Madison Swirtz, 2020 APS Education & Diversity Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Colorado School of Mines

I’m an incoming senior in Engineering Physics at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. My junior year, I did research in expanding the connections between quantum entanglement entropy and bulk spacetime, and I will be continuing that work my senior year. At my school, I have been an officer of SPS and the Society of Women in Physics for the last two years, and next year I will be an officer of Sigma Pi Sigma.

I didn’t start out college intending to be a physics major, but that quickly changed when I took my first physics class and learned about how wonderful our department is. I fell in love with physics and began going to every office hour, guest lecture, and club meeting I was allowed to so I could learn more. Community has been a cornerstone of my physics experience, and that’s something I want future generations of students to experience. The value of diversity is a proven fact, and I’m ecstatic to work with APS this summer and continue working to make physics a more inclusive place!

Internship

Host: American Physical Society

Project

Abstract

Although many STEM fields have made significant progress towards gender and racial parity, physics has lagged significantly behind: women only make up 20% of the undergraduate physics degrees awarded yearly despite making up half of the population, and Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islanders only account for 15% of undergraduate degrees awarded yearly despite these populations making up about 30% of the college-aged people in the United States. In the wake of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, the question of how we will make physics more inclusive has been put at the forefront of the community’s conversations, and that question is still left largely unanswered. In my time at APS, I have learned a lot about where the culture of physics stands now, what structures are reinforcing this culture, and what work people have done and are doing to make physics a more inclusive place for everyone. This presentation explores what I learned this summer while working with APS Education & Diversity Statistics, attending the American Association of Physics Teachers conference and Physics Education Research Conference, and doing analysis on a survey from APS funded outreach programs.

Final Presentation

Madison Swirtz Final Presentation.pdf (.pdf, 1 mb)

Internship Blog

I have become comfortably numb

My first warning sign was in the first sentence of the instructions: “This is something that should be avoided at all costs due to the amount of time it requires.” The steps were pretty simple, click about 20 buttons to specify the degree level and majors that apply to STEM, then choose the variable you want those stats for: repeat for 30 variables, which is then done for the three degree levels (bachelor’s, master’s, PhD). This adds up to a lot of scrolling and button clicking, but it was simple enough that I assumed it would take me one morning, maybe one day if it was especially bad. Regardless, I had mostly finished my job for the week, and this extra little task was something I thought would be helpful for anyone trying to do my job in the future, so I forged ahead.

This was denial: the first in the five stages of grief. I timed myself going through it perfectly once, and it only took 2 minutes, so I thought I could tidily have it done in about two hours, three if I was feeling fatigued.

Then came anger. Why was this website set up this way? Why couldn’t I select all of my variables at once and then click a couple of checkboxes to make new variables instead of searching and scrolling and clicking the same buttons over and over? The first time I lost all of my data because the website spontaneously refreshed itself I was two variables in; the second time, I was about 20 variables in. I figured out how to intermittently save progress after that.

Depression came midway through day-two: as I clicked and scrolled and clicked and clicked I grew more fatigued. There were cats walking across my laptop, I had to eat and sleep, I had meetings for christ’s sake. I was about half way through.

I’ll be honest, I wasted some time with the bargaining. As I clicked button after button, I thought about the ways I could work around this clicking. Maybe I could do the process for one variable, copy-paste thirty times, and just replace some words in parts of the code? Maybe I could just do one degree level and duplicate that and change one thing to fix it and eliminate 60% of the work? But as I scrolled through other files and dug into the code I found that workarounds were impossible where they would have been helpful. In hindsight I’m glad I spent the time to find out how the code functions, but in the moment it was devastating.

Finally, acceptance. I resigned myself to my fate and clicked, taking breaks and drinking water when needed. I pulled up Netflix and played a show in the background so my brain could have something slightly less monotonous to pay attention to. My mind drifted to pondering my place in the world— in physics. Someone had to click those buttons. Even if I suffered, it was so that nobody else would ever have to be slightly inconvenienced to update a handful of APS graphs in the future, and that’s something I’m happy to have done. I finally finished around 11:00AM on Friday. I was older, wiser.

My mentor and I met that morning and talked about this experience, and how difficult it was for both of us to navigate some of the documentation for my summer job the first time through. My whole summer is dedicated to updating a series of graphs, lists, and statistics for the American Physical Society, all of which are very important for researchers and physicists to do their work. While I’m happy to do this work, it’s frustrating how much learning how to do my job is slowing me down. Hopefully next week I will get into the swing of it a little more, and I will never take it for granted again if my first week’s task is to “learn how to download data”.

