Fermilab is a wonderful place to travel to in the late summer or fall. The site of the laboratory is a wide chunk of land just east of the Fox river, 30 miles west of Chicago. It is home to not just physicists and engineers, but to a wide variety of animals. Geese on their way South stop yearly in the lake in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall, and many of them decide to spend the winter there, to benefit from the warm waters; deer are copious, but will not be easily seen around, save for the occasional one at times seen standing in the middle of the road at night; buffalos roam within large lots of land outside and inside the ring. Woods, trees with widely varied colours, and prairie make one feel it is a privilege to do Science there.
I will be traveling to Fermilab tomorrow for maybe the hundredth time in over seventeen years of participation in the glorious CDF experiment, to attend to my duties as a Scientific Coordinator of the crew overlooking data taking, which operates 24/7 in the control room sitting on top of the detector. It will be one week of full devotion to an amazing experiment, at a time when most of my energy and all of my brain is busy with organizing analyses for the data that hopefully will be soon collected by a different experiment: CMS at CERN, one of the two detectors that will soon steal the spotlights from CDF and DZERO thanks to the competitor accelerator at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider.
If I were free from obligations and commitments, and I could choose what to work on, I would probably choose to start skimming the huge dataset collected by CDF since 2001 in search for a rare process that caught my imagination eight years ago; a process which was unobservable in the 100 inverse picobarns dataset I had at hand back then, but which has a chance to be measured now, with the sixty-fold larger sample of proton-antiproton collisions now available. It would not advance Science much to search for those events, but it would satiate my curiosity -and curiosity is what drives me most in my job as an experimental physicist.
But obligations and commitments are the things that shape our lives -and justly so: the choice to devote most of my time to CMS was a well-thought one, and I stand by it fully. In a few months, I will hopefully put my hands on 7-TeV proton-proton collisions, and happily forget my relic attraction to CDF data. Still, I wish CDF a bright future. And the future of CDF is now probably going to extend to 2012, and maybe past it. I will continue to participate in CDF as long as I will be allowed to.
Right now, apart from shift duties such as the one I am about to attend for a week, my only real contributions to CDF take two forms. The first one is my participation in Godparent committees -groups of three sages who are assigned the task to take mature analyses by hand, bring them through the approval, and then through the complicated publication process; in the last few years, including 2009, I have taken part on average in two such committees per year. The second is my activity in the Spokespersons Publication Review Group, an official committee elected by the Spokespersons that reviews with care the various versions (two or more) of each and every paper that CDF seeks to publish in scientific journals. This is a demanding job, since CDF publishes about 50 papers per year!
All in all, those tasks take up about 20 percent of my research time. Is it too little to claim I still have a right to sign CDF papers ? This is a rather complicated question to ask, and I will leave to another day to discuss it. Of course, if you have an opinion, do spill your guts.
Comments
J Q | 09/15/09 | 17:44 PM
Anyway meeting in person is becoming obsolete in the XXIst Century!
Cheers,
T.
Tommaso Dorigo | 09/16/09 | 14:56 PM
I have too little experience in the job hunt to be able to write meaningfully on the matter, especially if we are to discuss the US system, as I think was your idea. However, I can give a you my two cents here.
About applications: I think it largely depends on endogenous factors, such as how easy it is for you to twist the arm of a few seniors and get them to send reference letters around, how happy you are with shopping around giving seminars in Universities around the country which may not end up being critical to your future employment, and how picky you are on the place and prestige of the institution that might hire you. It also depends on how easily you get depressed upon being turned down: if you submit applications to places that are quite unlikely to even consider you, it may turn out to result in a depressing wait which does not materialize in an offer for an interview. So it largely depends on data which I do not possess in your case. If you ask whether there are negative sides of submitting many job applications, however, I can think of only one thing: you may end up accepting a position which is not the best you could get, because job offers at the post-doc level cannot be kept on hold for long. So my best advice is to try and assess objectively your chances of getting hired in one of the top places, and maybe try to first apply for a position there.
About changing research topic: that also mostly depends on you to some extent. Of course, if a field of research is very active, it will be advantageous to join it; but be careful to avoid making a wrong choice driven by fashion considerations. If you liked your PhD research topic, and chances are you did, you should not change too much in my opinion, to minimize the risk that you end up doing something which is not interesting or not to your taste. Then, there is a matter of consistency. If in your PhD you became the real expert on a specific topic (and again, chances are you did), you should not waste that experience in search for greener pastures, but try instead to build a reputation through further investigation on closely related topics. This may be ultimately the most important factor in your choice of applications.
Cheers,
T.
Tommaso Dorigo | 09/16/09 | 00:09 AM
In fact I'm doing the PhD in Europe, but I'm looking for a postdoc also in USA... if I end up taking the postdoc of the INFN I'll let you now, and we may run across somewhere :D
Grazie mille!
Ladonim (not verified) | 09/16/09 | 03:36 AM
Good luck with your job search.
T.
Tommaso Dorigo | 09/16/09 | 14:57 PM
Kea (not verified) | 09/16/09 | 04:10 AM
Cheers,
T.
Tommaso Dorigo | 09/16/09 | 14:58 PM
know any of the people to whom I applied (or vice versa). It was a frustrating at times as many people
did no even acknowledge application emails, but eventually I did get one and it worked out well.
so best of luck. But as tomasso said if you are sticking to particle physics and in same sub-field of
research/experiment it should be easy to get positions.
shantanu (not verified) | 09/19/09 | 12:17 PM
nice post!
I'm a PhD student in particle physics and I'm about to apply for a postdoc position in the next months, and I'd like to suggest you to write a post about this issue. I think it's a very complicated decision that can point the future of a researcher, and I'd like to know your opinion about it... is it better to apply to a lot of places or to be selective? is it better to change a bit the research line of the PhD or to go on with it during the postdoc? what about changing it a lot?
Well, that is my suggestion (for my own interest, of course!).