For Students

Here I collect information about general expectations and other aspects of doing research in our group, including links to resources that students may find useful. I took inspiration (sometimes heavily) from my friends and colleagues Scott Hughes and Vitor Cardoso.

Core values

Respect and inclusion. All members of our group must treat each other with respect. We value our diverse skill sets, career paths, and personal backgrounds. We strive to speak and act in ways that support and include all members of our community.
Collaboration and mutual support. Physics is a social activity. Working as a team is key to solving problems and overcoming adversity. We support and help each other at all times. We all go through hard times. Remember that you are not alone and seek help when you need it.
Mentorship. We all learn how to do physics through the mentorship we have received and continue to receive throughout our career. Value your mentors and try to be a good mentor.

Communication

Group members are expected to remain in communication as often as possible.

Group meetings and journal clubs. All group members are expected to participate in our regular group meetings and journal clubs. We typically have one group meeting and one journal club every week during the academic term, with occasional gaps due to academic overload or travel.
Slack and email. Please use Slack for day-to-day communication (examples: social activities, scheduling meetings, attending talks in the department, working on figures…), but try to use email for permanent items that we may find useful in the future (examples: Mathematica notebooks or python codes, paper submission emails, pdf drafts). Slack messages will get lost!
Working together. Students are expected to seek mentorship and help from postdocs in our group. Remember that we work as a team! I will devote as much time as possible to meet with students outside of the regular group meetings to discuss technical issues or while working on papers.
Absences. Sometimes an absence is inevitable. If circumstances are going to keep you out of contact for extended periods, please let me know.
Vacation. The following text is the University’s official policy: “PhD student workers may take 15 days of paid vacation per fiscal year in addition to university holidays. The number of vacation days will be prorated for appointments that span less than the entire fiscal year. Additional vacation time may be granted by the PhD student worker’s supervisor. PhD student workers must make a written request for vacation days in advance to the designated supervisor and receive written approval, which will not be unreasonably withheld. Supervisors should follow their department’s/division’s processes for record-keeping of vacation requests and approvals. These vacation days are with respect to their work duties, not their academic requirements. As an example, a PhD student worker cannot decide to skip an exam because they are on vacation.”

Goal setting and expectations

Research goals and career goals. As you learn during orientation, the Johns Hopkins Department of Physics and Astronomy has “official” ways to monitor your progress through the Research Exam and the Graduate Board Oral examination (GBO). Each group member will formulate goals for what they hope to achieve both in the short term (e.g., in a semester or academic year) and in the long term (what are you career goals?). These goalposts will shift over time. Remember that relativistic astrophysics and gravitational waves are a very competitive field. I expect you to be doing research because you are passionate about it. I wrote down some of my personal motivations for doing research in the intro of a popular science book by Vitor Cardoso. Please talk to me if you feel like you are not meeting your expectations or if you are considering other career paths. I am here to help.
Financial support. I generally try to support students over an academic year with a mixture of TA and RA funds. When we are approaching the end of a grant cycle, extra TA duties may be necessary. Priority is given to making sure that all students have summer support, and that “terminal students” do not have TA distractions while applying for jobs. Be proactive and look for financial opportunities. Receiving fellowships can significantly boost your CV. These include NSF Fellowships (for US national students), the NASA FINESST program, and several national fellowships for international students (in the past, students in our group were supported by Italian grants, the Croucher Foundation in Hong Kong, and the Onassis foundation in Greece).
Travel support. Remember: physics is a social activity. You should join the American Physical Society (APS) and the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (DGRAV). As you become productive researchers, it is of highest priority that your accomplishments be recognized. Attending conferences (both small workshops and large conferences, such as the APS April Meeting and the GR-Amaldi conferences) is important. This is where you get opportunities to advertise your work, start external collaborations, and meet your future employers. As you get close to graduation, try to identify departments that are particularly active in your own research field and visit them to present your work. Discuss your travel plans with me before you travel. I don’t want to micromanage because this is the job of our grant administrators, but it’s important to give me at least an estimate of the cost of the travel before you request support. In general I will do my best to support your travel using my grants, but please keep in mind that there are several opportunities to receive external support. If you give a talk, the hosting department may be able to cover some of your expenses. The APS Division of Gravitational Physics (DGRAV) and Division of Astrophysics (DAP) both offer travel support for student attendance to the APS April Meeting, and other professional societies sometimes offer grants to support student travel. I will advertise these opportunities through our mailing list. Please apply. Any external financial support that you can get will help us all. We work as a team.
Resources. The webpage of the Department’s Committee for Diversity and Inclusion has a list of useful resources available to students. See in particular the workflow for submitting a complaint or concern.

