(Part 2) Best products from r/AskAcademia

In response to your request for "a book that might help" you decide on physics...

I actually hated my first exposure to physics in high school, but my freshman mechanics course really got me excited about the subject matter. The textbook we used was excellent and is called "An Introduction to Mechanics" by Kleppner and Kolenkow (link).

If you have made up your mind on classical physics, check out an introductory text on Special Relativity. There is a highly readable and mathematically completely unintimidating text by a man named Helliwell (link) that I like! I'll warn that it completely skips a tensor-based approach (which would actually be useful later on) in favor of a trivial-algebra-based approach that does miss out on some of the beauty of the subject but does manage to blow your mind if you've never seen the material before.

There are other books out there that are potentially superior, but these are the ones I like, although I will say that in my opinion nothing beats Kleppner and Kolenkow in clarity or material at its level. I hope this helps, and if it doesn't, shoot me a PM and I'll get back to you!

Good luck!

Edited: formatting, grammar.

Griffiths is the go-to for advanced undergraduate level texts, so you might consider his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Introduction to Particle Physics. I used Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics to teach myself and I thought that was a pretty good book.

I'm not sure if you mean special or general relativity. For special, /u/Ragall's suggestion of Taylor is good but is aimed an more of an intermediate undergraduate; still worth checking out I think. I've heard Taylor (different Taylor) and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics is good but I don't know much more about it. For general relativity, I think Hartle's Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity and Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity are what you want to look for. Hartle is slightly lower level but both are close. Carroll is probably better if you want one book and want a bit more of the math.

Online resources are improving, and you might find luck in opencourseware type websites. I'm not too knowledgeable in these, and I think books, while expensive, are a great investment if you are planning to spend a long time in the field.

One note: teaching yourself is great, but a grad program will be concerned if it doesn't show up on a transcript. This being said, the big four in US institutions are Classical Mechanics, E&M, Thermodynamics/Stat Mech, and QM. You should have all four but you can sometimes get away with three. Expectations of other courses vary by school, which is why programs don't always expect things like GR, fluid mechanics, etc.

I hope that helps!

Books: How to Write a Lot was recently updated. It's a small book by helpful. I think my favorite recommendation in the book was "You probably don't skip class, you don't find excuses to not do your teaching obligations, so why are you often postponing writing?" From that, I blocked out an hour a day to write. That could mean reading papers, but I would also work on summarizing a paper.

When I started to get really critical of my writing, I noted papers that I enjoyed reading. There aren't many of them, so what set them apart? Taking time to just sit and think about what makes a good sentence, paragraph, or section can help improve your writing. For example, when does varying sentence length help or hurt your writing?

Another HUGE impact was co-writing with someone. I told my adviser I wasn't confident in my writing. He had me send my drafts to him, and he would edit with track changes. I critically looked and how and why he moved my sentences around. What did he add that I had excluded? The next round, I tried to emulate that style.

Another good book is The Scientist's Guide to Writing. As a bonus, Dr. Heard provides a syllabus for how he structures his classes around the book.

I hated people who told me to read more to write better. Reading more helped me learn how to phrase things in my field, but the papers were rarely a pleasure to read. Focusing on the English basics and an English writing course can actually help. If you can take a creative writing class, I would recommend it. You get to play with structure and style and work to convey a story in a less rigid way than writing science. Plus, as you develop those skills, they will translate into effective grant writing.

I work at a community college, and we definitely have a significant number of students who are people of color and/or live in economic precarity. So, it sounds like we are interested in working with similar populations of students. Here are a few resources I've found helpful:

Reading on critical pedagogy for a theoretical framework. Freire and Giroux are where I'd start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy

The idea of backward design for semester-length planing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_design

I'm having trouble finding a good resource to link to quickly, but the idea of transparency in lesson design seems important to me.

"How Learning Works" and "What the Best College Teachers Do" for more day to day things:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Learning-Works-Research-Based-Principles/dp/0470484101

https://www.amazon.com/What-Best-College-Teachers-Do/dp/0674013255/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=F2A8M8CSVQKDBS14P2QC



"In The Middle" for a good outline of a workshop approach to teaching writing

https://www.heinemann.com/inthemiddle/

I haven't found a good single book that talks about teaching active reading, but there are a lot of resources online, and I've found teaching it explicitly and modeling it for my students as part of a whole class discussion to work pretty well.

As far as the critical theory aspect of reading (which I do think should be taught early on and even to people who are just beginning to read at the college level) I like "Texts and Contexts" and "Critical Encounters"

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Encounters-High-School-English/dp/0807748927

https://www.amazon.com/Texts-Contexts-Writing-Literature-Critical/dp/0205716741

Hope that's helpful! Good luck to you!

