University of Rochester I, a little comedy, a bittersweet farewell

University of Rochester

I was a grad student at the University of Rochester from 1994 to 1999. In retrospect, I would not trade my experiences there for anything. I am deeply grateful to many people there, most importantly my advisor, Emil Wolf,    shown at right at a colloquium lecture at UIUC in 2004.

Pursuing a career in academia is a little like pursuing a career in professional sports, except the pay scales are a little different and the fall back position not quite as far a fall. To ``make it'' one must have a certain combination of talent, accomplishments, personality, pedigree, and contacts. Then one must get really lucky. I am amazed at the number of people I know who would be much better at my job than I am who are still looking for a position.

So, when I write that I would not change a thing, I mean it. It was a delicate, fragile, cascading series of lucky events that gave me the opportunity to land in a tenured faculty job at a top school and graduate study at U of R was a huge part of that diaphanous structure.

A little comedy

I really can't tell my UR story without taking a little air out of the great, over-blown hype ballon that is often encountered in an entering class of grad students. Every year a grad program evaluates how many students they think they can handle, they estimate acceptance rates based on previous years' rates, and they make a number of offers.

In the spring of 1993, UR Physics was looking to bring in 15-20 students for the fall. they made their offers and got 31 acceptances. So they restricted offers in 1994 and brought in my class, a class of eight of the most elite, carefully selected students, the best and brightest class they had ever admitted. We were told this. I'm not sure anyone worried about the message this sent to the class a year ahead of us.

Last I knew, 29 or 30 of the 31 entering students from 1993 finished with a PhD in Physics. The one I am sure didn't finish transfered to a history of science program at another U. Most of those that finished did so in reasonable time, meaning five, six, even seven years. I think there might have been a couple of eight year stragglers. This is a very impressive record for the class of 1993.

After five years, two of my class ( I and Ed Hull ), had finished PhDs. Two more would eventually make it out in seven or eight years. As far as I know, the other four never finished.

My closest friend in grad school was among the four that didn't finish. We studied for and passed the quals together and a semester later Dave explained his decision to quit this way: ``I came to grad school because I believe in pursuing my true love in life. I've come to realize that what I love is money. '' Amen.

I have a lot of respect for Dave because he was able to make a clear-headed choice in a social environment pushing him to ``stick it out,'' as if grad school is just some exercise regimen getting you ready for the day at the beach that will be the rest of your life. If you don't like grad school, you probably won't like the career it prepares you for.

Anyway, our elite little group wasn't so much. I never really believed it anyway, being a subscriber of the Marxist theory of such evaluations. Some people have so much promise they don't have room for anything else. Some people just get busy living.

A bittersweet farewell

We finally get this show on the road tomorrow. We fly out of St Louis at 1:38, spend a few hours in Philadelphia, and take of from there a 9 PM. We land in Schipol at 10:30 AM local time after a seven hour flight. We're all really excited.

So why is the departure bittersweet? 

We'll miss the dog.

We'll also miss being here for the rebirth. 

New camera, stubborn women, the intertubes back on my computer

New camera

We have decent camera that's a couple of years old.  I haven't really paid attention to the consumer camera market.  I work on projects that include 1024 element line cameras for spectroscopy that cost upwards of $10,000.  Yes, that's a 1-D array with a kilopixel for more than ten kilobucks.  So today I decided it would be handy to have a light, cheap, second camera to go along with our five megapixel camera, I was a little astonished to buy an 8MP Nikon CoolPix for about one hundred bucks.  Takes a good picture too.

Stubborn women

Back on the 23rd we got freezing rain here.  I went outside to do something and promptly fell flat.  My mother-in-law rushed out to check on me and did the same.  I've had a run of bad luck lately, injurywise, and figured maybe I broke my elbow.  No, I was fine.  My mother-in-law complained that her wrist was a bit sore.  We encouraged her to go to the ER.  No doing.   The next day it was so sore she couldn't put her car in drive.  Today she agreed to go to the ER, but only because it would allow her to claim sick days at work when she took time off for what she was sure was a sprain.  I offered to drive.  I argued I should drive.  I insisted she let me drive.  Not having any of it. 

So we got a call a few hours later to come pick her up because she has two breaks and couldn't drive home.  

Oh yeah.  She's a nurse.   

I married into this.  And hard-headedness is demonstrably hereditary.   