Unsolicited advice

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987), 26. (Thanks to Hector Okada da Silva for the audio link!)

Work. Work. Work. As a friend once told me: “When I start reading one of Chandra’s books, I feel like I can run with him. Then I realize that I am running a sprint, and he is running a marathon.” If you are here, I already know that you are smart. Everyone in a physics department is pretty smart (ok, almost everyone). However, remember: science is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. To be successful in the long term in academia, you need more than technical problem solving skills. You must develop the ability to identify the most important problems that you can actually solve, or where you can at least make a valuable contribution. How do you learn this? By reading.
Read. Read as much as you can. A great part of any good researcher’s time is spent reading. Read critically. When Isaac Rabi was in school, his mom would not ask him what he learned. She would rather welcome him home by saying: “Did you ask a good question today?” When you read a paper, question everything. What assumptions were made? Are they justified? What can you do better? Most research ideas are incremental, and they come from fixing flaws in other people’s work. As an active researcher, you must know what the community is working on. Most good researchers start their day by checking the arXiv (or if they are workaholics like me, they check before going to bed). Check the arXiv daily. The most useful subcategories for us (depending on your personal taste and skill set) are gr-qc, astro-ph, hep-th, and hep-ph. The number of papers coming out daily on arXiv and in specialized journals (PRD, PRL, ApJ, MNRAS, Nature, Science…) can be overwhelming, but you must follow the literature. Try to read at least one paper each day. This is hard, but that’s why we have journal clubs. We vote for papers (at the moment we use benty fields). Choose one paper per week for a “deep dive” and present it during the journal club. You don’t need to understand every detail of the papers you read. Start from generalities: try to understand the problem that the authors are addressing, why it is interesting, and how they are solving it. Papers often come with open source software that can be useful for your work. Keep track of this software. Even if the details are unclear to you at first, over time you will develop a set of tools that will turn out to be useful when you least expect it. Knowing what to read is a learning process. The more you read, the easier it becomes to tell good and bad papers apart. You will soon realize who is doing the best work, pay special attention to their papers, and start emulating their style when you write your own papers. Some years ago I prepared a list of Classic Papers: it’s a good starting point. Finally, checking good popular science magazines is sometimes helpful to catch important works that you missed.
Write and share your work daily. As you work on technicalities, it’s easy to forget that science is not just about problem solving. Half of your job consists of communicating your results clearly. If you can’t explain your work to your dentist, you probably don’t understand it well enough. As soon as you start your project, create a paper draft in overleaf or git. Collect all intermediate results and figures there. Share the draft and the rest of your work (notebooks, codes) with your coauthors. It doesn’t matter if the draft is not perfect and the codes are buggy! Remember: perfect is the enemy of good. Sharing your work and writing as you go has three main advantages: (1) Your coauthors can keep track of your progress and give you feedback daily. (2) Writing cleans up your mind. If your coauthors don’t understand what you are doing, it’s probably because you don’t fully understand it either. (3) When the time comes to wrap things up, most of your work will be done. I have a lot of opinions about how to write a good paper. If you are writing your first paper, you may want to go through Kip Thorne’s 1987 tips about technical writing. Many of the technical details may be outdated, but his general advice about writing is still spot on.
Talk. Don’t stay home all day. There’s a lot of clever people in the department and at the Space Telescope, just across the street. Go have coffee and lunch and beer (if you drink) with them. Pick their brains and force them to pick yours. Try to find out the state of the art in their field. Can you make valuable contributions?
Listen. Did I mention that physics is a social activity? Learn how to listen. Everyone is always eager to present their work. Don’t talk over other people. Many of us are shy, but we all have something valuable to say. Talk to students, postdocs and visitors. Find out what the visitors are doing. Take them out for coffee or dinner. As shocking as that may sound, other people may even point out that you are wrong! We are all occasionally wrong. I learned that from my wife. As John Wheeler used to say, the best physicists are those who make as any mistakes as possible, as fast as possible.
Be on time. Nobody likes to wait. If you respect and value other people’s time, they will return the favor.
Work. Work. Work. Don’t close yourself in your little bubble. If you are a theoretician, learn numerical methods and data analysis. If you are a data analyst or a numerical relativist, learn the theory behind your work. Learn new tools and new methods. Learn. It will pay off.

Presentations

Public speaking may be daunting, but if you want to pursue an academic or research career, you will have to present your work to the community. This means that you must know how to talk in front of an audience. The most common way to do this is through seminars. Your calculations will not be read nor understood until you convince others that they are important. Promoting your work is a key part of building your reputation within (and beyond) the scientific community. A good talk or presentation can make all the difference in getting a job or a grant.

