else is "good enough") and demand maps/cross-sections/etc conform to actual data.
I seem to be mainly good at figuring out how to set up experiments using just the junk laying around the lab, which saves a phenomenal amount of money over buying new equipment.
My mere presence causes a malfunctioning computer to sit down, shut up, and get back to work more often than not.
I describe complicated things clearly and concisely.
thanks
You know, when I am on the ball, I teach well enough. But what I'm best at, I think, is designing really interesting classes. Right now, I am doing a lit class on Paranoia. (We're start the Cold War next week! Yay!) I did an intro to college writing class based on extraordinary claims. Topics: UFOs, ghost hunting and standards of evidence; Holocaust denial and free speech; intelligent design, evolution and national science policy...also some fun wacky medicine and hoaxes. I'm also mercilessly cross-disciplinary. But I have the attention span of a fruit fly, which I am assuming has a limited attention span.
HJ
The crystallographers think I'm a pretty good geologist.
The geologists think I'm pretty good crystallographer.
It seems my principal skill lies in keeping them from comparing notes...
I'm good at mapping things. This comes in handy in my research, since a lot of what we do involves following magnetic field lines and seeing where they go.
I'm good at translating. I can read a paper in one field and explain it to people in another.
Apparently, listening well is a rare skill in a department chair. Fortunately, I can, but I'm not sure why it's so valuable to both the staff and students.
I am an artist. i have been told that i have the artistic skills of an 80 year old artist and im only 24. i wonder if my add has anything to do with being a fraking great painter?
Finding mistakes. I can basically smell where it goes wrong. Unfortunately, this also makes me supercritical against everybody's including my own ideas.
It is an interesting topic btw because I think few scientists pay enough attention to matching diverse strenghts. I have argued here that this sort of job-related diversity is much more important than demographic diversity.
I get the right answer: I can do really complicated calculations (especially computer programs) correctly. That was a key in my past life, along with #17, but not so good on the creative side of research as I got older.
For my present life, my greatest strength is that I know a great number of odds and ends about things (not just book physics), which can make for a good lecture if it doesn't get in the way of the physics. Plus, I can usually find a clear way to explain almost anything in basic physics and calculus. Part of that is the ability to diagnose where someone is stuck on a problem, a skill I have had for as long as I can remember.
"One exceptional skill per comment, please (JVP, this means you)."
I am getting better and better at COLLABORATING on research, which has an orthonormal basis of {being less of a jerk; working harder; working smarter; finding a good fit with what collaborators do exceptionally well; rules of thumb on the right collaborationware; finding good way to collaborate on publishing/conference presenting}
Sidebar: I especially thank Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, Chad Orzel, Mark Chu-Carroll, Charles Stross, and John Baez for teaching me how to be less of a jerk in the blogosphere.
My wife teaches in the humanities, and whenever any of her colleagues have questions in the sciences, I'm the one they come to. Apparently, I can explain the sciences in terms that specialists in the humanities find clear.
Note: my wife points out that this also applies to middle school students. I'm not sure what this says about specialists in the humanities. ;)