The intertubes are back on my computer

I finally figured out how to get the modem here to give me a new DHCP lease and got my own machine back on-line.  Yeah.  I have email again (I download everything to a local client and believe that webmail is only for whippersnappers).  I can also upload pictures again as you can see.

The plague, the Christmas

The plague

So I missed a blog cycle (I've been trying for every other day). I have a pretty good excuse. I had the Black Death. Or so it seems. Sometime during the night of the 23rd I started a full system purge that kept me awake and in the bathroom most of the night. The 24th was mostly spent lounging about trying to recharge. Today is ok.

The Christmas

We drove down to the St Louis area to spend Christmas with my mother-in-law. We'll stay with her till we fly out for the NL. Always a good time

Grandma T insists every year, over our protests, that our boys need a huge pile of plastic toys. Despite this training in full-bore, American-style, too-much-is-never-enough consumerism, the boys remain blissfully oblivious. Of course this is Leif's first Christmas with us. Ethan this year asked for two things, Kapla Blocks, and toothpaste. He's a sensible boy. He got those things and was grateful for them. The rest of the pile was appreciated, but he was much more interested in giving out presents to others than in unwrapping his own pile. This makes me pretty happy.

Old friends, old home and a graduation

So I heard from a couple of old friends last week.  High school pals.  Guys I played sports with.   I was a little surprised at how happy I was to hear from them.  Not that I wouldn't have wanted to hear from these guys in particular, but that I was actually happy to be reminded of my home town and my childhood.  I don't go back to the old home very often.  In fact it's been more than a year now and will be closer to two before I do get back at all.  I usually think of going back with a little dread.   I made a point of not being back for my ten year class reunion in 2000.  

So a note from these guys made me wonder why I treat the old hometown with so little regard.  I thought about the rather large number of very fine people I knew back then.  Sure there are a fair number that I am very happy to never see or hear from again, but there were also quite a few that I am sure I would still be fortunate and glad to call my friends.  I think the real problem is this:  I am one of the people I'd be happy not to hear from again.  I was a fairly gung-ho guy, and took myself far too seriously.  I think this was at least in part a reaction to the small-town mentality where people didn't always take themselves or their lives seriously enough.  Now that I work in academia where thou shalt take thyself and thy work quite seriously indeed, I have very little seriousness in me.     Anyway, I try to go easier on myself and the people around me these days and I am afraid I have been projecting my dislike for the kid I was two decades ago onto the people who were kind enough to put up with me back then.   I think I might even try to go back for the 2010 reunion, although a lot of the folks I would really like to see were a little older or a little younger than me.  And the guys that got in touch are definitely among those I'd really like to see.  

About a year ago I tried googling a few old friends mostly out of curiosity. Maybe I'll give that another try soon.  I'm sure a trip home next summer could put me in touch  with a lot of people just by walking up and knocking on some real-life, actual, solid, 3-D, not-an-avatar, undigitized doors.  

One of the very few things I am serious about is the mentoring of students.  I was most pleased and proud to attend graduation ceremonies for Andy Mitofsky this weekend.  Andy wrote a lovely PhD thesis under me and today is teaching at Trine University.  I'm very proud of Andy and I was really happy to see that she seems to be really happy.  

The University of Illinois and hardening up

So I thought I'd try to continue with building some background for the blog with some specifics about the stuff in my life in it.

The University of Illinois

I work at the University of Illinois.  That means I'm an employee of the state of Illinois.  That's good and bad.  The retirement benefits are ok and we enjoy some protections I suppose we might not at a private university.  It also means that we are bearing an certain bureaucratic burden. This burden has been increasing in an attempt to answer what is seen to be a culture of corruption in the state government.  Imagine that.  It's understandable, but it doesn't make it any more fun for an honest man stuck dealing with rules set up to deal with crooks. 

I am an alumnus of the U of I myself.  I took a BS in Engineering Physics in 1994.  It was a great place to be an undergrad.  The town exists largely because the U is here and so it's pretty student-friendly.  There are lots of student-priced ethnic food joints and cool places to hang out that won't cost you an arm and a leg.  This also makes it a nice place to live as an ``adult.''  The educational experience was a notch above.  I was incredibly well prepared for grad school and I had a chance to do research with John Tucker and got my first paper out of it.  The best thing I got out of it was that I met, and in my senior year started dating, the woman who would be my wife. I've attached my favorite picture ever.  Not my favorite picture of my wife, my favorite picture ever.  It pretty much says it all and you can see why this trumps anything else I may have gotten out of the experience.

