Via FriendFeed, Daniel Lemire offers a suggestion on "branding":
Stop saying you are "John from school X". Say that you are "John who works on problem Y". Don't rely on your employer to carry your message!
Of course, this is only the second of the three possible options. You could also be "the guy who works on Problem Y at school X." This is pretty much the state of play for my thesis advisor, who never had any trouble remembering problems or institutions, but often forgot names. He could describe a person's whole scientific career-- worked on this problem at this school, then moved to that school and worked on this other problem-- but not remember their name.
As somebody who is bad with names (the first week or two of a new class is always an ordeal for me), I think it would be great if academia as a whole were to adopt this system.
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Scientists are also branded by their mentor.
A: [at a conference] "There goes X, who was a student of Y."
B: [understanding top-rank geneological statistics] "Oh, wow! Since X won a Nobel Prize, that increases the odds considerably that Y will win a Nobel Prize."
I'm wondering if Jonathan's claim (that students of Nobel laureates are more likely to be Nobel laureates themselves) is actually true. It certainly sounds plausible.
I'm wondering if Jonathan's claim (that students of Nobel laureates are more likely to be Nobel laureates themselves) is actually true. It certainly sounds plausible.
Well, my advisor won a Nobel prize, and I haven't gotten a whiff of one yet, so I have my doubts.
I suspect that "the guy from school X" formulation is a holdover from the days when it was relatively easy to get a tenure track position, and not so common to move to a different institution. But you would be working on different problems as your career progresses. Thus "the guy working on problem Y" was not a constant identifier, but "the guy from school X" was more likely to be stable.
Now, of course, people are likely to have multiple postdocs before landing a tenure track job, if they ever do. So "the guy from school X" is no longer as stable an identifier as it once was. "The guy working on problem Y," meanwhile, has become even more problematic: not only do the problems change, but in many cases you are part of a large group of people working on problem Y, so you might be "that other guy working on problem Y." "The guy working on problem Y at school X" is more specific, so while it is not trouble-free it is a sensible way to identify somebody.
Since neither project, place of work or collaborators are stable identifiers we need something else. I suggest we should adopt the cheesy Swords & Sourcery wizards alliterative naming pattern of "X the Y" (like "Gandalf the Gray").
So we'd have "Munoz the Magnificient", "Rolls the Reliant", "Itti the Inquisitive" or "Orzel the Orthogonal". Could have a naming ceremony when receiving your PhD, with the committee deciding on the name (perhaps at 1am, right around when the graduation party is getting out of hand; makes for more interesting names).