Advice for Young Scientists Series #3
Cherish the Teaching Assistantship

When I was in grad­u­ate school I was very lucky. I was fully sup­ported the entire time. The fund­ing level wasn’t great, but it wasn’t all that bad either. Still Here Too worked full time in a field rea­son­ably related to her cho­sen field. So our life was pretty good. I was basi­cally paid to per­form the research required to com­plete my PhD. The first year, all stu­dents were required to serve as teach­ing assis­tants. This included teach­ing lab­o­ra­tory classes and tutor­ing ses­sions for the, as we in our less-than polit­i­cally cor­rect man­ner referred to, “Physics for Dum-Dums” classes (this was way before the “…for Dum­mies” book series came along). As you might guess, the higher-ranked (note: big-ego, top-scoring, we know we are the smartest in this bunch) grad­u­ate stu­dents (pat myself on the back now) could not wait to get this require­ment out of the way so we could get on with real busi­ness of becom­ing big-shot scientists.

Now that that I am older and wiser (just older many would say), wait a minute, I am not that old! Now that I have used my many tal­ents in many dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios (yeah, I like that bet­ter), I must admit, that I actu­ally learned some very valu­able lessons from my time as a teach­ing assis­tant. While at the time, I was def­i­nitely anx­ious to fin­ish the manda­tory assign­ment and get on with the fun stuff (research), I did take the assign­ment seri­ously and tried to com­mu­ni­cate with the stu­dents in ways that they would actu­ally under­stand the basic con­cepts behinds the sub­ject. Physics, or at least the parts of Physics that really inter­ests me, is essen­tially try­ing to explain behav­iors of the uni­verse with math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els. (To be per­fectly hon­est, I really “get my kicks” by using com­puter mod­els of math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els to explain behav­iors of the uni­verse – but that is prob­a­bly a per­sonal prob­lem) The major­ity of the stu­dents in these classes would be what you would call math­e­mat­i­cally chal­lenged. Many of them were quite intel­li­gent, just not very strong in math. They were tak­ing the Physics class because it was a require­ment for their degree. So, I had to work to com­mu­ni­cate with­out using the terms that I would use if I were dis­cussing the topic with another physi­cist. In fact, I had to com­mu­ni­cate using analo­gies that would get the con­cept across in ways that often actu­ally described the work­ings of the math­e­mat­ics as much as the Physics.

For the remain­der of my aca­d­e­mic career, I really was not faced with hav­ing to com­mu­ni­cate to audi­ences not expert in the field. As I have said, I was one of the higher-ranked grad­u­ate stu­dents who was sup­ported totally by research. After com­ple­tion of my doc­tor­ate, my fac­ulty posi­tions were entirely research and graduate-level teach­ing focused. One cer­tainly did not use expla­na­tions that avoided the use of math­e­mat­ics at that level.

Once I made the great escape from the ivy-covered insti­tu­tion (and there actu­ally was a lot of ivy at my last insti­tu­tion) to the world of cor­po­rate Amer­ica, I was imme­di­ately faced once again with hav­ing to explain com­pli­cated tech­ni­cal results to intel­li­gent but not necessarily-technical or math­e­mat­i­cally inclined man­agers. My first posi­tion when I left aca­d­e­mics was to pro­vide over­sight of a remotely-located R&D cen­ter. So I had one foot in the world of third-order, cou­pled dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, and non-linear optics (a topic I was learn­ing on the fly, but that is what you do in indus­try, plus it is fun) and the other foot in busi­ness require­ments, plan­ning, and finan­cial con­se­quences (another sub­ject I was learn­ing on the fly – also fun) where you have to get the point across quickly with­out resort­ing to jar­gon, tech-speak, equa­tions, math, etc. I very quickly real­ized that what I really had to do to suc­ceed, more than any­thing else, was fig­ure out how to com­mu­ni­cate to the R&D cen­ter what the busi­ness require­ments were in terms they could under­stand and com­mu­ni­cate to upper man­age­ment the results of the R&D Cen­ter and how it impacts the busi­ness in terms they could under­stand. Basi­cally the same com­mu­ni­ca­tion issue I faced when I was a teach­ing assis­tant in both direc­tions, from me to the stu­dents and from the stu­dents to me. And quite hon­estly, I found that the same tech­niques worked.

Before every pre­sen­ta­tion you make, but espe­cially every pre­sen­ta­tion to man­age­ment, make sure

• You can clearly express to your­self what point you wish your audi­ence wants to leave under­stand­ing – I made a point of think­ing through what the stu­dents really needed to under­stand before each lab or class ses­sion. If I could not express this to myself, in one or two sim­ple sen­tences, then I knew I was going to be scram­bling once I got started with the ses­sion. The same is true with any pre­sen­ta­tion you make in indus­try. Before you stand up, if you can­not sum­ma­rize the point you are try­ing to make in one or two sen­tences, you will stum­ble some­where in your presentation.
• Keep the jar­gon, buzz-words, equa­tions to a min­i­mum – they have their place and are appro­pri­ate for use when com­mu­ni­cat­ing to man­age­ment, but only if they terms or sim­ple equa­tions are ones that are likely to be used repeat­edly in non-technical dis­cus­sions and if sim­ple def­i­n­i­tions either have already been giv­ing to your audi­ence or if you have the oppor­tu­nity to slowly walk through the definition.
• If you are asked a ques­tion to which you do not know the answer, SAY YOU DO NOT KNOW! Say you will get the answer. Com­mit to when you will have the answer or when you will be able to com­mit to a date for pro­vid­ing the answer. But NEVER, NEVER, NEVER make up an answer on the fly. Fastest way to sent your career down in flames!
• Take your time! Prob­a­bly the biggest mis­take I see young sci­en­tist make when brief­ing man­age­ment is try­ing to present too much infor­ma­tion. Pace your pre­sen­ta­tion to your audi­ence. Pay close atten­tion to how they are react­ing to the presentation.
  • I can assure you that there is a greater chance that you will fin­ish with no ques­tions, be thanked, and find that for some rea­son your career ends up rel­e­gated to being just one of the middle-of-the-road posi­tions if the first few times you brief man­age­ment you buzz through page after page filled minute detail.
  • On-the-other-hand, I am fairly cer­tain that if in your first few oppor­tu­ni­ties to brief man­age­ment, you present a clear state­ment sup­ported by easy to fol­low, clear sup­port­ing detail pre­sented at a sum­mary level; when asked any ques­tions, you answer directly, tak­ing time to make sure the per­son ask­ing the ques­tion feels they under­stand the answer to their sat­is­fac­tion; that you are very care­ful not to devi­ate you dis­cus­sion off into top­ics unre­lated to the issue being dis­cussed; then you will fin­ish, be thanked, and find that you are asked to brief man­age­ment again, likely asked to take addi­tion respon­si­bil­i­ties, and if you con­tinue to per­form well, advance to higher and higher lev­els within your company. 

Never for­get, you are being paid to do the tech­ni­cal work. Man­age­ment expects your work to be accu­rate and com­plete. In gen­eral, you will find that when you enter into a posi­tion, you enter being trusted. If you give man­age­ment rea­son to believe this trust is jus­ti­fied, you will be drawn fur­ther and fur­ther into the trusted cir­cle. If you give man­age­ment rea­son not to trust you, you will find they have the mem­ory of ele­phants, very long! This is actu­ally easy to under­stand. Your input is used to make deci­sions. Bad infor­ma­tion leads to bad deci­sions, Bad deci­sions leads to bad busi­ness per­for­mance. Bad busi­ness per­for­mance costs man­age­ment, and you, their jobs.