Happy Father’s Day to all the dads & families!! We are going out to a BBQ later today!
Some of the approaches to math in my younger D’s common core workbook are so tortured it’s unreal. Her math teacher (who is wonderful) feels no compunction about skipping the sections she finds particularly useless. The real killers are the written explanations kids are expected to do describing “how” they solved very elementary math problems. My DH, who has very little patience for these things lol tried to get her to write “because I’m not an idiot” as her answer, but law abiding D refused. 
Happy Father’s Day to the dads here!
(We are taking DH out kayaking and then to late lunch. Son made apple crepes for breakfast.)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Let him do what he loves 
knowing it might take over 10 years after a PhD from a prestigious university and several cross-country moves between top institutions before landing a potentially permanent position. This is very common among the people I’ve met over the years at top universities. Few succeed in staying in the filed while most struggle and stay at temporary positions. However, it is decided early enough. If one doesn’t find a position by 35 yrs or 10 years after a PhD, it is unlikely to do so later.
He might change, even during graduate school. It is hard to imagine a life where one has to pack up every couple of years and move to different places especially with family with little kids. It gets harder with school-aged children.
There is nothing wrong with pursuing the most intriguing and challenging topics in youth. Also, there is nothing wrong in moving onto a completely different field. The world is full of interesting problems to solve.
To tag on to what @payn4ward wrote, I’m one of the lucky ones who landed a tenure-track job right out of grad school. That was, in great part, timing, however—with the exception of a very, very few fields, that simply doesn’t happen anymore, and the odds of anyone landing a tenure-track job are steadily dropping as academia moves to a more private-business-style model.
As a result, if any students express interest to me in getting a PhD (no matter the field they’re interested in), I give them two pieces of advice:
[ul][]Don’t do it. Unless you can’t imagine your life being complete without beating your head against esoterica in an often futile-feeling attempt to discover things that might not even be discoverable, that is—in that case, then definitely, do it.
[]If you do get a PhD, make sure that you set yourself up for jobs outside of academia. There’s still some resistance by a number of academics to helping their PhD students land non-academic jobs, but that’s slowly changing in a generational shift, as those of us who have come into academia in the last couple decades recognize the importance of not setting brilliant people up for post-PhD failure. (And besides, the more PhDs go into non-academic jobs, the better it is for academic-job PhDs, too.) So make sure that you very, very carefully and directly make certain that the faculty in the department you go into supports graduates going into non-academic jobs.[/ul]
Just looked at D’s HS graduation requirements. 1 year of Visual/Performing arts is a requirement.
@thermom Just another reason to homeschool. I am so not-compliant-and-willing-to-conform to whatever the current mode in fashion is. I raise my kids to question why certain methodologies are in vogue and what the difference is between learning knowledge vs. critical thinking. The joy of being teacher and principal!
@payn4ward and @dfbdfb Thanks for the insight. Ds loves research. He lives and breathes it. I know he recognizes the lack of employment opportunities within certain fields of physics. I have no idea what direction he will go in the future. He is also my child who if he came home and told me he was joining the Jesuits, I would not be phased.
DS17 is not an engineer type so he is not going to be going to Georgia Tech. But today we dropped DS19 off for an engineering camp for the week. I just wanted to say that one of the things that I like about Georgia Tech is even though it’s in Atlanta, the campus is really pretty and it doesn’t “feel” like you are in a big city. So if anyone has kids interested in engineering I would recommend looking at it.
Hope all the dads enjoy their day!
I had a great weekend where I got to hang out with son17, just the 2 of us. Lots of good talks, some laughs, got to watch him play lacrosse, enjoyed some meals together. Perfect Father’s Day!
@Mom2aphysicsgeek If it were logistically feasible to homeschool younger D, I would certainly consider it. Actually, most of her curriculum is fine, it’s just the common core math that makes me a bit batty. I am glad D17 escaped the new protocols. It’s funny because when I first heard the concept of the common core, it sounded like it could be a good idea. The actual execution? Has left me positively baffled.
Also: HAPPY FATHER’S DAY to thems to whom it applies.
@dfbdfb , DH has an engineering PhD, and has worked in industry, instead of academia. I think he had hopes to work in academia, but he was concerned about tenure track.