Sure. I left three years into my Ph.D. program, between my second qualifying paper and quals proper, circa 2012. (I reenrolled for a hot second in 2013 to brush off my QP, turn it into a masters' thesis, and defend.)

I had some research-related disagreements with my advisor which were the actual flashpoint, but it was really more a matter of weighing my options: looking at just what I would have to do, and what I might be missing out on, over the next 3-5 years just to have that X% chance at a tenure-track job. I'm also really big on work-life balance, and though academia has been making some improvements there very recently, in most areas it's still got a long way to go.

On the whole, it worked out pretty well: I went into science communication, took a few different jobs, and now I'm working for one of the leaders in the field. I'd definitely set the groundwork for a non-academic career, though, long before I actually left -- volunteering for non-profits, keeping in touch with industry connections, etc -- and I was also fairly successful at turning my academic background into an advantage rather than an irrelevancy: highlighting the interplay between linguistics and communications, bringing quantitative analysis to a field that doesn't always know what to do with metrics, working for organizations which handle scientific research and academic affairs, etc.

So I'd definitely recommend anyone considering a non-academic career (which, frankly, based on the numbers, should be most of us) think about those same things; when I was first starting off, I found Versatile Ph.D and So What Are You Going To Do With That? to be the most useful, but there could be other resources that have popped up since then. No matter which path you take, though, best wishes making it happen!

If you're looking for a course introductory book with some (very little) math, you could look at F.F.Chen, the standard undergrad plasma book. It's a bit simplistic, but it's an easy overview of plasma physics. He also wrote a more pop-sci-esque book that is (supposedly, I haven't read this one) a very good and informative book that avoids math completely.

If you wanted more rigor and details, you can try the Goldston book which has the basic concepts like F.F.Chen without the babying. I used the Goldston to review general concepts sometimes, but with more complicated or modern stuff, you have to just read papers.

Personally, my favorite is the free book/html/pdf offered by Fitzpatrick. It's got good organization, pretty good explanations, and doesn't skirt the mathematics. There are some more detailed books for specific things (such as Ideal MHD by Friedberg, Plasma Diagnostics by Hutchinson, Plasma Waves by Stix, Plasma Astrophysics by Tajima, and a crapton other).

In any case, I would say, go with the pop-sci one if you don't want to look into the math, go into the F.F.Chen intro book if you want to look at math but aren't strong in math, and go with the Fitzpatrick if you want to learn on the side, don't mind the math, and you're pretty good in math.

I use an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. It cost me about $100 a few years ago and is great. However, it looks like the price has gone up considerably:
http://www.amazon.com/Olympus-DS-40-Digital-Voice-Recorder/dp/B003L871OQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1332128720&sr=8-3

It came with a detachable microphone for amplifying and it's all small enough to fit in my pocket. I recorded an interview with two students in a VERY noisy library. I was pleasantly surprised when I could hear them crystal clear when I listened to it later. It has a USB drive and cable to transfer the files to your computer. I use a free program called Express Scribe to transcribe everything. It looks like there is a Mac version:
http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html

Good luck. A nice digital recorder is a fantastic investment for a qualitative researcher.

We are apparently not allowed to ask the school librarian or the special reference lady (not sure what her title is, but she works in the library and is specifically there to help people in the social work program) either. It's a pretty dumb rule. The stated reasoning is that they just want to "evaluate where we are" so they can do early intervention since they will identify the students who really need help with writing, but then that doesn't make sense to grade us on it, does it, if we haven't had a chance to learn about what's required yet? If it's graded, that's more of a test type thing to see what you've learned while in the program. But I digress...

There's a link here to the book: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/hutchisonpe4e/study/default.htm
and Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Dimensions-Human-Behavior-Environment-Edition/dp/1412988799/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410159190&sr=8-1&keywords=dimensions+of+human+behavior+person+and+environment+hutchison+4th+ed

And on those pages, you'll see that the author is listed as just Elizabeth Hutchison but on the amazon link, you may also be able to see in the photo that it also says "and contributors." I may be able to get away with just listing Hutchison but if there's a way to put and contributors I'd like to do that since this paper is really more about the ability to follow directions and follow APA format than the content of the paper.

EDIT: You did just remind me that I have a friend who is a librarian though, she doesn't work at my school so I may ask her, thanks for the brain jump start!

Introduction to Elementary Particles by David Griffiths

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-David-Griffiths/dp/3527406018/