Understand your audience. Find out who you are talking to. Adapt the content and your presentation to the audience. Take into consideration their level of expertise and interest in your topic.
Practice. Especially at the beginning, try to mimic the same conditions you will have in the real presentation. Ask friends and colleagues to point out your speaking flaws and to give you feedback. Always test the technical aspects before the seminar. Be in the seminar room ahead of schedule. Test your laptop, slideshow, sound, projectors, etcetera – there is nothing more embarrassing than having to fix these things in front of a large audience. For online talks, make sure that your camera is well oriented and that your microphone is working properly before the seminar. Find a quiet room with good lighting and no distractions in the background.
Speak slowly and loudly. Prepare very well the beginning of your talk: a good start will make you feel more relaxed. Be aware of the weak spots of your work are and prepare for potential tricky questions. It helps you to remain calm and sound more confident. If needed, ask for a microphone. Spend time introducing and motivating the work you are describing. Tell the audience what you are doing and why they should care.
Keep your slides simple. Too many slides mean that you will have to talk too fast, and your audience won’t be able to follow. Too much content on one slide will make your message less clear. Two simple rules: (1) have at most one idea per slide; (2) never have more than one slide every two minutes (unless you are giving a very short talk). Slides are meant as a means of supporting what you are saying, they are not the talk. Don’t expect people to read them. Avoid equations and technicalities at all costs. Make sure that your plots are clear and attractive. Do not explain every detail of your work, even if some of it is mentioned in your slides. Do not be afraid of oversimplifying if you are having trouble communicating your message within the allotted time. This will attract “easy” questions that will give you a chance to explain the technicalities. Always look at the audience, not at the slides. Throw in some jokes if you think that it’s appropriate and that it helps the flow of your talk. If you lose the attention of the audience, your talk is useless.
Be focused. What is your message? Select 2 or 3 main points. Present them at the very beginning and reinforce them throughout the presentation, particularly when you are giving longer talks. This helps the audience to keep track of what you are doing and why.
Be consistent. Find a powerpoint/keynote/beamer… template and stick with it. Avoid using different background colors or changing font from slide to slide. Choose your fonts wisely (no Courier Sans!) and use one, or at most two, fonts in your presentation. The font size should be large enough for it to be readable at the back of the room. Don’t fill your slides with equations, unless they are really necessary.
Be spare. Too many colors can be distracting. Use two or at most three-color schemes. Use contrasting colors for text and background. For example, use a light colored font on a dark background, or dark fonts on a light background. Avoid patterned backgrounds, they reduce readability. Avoid fancy slide transitions and sound effects if they are unnecessary.
Give credit. This is perhaps the most important advice. Always acknowledge the authors of images, plots or results that you use. Check if you are allowed to use the material. Just because you found it online, it doesn’t mean it’s up for grabs. If you give people credit, they will (usually) return the favor. Be kind.
Use good quality images and plots. If possible, use the same plotting style throughout your talk. Make sure that the presentation is aesthetically pleasant.
Engage with the audience and be inclusive. Don’t turn your back to your audience while you speak. It makes you look insecure and it distracts the audience. If you are giving an online seminar, turn the camera on and show your face. It makes the experience more pleasant and helps to keep your audience engaged. Avoid rhetorical questions.
Respect your audience. Don’t assume that the audience knows as much as you do about the topic of your talk (they probably don’t). Don’t be arrogant: avoid at all costs expressions like “as we all know…”, ”it is well-known that…”, or “I’m sure you have never seen this before”. Check the pulse of your audience by gauging their reaction. If they seem lost, pause and ask if anyone has questions (this is even more important in online talks, where people often keep their cameras off). If you feel that no question is coming, just move on. It may be useful to coordinate with the seminar organizers on how to keep track of questions (do they prefer to have questions during the talk or at the end?)
Don’t go over time. It is extremely impolite to go beyond your allotted time slot. Respect the next speaker and the audience.

Job Applications

To get a career in academia you need a job. To get a job, you need to apply for it. Applying for jobs and grants is an essential part of the life of a researcher. Success rates are very low. Don’t get discouraged.

Here I list some tips to help guide you through this process. Some of them are just common sense, but hopefully you will find them useful. A very useful page (especially if your main research interests are in astrophysics) is Floor Broekgaarden’s collection of resources for early career astronomers.

