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Re: Lab Report



I never thought of CIT as a trade school - my best HS sci. friend attended. He
gave me a tour of the experiments he was doing and I was duly impressed. Well,
that's two out of three.

I must have been very lucky not to have any of the bad experiences recounted, and
I hope I have helped ensure the same for the many students who've taken the labs
I've taught or managed.

When I went to school there were no electives, so I couldn't avoid any possibly
lame courses, no TA's, and, except for a recent Ph.D. from UCB, none of the
instructors were green.

When I first started managing at UCSC, the intro. lab consisted mainly of
experiments made in house in the '60's. They were ingenious and constantly
required repair. However, I required the TA's to do the lab before the students
arrived and at least cursorily verify that all the "set ups" worked. The full
time LD manager and our student workers kept them going.

I was always available in the intermediate and advanced labs to assist the
students -- green TA's (we tried to keep each TA as long as possible for the UD
labs.) would immediately come by to learn. The instructor was present about a
third of the time and available by 'phone usually otherwise. So the s/i varied
from ~ twelve => three to one at any particular time. Occasionally the Advanced
lab. prof. was green and required much asistance. The Adv. lab is universally
considered as the most difficult (under grad.) course in the dept. -- even so
written in the syllabus. Initially, the equipment was in cabinets (only one
station -- EPR) and the students had to use some judgment in choosing what they
needed. The first two or three meetings the instructor discussed the theory of
the experiments and general experimental techniques. Attendance was six hours /
week (ten weeks), but most most spent > ten for most of the experiments. Usually
about sixteen experiments of eighteen were available. They were classed is
several groups and min. of one from each group required. Of the total one report
was in AIP journal style and one required extensive statistical analysis. As the
enrollment has increased and the faculty evolved, the trend is to stations and a
more "cook book" nature, sad.

Enuff.

bc

P.s. I had to paint "ADV. LAB." on the equip. with large type stencil, so I could
recover equip. the research students stole!

"John S. Denker" wrote:

Bernard Cleyet wrote:

Just as I thought, the more renowned (and expensive) the school the worse the
undergrad teaching.

I'm not sure about that. It depends.

I went to a rather expensive and rather well-known
little trade school in Pasadena. I have no complaints
about the undergrad instruction there. Quite the
opposite, really. They had some fairly lame required
freshman lab courses, but I sorta forgot to sign up for
those. Still, I spent plenty of time in labs. Real labs.
The sort of labs where everything works. I'll never
forget my first lab experience. I was 16 years old.
I poked my nose into a random lab and saw Ricardo Gomez
hard at work. (I knew who he was, because he was our prof
in Physics 1.) He had taken apart a PDP-11. It was
probably one of the first PDP-11s ever made. He said
he'd decided he didn't like how the PDP-11 interrupt
handling worked, so he was going to fix it. He
was busy soldering in an extra NAND gate (riding
piggy-back on another chip), cutting traces
on the PC board, and running wires over to the
new gate. Didn't take long. I'd never even seen
a computer before, and here was this guy taking
one apart and hot-wiring it.

The rest of the room looked like the bridge
of the starship Enterprise, only a lot more
impressive, because it was all real. Nothing
was fancier than it needed to be. Nothing was
gold-plated unless it really needed to be.
But you could tell in an instant that these were
high-class dudes and they really, really cared
about this lab setup. That PDP-11 wasn't the
only thing in the room that had been hot-wired
to make it better than new.

Ricardo gave me a job building stuff for the lab,
so I wound up spending lots of time there. I also
spent time in other labs, and they were all pretty
nice places. Lots of cleverness. Rack upon rack
of amazing things.

I went off to Cornell for grad school. I went out
there in June and spent the summer in the research
lab for a few months before the start of classes.

They had a required grad-student lab course that
I couldn't weasel out of. It was baaaad. It was
almost as messed up as the one that provoked this
thread:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

I borrowed all sorts of extra instrumentation
from the research lab, and I went down to the
machine shop and built new components for the
apparati, and I could still barely get the stinkin
things to work. I went to the library and found
the journal article that described how the critical
point setup was supposed to work, and it was
almost like somebody had sabotaged it on purpose.
You were supposed to make three measurements
resulting in three lines on a graph. The point
of intersection was the answer. Three lines
gave you a small triangle that told you something
about the experimental uncertainty. But our
apparatus was built with only two samples, so
you only could get two lines; no triangle!
So how am I supposed to do the error analysis?!?!
And the NMR apparatus was built with bits of
ferromagnetic stuff in the field, which messed
everything up. And the Mössbauer apparatus had
a 57Fe sample that was ferromagnetic, which
shifted everything about a gazillion percent
from where it was supposed to be -- and apparently
nobody had noticed before. The instructor gave
me a bad grade for getting the wrong answer,
but he had to change it when I cut off a bit
of the sample and brought it to him, dangling
from a magnet. Aaaaarrgghhhhhhh!

I felt pretty sorry for myself, and I felt
even sorrier for the other first-year grad
students, especially the theorist-types, who
didn't realize that this junk wasn't real
physics.

===========

I'm amazed that Ivy League teaching isn't any
worse than it is. Nobody there gets recruited
to teach, or paid to teach. They get recruited
to do research, and paid to do research. Some
of them turn out to be decent teachers, but you
can't count on it.

There is, however, one reason why a clever person
might want to attend a big-name school: The other
students. If you go to a third-rate school, it
doesn't matter how talented the teachers are; they
will have to water-down the coursework to match
the level of the students. OTOH if you find a
place where you are surrounded by really, really
clever students, you might learn more walking to
class than you learn during class.