What I learned during the STEM Shutdown

The first resource I looked into was ParticlesForJustice.org. The call to action on the front page is worth reading in its entirety, and I took my call to action as the following quote:

I decided to dedicate my day to reading, watching, learning, and discussing. My morning was largely spent reading through the resources section. Every article on there is wonderful and important. There were a few I found especially impactful and informative. The Rules of the Diversity and Inclusion Racket by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein pointed out the main pitfalls of diversity, inclusion, and access initiatives in physics; there are so many times that we as academics choose to ignore the writing and thoughts of underrepresented populations, and instead charge forward with misguided half-attempts at saving face to look like we care without making real, meaningful change that actually improves the day-to-day lives and experiences of the people we say we support. The ‘Benefits of Black Physics Students by Jedidah C. Isler discusses how insidious the argument that we need to justify what ‘benefit’ there is to having diversity in a field, which just reinforces the idea that black students don’t inherently deserve to be in the same spaces as white students.

In the afternoon, I got on a Zoom call with my department: about 40 participants who came together to discuss resources, do some learning, and make plans on how to change the culture of our department and make it a place that is welcoming to black students. We talked about joining the APS Bridge Program and TEAM-up. Professors admitted their ignorance and were hoping to learn. In the evening I watched The 13th on Netflix: a history of the military industrial complex in the United States and the decades-long war on drugs that has been used to incarcerate black people at immense rates.

My learning did not begin on Wednesday, and it is not anywhere near over. I keep coming back to the Particles For Justice website and reading more of the articles, revisiting ones I already read, and trying to learn how to be a better ally to black people in physics. This work won’t be over for a long time, and it’s important that we as physicists commit ourselves to maintaining this enthusiasm for change into the fall semester, and into the years to come.

For anyone who is interested in what my job actually is

Although my blogs the first two weeks were not very insightful, I do actually have a real job at APS. My job for the summer was to update the APS Top Educators lists and Physics Graphs & Statistics. All in all, lots of working in Excel. This was intended to be my job for the entire summer, but with a combination of luck, hard work, and having wonderful prior interns laying out the roadwork for me, I am on track to have both of these done within the next week.

After these last few weeks, I am a lot more familiar with the demographic breakdowns of people in physics, and by extension other STEM fields and the United States. Although my job is ostensibly just to update these graphs, my mentor and I have worked to also make sure the data is presented accurately, impactfully, and honestly. People use the things I’m making, and people learn from it. I’m really proud to be contributing to that.

I’m very proud to be a physicist, and I love being a part of the physics community. I am not proud of how behind we are when it comes to inclusivity. When I was a freshman physics major, I didn’t notice this discrepancy at first: my university is exclusively engineering, so I already went into it expecting poor representation for women. Then Physics Today posted Gender Matters . In it I saw a graph showing a breakdown of the percent of women in various STEM fields, and I saw physics at the absolute bottom of that graph. I also saw the comments on that article, many of which asserted there was no problem because ‘physics is a meritocracy’ and ‘women just aren’t interested in it.’ As I got farther into my major-specific classes, I noticed that the higher-level the physics, the lower the ratio between women and men got. The farther into physics I have personally gotten, the more I have experienced blatant sexism.

And that’s just being a woman. The number of black people graduating with a PhD in physics every year is so low every year that we cannot give a table of top schools by average student per year, it has to be summed over 3 years. The 9,000 undergraduate degrees awarded in physics every year dwarfs the 20 awarded to Native Americans and the 200 awarded to Black students, making a discrepancy so large that it barely makes sense to compare. I have been vaguely aware of this issue as I’ve been an undergrad, but working in this internship and seeing the raw data really drives home how important this is, and how far we have yet to come as a physics community. The graph I saw on Physics Today years ago is one of the graphs I just updated. This kind of work is only going to become more important as more people start taking a vested interest in who gets to do physics and who doesn’t, and I’m proud to be a part of that learning.

If there’s something you don’t know, literally just ask.

Since I had officially finished up the activities that were supposed to take me the rest of the summer, the APS Programs department gave me the opportunity to try some new things.

When I talked to my new boss, Dr. Fracchiolla, she asked me to do a lit review: look through the literature and find out what research exists on the benefits of doing informal physics education on the facilitators. I thought that seemed easy enough, so I hopped off the video call and went about finishing up the rest of my other work. I then realized that I had never done a lit review, I had no idea what that meant, and although I had a vague idea of the purpose of one based on our earlier conversation, I had no idea what actual deliverables I was expected to give.

My first instinct was to Google it. From this I learned that a lit review could mean several things. At this point I had only met Dr. Fracchiolla twice, and I didn’t want to look like a total idiot, so I went back to my SPS mentor Dr. Hyater-Adams, who graciously explained a little more, and encouraged me to talk to Dr. Fracchiolla about it and just tell her I had never done one.

When I admitted I had no idea what I was doing, Dr. Fracchiolla responded “oh, that’s awesome!” and explained a little more. I gave her my write-up at the end of the week, turns out I did just fine, and it is way better than it would have been had I tried to forge ahead without actually knowing what I was doing.

While it’s probably good practice to Google things before asking basic questions, no question is actually bad. More often than not in physics, I feel extremely out of touch, and way behind in what I am supposed to know. It has rarely worked out for me to wing it and push through on my own. It has always worked out better for me to ask friends and mentors for help, information, and feedback.