Work. This is by far the most important aspect. Do a lot of research, and make sure that it’s relevant to a good fraction of the community. Travel, give talks, and understand your community. Who is doing the most relevant work? Why is that work relevant? Valuable research is not just about solving problems, it’s about solving important problems. One or two years after the beginning of your PhD, you should be independent and able to identify the research problems that are most relevant and useful for your career.
Showcase your work. After getting the work done, you have to tell others about it. People should recognize you by your track record and be aware of your main contributions. Personal contact with colleagues (and potential future employers) is a key factor. Don’t stick to your department or university. Engage colleagues in other institutions and countries. Make your talks attractive. Show enthusiasm. Conferences and workshops are great, but departmental seminars are perhaps your best chance to impress someone. Use these opportunities to socialize with people and understand what they do.
Do some scientific outreach. Outreach is much more important than you may think at first. It is not only a way to engage with society, but also an opportunity to test and improve your communication skills. Kids and young adults often ask deep questions. Explaining your work to a lay audience is fun, rewarding, and gives you a broader view of science and why we do it.
Collaborations. Large collaborations such as the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration or the LISA Consortium are essential to get “big science” done, but do not join them just because you think they are an easy way to get papers out. Do not build a CV based exclusively on publications with hundreds of authors. The community knows who makes important contributions in long author list publications, and usually rewards the most active members of large collaborations appropriately.
Know when to stop. A career in science is not the best fit for everyone. If you are unhappy or you just run out of attractive job offers, consider looking beyond academia. I have my own opinions about the pros and cons of industry versus academia, and I’d be happy to share them if this becomes an option that you may be willing to consider.
Plan in advance. Start preparing job applications well in advance. The deadline for most “ordinary” postdoc applications is usually in November or December, but you have to be proactive and prepare the ground for application season. The odds of landing a job are very low, so you should be prepared to submit many applications (typically much more than 10). The most prestigious US Fellowships (such as the NASA Hubble Fellowship, the Pappalardo Fellowship at MIT, etcetera) are exceptionally competitive. Try to get hold of a copy of previous applications from successful applicants: the quality of those applications is often eye-opening. Monitor the relevant websites and mailing lists, some of which are listed at the end of this document. The Astrophysics Rumor Mill and the Particle Physics Rumor Mill are full of gossip, but they are often useful. Book departmental seminars, visit other groups, attend conferences, start new collaborations, and just ask around to find out what opportunities are available.
Curriculum Vitae. A strong and well-written CV is important. Update it regularly. Highlight your main achievements and awards. Include a list of your publications with links to the papers, preferably in reverse chronological order. While having a good CV helps, ultimately it’s the actual work that you have done that matters.
Research Statement. Many positions require a research statement. While it’s useful to have a general template, the length and format of the research statement depend on the type of grant, fellowship or position that you are applying for. Find out the rules. Identify who you would be working with and the areas of common interest. If you are really interested in a specific position, show that you care by carefully adapting your generic research statement to the host group. Try not to sound too narrow, and show your willingness to explore new and different research directions.
Reference Letters. Most applications require 2 or 3 reference letters. These letters are a very important component of your application. In fact, they can make it or break it. You should make sure that your referees are willing to write a very strong letter. If they hesitate, you should probably ask someone else. Do not ask someone to write you a letter just because they are well known. Well known people are very busy, and they may not write the best letters. Your closest collaborators are usually the best choice, because they really know you and they can highlight your qualities. Remember also that senior academics are very busy – the more senior they are, the busier! Make sure to ask for letters at least one month before the deadline, and even earlier if at all possible.

Useful links

Academic Jobs Online This is the “official” website for academic jobs used by most institutions.
Hyperspace Once known as the “MacCallum list” but now maintained by Luciano Rezzolla, this is the official channel for all gravity/general relativity related information. Sign up also for their mailing list.
INSPIRE jobs This is where most high-energy physics related jobs are posted.
AAS jobs Same as above, but for astronomy related jobs.
DGRAV Become a member of the Division of Gravitational Physics. Some gravity related jobs in the US are posted through the DGRAV mailing lists of the American Physical Society (APS).
APS Physics Jobs Board The APS now favors posting jobs to their official jobs board.
Physics Today Jobs is another good resource (mostly for faculty jobs).
NASA Hubble Fellowship Program These US-based Fellowships are exceptionally competitive but very prestigious. They can be taken to an academic institution of your choice (within certain limits).
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships These European Fellowships are also very competitive and prestigious. There is a “global” program that can be used to work at US-based institutions for part of the fellowship.
NASA Postdoctoral Fellowships This is NASA’s official postdoctoral program that can be used to join one of the NASA centers (I had one of these at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
Newton International Fellowships are for early career non-UK scientists who wish to conduct research in the UK. Similar fellowships are also available from the Royal Astronomical Society.
Floor Broekgaarden’s webpage has a great collection of hints to apply for PhD programs, postdocs, and faculty positions.

Emanuele Berti