My feelings about the U of I are best explained in a story about someone who doesn't have much love for the school.  The wife of a friend of mine, an old roommate of mine actually, got all her degrees, including her PhD, at very expensive private schools.  I needle her about this occasionally and she's often looking for ammunition to fire back . It's all pretty good-natured.  Mostly.  Anyway, my buddy and I were talking about how, at something like five or six thousand bucks a year for tuition, it's a hell of a deal.  The physics department is consistently ranked in the top ten in the country, and his home department, ECE (now my home department) floats between 4th and 2nd nationally.  There's frequently a Nobel laureate to be found in the halls and the folks are just plain nice.   So she chimes in with, "That's the thing about you Illini.  You get a couple of you in the room and all you do is go on and on about what a great place it was, what a great deal it was, how much you liked it, how well it set you up for your careers.  My classmates and I don't do that." Well, yes.  Indeed.  We just looked at her and let it sink in for a while.  

Hardening up

So I quit my whining, taped up the pinky that now looks more like a thumb and played ball today like an Illini.  My shot is so bad to begin with that it really didn't matter.  I cleaned out my locker and am planning to take the shoes to Holland in hope of finding a game there and learning the Dutch for ``Foul, you clumsy american!''

Second post and already faltering

Another post.  Mostly just to try to develop the habit.  

Gads.

OK.  I read the first entry and realized there are probably some problems with the approach I'm taking.  I was hoping to write in a somewhat generic style without too much reference to the particulars of my own life.  I was hoping to avoid the narcissism that now seems unavoidable in  these public- diary-type blogs.  Well, it seems generic alright, and so boring I'm not even interested.

So here are some particulars to be followed with more on other nights:

My name is P. Scott Carney.  I am a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.  I got my PhD in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1999.  I was an undergrad in physics at the U of I.   I grew up in upstate New York.  My wife is a full-time mom and formerly a development officer with the university.  We've been married ten years.  my boys are 5 and 1.  

I'm fairly athletic, or at least active.  I bike a lot.  I am a weightlifter (all one word, if you don't know the significance, you won't care). I play basketball very badly but am getting a little better.  Today I  dislocated my right pinky at two joints playing ball.  Lucky one of my friends on the faculty is a bad-ass martial artist and he came over after four other guys had been tugging at the thing (yes- please pull my finger, no really, look, it's hideously twisted...) and just popped the thing straight.  He might have sneered at us a little for our unmanliness, but I think he's too nice for that.  

I also submitted a paper for consideration in a pretty good optics journal today.  I do this far too often.  That is, I participate in the extreme overproduction of scientific literature.  Much of it goes totally unread because, if it didn't, all scientists would do is read the literature. Sigh... anyway, I try to only submit things I am really excited about and genuinely believe may help someone else in her own research or might be important in another field.  I have to admit though that  after a few years I have become consistently unimpressed with my own work.  So I think the stuff I'm doing now is good and important, but ask me again in 2012.    OK, I take that back.  I still like two of my old papers.  I have 55 peer-reviewed publications.  

OK.  I'm going to take some more pain meds and go to bed.

Here's apic of my poor swollen pinky.  Whah.  And yes, those are diaper ans wipes behind me because that's how I roll.

Welcome

Welcome to my little blog.  

I'm a professor of engineering on sabbatical in Holland.  

I have to admit some embarrassment in writing this blog.  I'm an academic and live in a little college town.  My friends have blogs.  My neighbors have blogs.  My old college office mate has a blog.  The students have blogs.  The mail carrier has a blog.  

I don't read any of them.    I've tried, but I can't stay with it.     I can't see how my life or what I have to say will be any more interesting.  However, I am about to take money from the good people at the Fulbright Foundation and they would like me to document my experiences.  They don't require a blog, but they do require a report that I might like to compile from some of these entries.  Maybe you too are going to Holland for an extended visit, or you really like bikes, or you are into theoretical optics and physics, or you find the daily doings of a midwestern engineering professor in Europe really compelling.  What ever keeps you reading, I hope you enjoy it.

So that's my excuse. 

Since I'll be a representative of both the Foundation and the US government, I'm going to try to suppress  my natural tendencies to curse, to be snarky and sarcastic, and generally to attempt to p**s people off just to see how they react.  We'll see how that goes.

My prediction is that I will post less and less frequently so that by March I have one or two entries, maybe one in April and then I forget how to navigate to the site where I log in to edit this thing.  So keep checking back.

Did you know I'm kinda famous for my motivational talks?