Personal thoughts about science, academia, and beyond.
Norma. Sculpted by Abram Belskie from the averaged measurements of 15,000 women. She matched none of them. This is a story about designing institutions for people who don't exist, and what happens to the people who do. It starts with fighter jets, but it ends with graduate students and postdocs and tenure committees, all sitting in cockpits built for someone else. On a single day in the late…
Imagine you're a new assistant professor at a research university. You just got the job, you just got a small pot of startup funding, and you just hired your first two PhD students: Alice and Bob. You're in astrophysics. This is the beginning of everything. You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable,…