The Educator’s Tax

February 24, 2023 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

What is the work we do as educators? “Transfer information” may be the instinctual response, but I want to argue this is wrong, and we’re past the stage where this could have been enough. The short reason is that there are simply too many high quality resources available for learners. From textbooks, blogs, online courses,...

Tractability and Fidelity

January 24, 2023 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

One of my favourite parts about mathematics is its definitive nature. Once you’ve proved a result, it’s true for all of time. We can be confident that the chain of reasoning will hold, even without inspecting every part. This feature of mathematics has let us build incredible structures, and as a bonus, tools to help...

Finishing is a Superpower

December 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

When I was completing my master’s degree, I was excited to be working on new research. While some students in my cohort worked on understanding the literature, my supervisor gave me a novel project we thought we could eventually publish it. The concept was simple and straightforward, motivating me to build the experiments, collect the...

Consuming and Absorbing

November 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

How much do you read in a day? How much do you remember? As a scientist, one of my main jobs is reading papers. This is to learn about new work in my field, understanding the methods of others, and getting ideas for my own work. I also love reading fiction, which I do every...

October 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

More is more. Not better and not progress. More is more. It’s an easy default to act on instead of asking subjective and difficult questions such as: Am I spending my time doing the things I care about? Am I searching for more because I don’t know what else to do? Why do I feel...

Daily Anchor

September 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

If you’re like me, you have a lot of projects going on. I currently have multiple research projects for my PhD, my webcomic Handwaving, my monthly essays here, and some other personal projects in the works. Not only that, but a few of these are open-ended. They don’t have a completion date. And even when...

ComSciCon

August 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

One of the truly sad parts about academia and science is that as you go deeper and deeper into a subject, the circle of people who speak your default language shrinks. Academic siloes are real, and they prevent many scientists from taking a broader perspective of their work and communicating to those without a research...

Scientific Contributions

July 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

How do you contribute to science? My instinctual answer for so long was: become an academic and publish cutting-edge research, pushing humanity’s knowledge forward. This seemed pretty obvious. My reasoning was that scientists are the ones who do the science, so of course that’s the way to contribute. It was part of why I continued...

People

June 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

I think one of the main mistakes I’ve made in the past is discounting the role of people in how much I will enjoy an experience. Whether I was trying a new activity, thinking about work I wanted to do, or pondering which topic I should study, I would focus on the thing itself, and...

Do I Understand You?

May 24, 2022 jeremy Communication, Education and Outreach, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and Astronomy

When I was an undergraduate first getting into research, I focused on hiding my lack of knowledge over growing from my confusion. I would often nod along while my supervisor said things I didn’t understand1. I would fool myself into thinking that I could figure it out from context. I didn’t, since these were technical...

Mathematics and Statistics