Good thing about his education, he was able to identify that the stroke that the swimming coaches taught for freestyle was good for short term, but not the best, efficient stroke, as his field is fluid dynamics. He told D to use his stroke instead of the coach’s. D is a good girl who listens to her Dad. Now, years later, many kids around D age in the club have shoulder problems, while D is getting faster and faster every year! Happy Fathers Day to all the dads who care!
@whataboutcollege regarding Duke Engineering, my S14, presently a Biomedical Engineer student at Tulane, really loved Duke. One particular aspect that impressed me was the strong support for studying abroad within engineering curriculum…very unique we found among Engineering programs. I recall we took a tour on a Saturday morning specifically for Duke Engineering School and they even had a woman stationed in a room at the school specifically to talk about study abroad options. It was different…in a good way for us.
DH has a PhD in physics and went the industry route also. It’s been good for him, because we got to stay here in town and like it here. His PhD involved developing a scanning probe microscope, and he’s been in that general field ever since.
As far as the other physics PhDs we were friends with during grad school, a number of them went to various national labs (seemed to be easier for a couple to both get jobs there than at a university). So, we have friends at Los Alamos, Livermore, NIST, and some others. Some are professors, including at Mudd, JHU, Kansas, and some other places. One is very involved with the LHC. At least one went to Wall Street. Several went into industry locally and in Silicon Valley. Probably even more grad students from here are going into local industry now, because a lot of professors have startups or funding for off-campus commercial research.
DS is currently planning on a PhD in physics, though it’s possible he’ll switch to CS. He would love to work for JPL, SpaceX, or something similar one day. I think he’d make a good professor (good at teaching), but that’s not definitely his goal.
A friend works for JPL while his wife teaches at a CSU. What he did for his physics PhD has very little to do with what he does at JPL but that usually does not matter. It used to be (or still is), oh, you have a PhD in physics then you can do anything, here is our technical problem you can solve for us… :))
Math: DS had trouble with the timed math facts tests, especially in 2nd grade. But, it was because of poor fine motor control and difficulty writing fast.
Luckily his 2nd grade teacher was great about it. She told me not to worry because understanding math and timed tests were two different things, and she’d seen a lot of kids who were good at one but bad at the other.
His Montessori preschool/kinder was not so understanding about math and fine motor skills. He kept failing math “works” because although he could write the correct answer, he couldn’t line the beads up to his teacher’s satisfaction.
Materials: @payn4ward Our UC has a whole separate department in Materials under the College of Engineering. They do a lot of cool research. It’s mostly a grad department, though there are some upper division undergrad courses and a fifth year masters. I’m often surprised to see materials research in the physics departments I look at for DS, because to me that belongs in its own department.
Colorado: Welcome @BlueAFMom !! Have fun in Colorado! S17 will be heading out there a week from today for 6 weeks at CU Boulder.
@disshar, Welcome back… While you were gone, The Beatles reunited, @2muchquan created a fake student account on Tinder, and @greeny8 was accused of bring the Zika virus to the US. Other than that, all is the same here.
@BlueAFMom
Agree that you might want to squeeze CSU into your Colorado tour especially if you are from a WUE state. It tends to be a good value.
Duke- Don’t their scholarships require lots of leadership and community service?
baby stats - I taught this a couple of times - then realized I didn’t like teaching.
@Ynotgo There is a lot of overlap between what material scientist/engineers (in college of engineering), materials physicists, and materials chemists do. Yes, there is materials in chemistry department. Then there is bio materials in BME.
Chemists and engineers do, Look! what cool nanocrystals we synthesized, and here is the scanning microscope picture! and it gets published in journals. Material physicists cannot even submit a paper until they can say why the crystals grow that way :-? and what the significance of it is. [-( (I’m biased obviously)
Science Olympiad high school division has material science event for next year and my DS is thinking of competing in it since he is the Chemistry guy on the team.
@nw2this @What!!! Thanks for putting CSU back on my radar! It has been on/off our list but at this point I can’t recall why it fell off…has her major, etc.
It’s closer to Denver than I thought and schedule allows for it so we are signed up.
Sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees in this college search!