As I am spending my time these days selecting candidates for early-stage researcher positions in the EU network I am coordinating, I am reminded of my own experience as a participant to job interviews from the other side of the table. The text below tells the story of my interviews for a post-doctoral position in 1998. Enjoy!
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After
the 1998 ICHEP conference I was invited to describe my search for Z->bb decays at seminars which
were held in rapid succession at Michigan State University, Duke University,
Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All
institutes except Michigan were looking for post-doctoral scientists to prepare
for their analysis effort in Run 2 and finish the commissioning of the CDF detector. Those talks went generally very well, with the exception of the one at
Harvard, where Melissa Franklin managed to put me in a very awkward situation.
I was discussing the muon dataset used in the Z search, when she interjected:
“May
I ask you a question? What’s the muon pseudo-rapidity range? Are you using CMUP
muons in your search?”
“Yes,
CMU-CMP coincidences. They cover muons with pseudo-rapidities of up to 0.6.”
“So
you are not using the CMX. Why?”
The CMX was the “Central Muon eXtension”
system, which covered with scintillators and drift chambers the pseudo-rapidity
region from 0.6 to 1.0. It was a beautiful, but problematic detector. It had
been built by Harvard University for Run 1, and Melissa herself had been working
on that project for several years. Now she was passing the hot potato to the
new young faculty member of the group, Michael Schmitt. Michael was in fact in
search for a collaborator to help him complete the commissioning of the CMX
detector, which had only been partly installed in Run 1. Unprepared, I tried to
put up some defence, and failed miserably.
“Well,
there is more background in the CMX samples...”
“That’s not true!” (I remembered that she said "that's bullshit", but a witness says it can't have happened). And then she turned to Schmitt. “See, Michael, I want you to take
note, as that is exactly the attitude you will have to fight against in your
upgrade of the CMX. Our colleagues have been distributing that false myth and
it is an uphill battle, both for the integration of the system and for the
allotment of a reasonable trigger bandwidth to CMX muon signals.”
I spent the rest of my talk with half of my
brain intent in repeating the speech I by then knew by heart, and the other
half silently kicking itself for that remarkable display of short-sightedness. That
day I learned a lesson: when you give a seminar somewhere, you have better make
sure you know what is the background and the past history of the prominent
professors that are likely to attend it. I had indeed been very careless: had I
given a bit of thought to the fact that Harvard had built the CMX and that they
were hiring a post-doc precisely for the purpose of completing the
commissioning of that system, I would have devoted at least one slide to a
careful justification of not using their detector in my search. Because the
choice was indeed justifiable: the datasets collecting data triggered by CMX
muons in Run 1 were less well understood than the others, as they had been used
less often; their use entailed a time-expensive, dedicated study. It would have
been a bit disappointing to hear, but it would have at least been true, and
understandable. What I should have really avoided to say was that the CMX was a
more noisy detector!
Despite
my unconvincing performance, after the seminar Michael Schmitt was in a
cheerful mood. That evening we went together to a pub in Cambridge and he told
me that he intended to hire me.
“You
know, we have still to discuss the matter with the other faculty members, and
there are still a couple of people I have invited here to give seminars, but I
have read their curricula already, and I can tell you that if you want the
post-doc position it is yours.”
“That’s
fantastic! I would be very happy to join your group.”
“So
would we.”
I was enthusiastic about the new job prospect,
but Michael’s early offer raised a problem. I explained it to him:
“I
am to give the same seminar at the MIT in two days, but even if they also offer
me a position I think I will choose Harvard. Working with you guys is way more
appealing to me. Do you think I should tell them I have already accepted to
join Harvard?”
“It
is up to you; in any case I am quite sure they will also try to get you, as typically
the HEP post-doc applications Harvard and the MIT get are the same, and all the
other candidates I got are way less convincing than you are. But as I say what
I told you is not official, so maybe you should behave as if you had not made
up your mind just yet.”
“Interesting!
I think it will be fun then.”
Two days later I visited the particle physics
department of the MIT, where I could give a much more relaxed seminar than the
one at Harvard. I had been called there by Christoph Paus, a bright young
professor who had very recently joined CDF and was now looking for a post-doc
to work on data analysis in his current area of interest, B hadron physics. I
had met Christoph soon after his arrival at Fermilab, and we had also spent
some time chatting together at the ICHEP conference in Vancouver just a couple
of months earlier. At the CDF trailers his office was close to mine; he was a
sociable guy, and he often invited me there to drink tea brewed from a strange
oriental-looking gizmo. But he was not my kind of guy: I found his approach a
bit too managerial for my taste. He did get things done; but my sense of humour
was incompatible with his. Unfairly putting the blame on him, I could say it
must have been the compound effect of being an engineer by training (physicists
often joke about this, contemptuously looking down on engineers) and having spent
two years of his time as a soldier in the Bundeswehr, where he had been an
interrogator in Polish language. For he fluently spoke seven languages,
something I really envied him for.
After
my seminar Christoph and I sat in his office to talk business, and I decided I
would not show my hand immediately. Besides, in principle the MIT would be offering
much more money to post-docs than Harvard, so there were all reasons to
investigate the MIT offer in detail. But I felt free to speak my mind, at
least.
“So,
Tommaso!, that was good stuff we heard at your seminar. Now about your
application: I am trying to get together a strong group of analysts to do B
physics with CDF in Run 2. What do you think about that?”
“B
physics. Hmm, sure. What do I think – well, I think CDF should invest as much effort
as possible in the high-energy frontier in the next few years, before LHC comes
up and sweeps the tables: SUSY, the Higgs, new physics. B physics is quite interesting
of course, but it’s a bit like putting on a smoking suit to stay home and watch
TV, if you know what I mean.”
He was taken aback, but he insisted. “Oh, but
Tommaso, there are many possible discoveries of new physics in the B sector! It
is a very exciting program. Basically, we plan to measure Bs oscillations, plus
we will go after many rare decays. And there is a wide range of CP violation
measurements to develop; I am basically looking for somebody who can give a
strong contribution on that front. Would you be interested to join us?”
Christoph used the word “basically” a lot.
“Yes,
well, I mean, no. I mean, you know, it’s strange – just a few months ago in
Vancouver we discussed the Higgs search, and you seemed gung-ho with LEP II
having a clean shot at it –”
“Sure!
LEP II has a big chance to find the Higgs, in fact it is quite probable that
they’ll find it there.”
“
... so, with a big group, you should invest some efforts on Higgs physics. If
the Higgs is seen by LEP II before it is decommissioned, we will have a great
motivation for an extended Tevatron run, to study that particle in detail. As
you’ve just seen, I have spent the past three years to demonstrate that we have
good chances of seeing bottom-antibottom decays of heavy resonances –that’s the
whole point of my thesis in fact. So whatever group I am going to join, I will
try to work at the Higgs search in Run 2.”
“Well, the prospects to find the Higgs in CDF will come only after we collect a large amount of data. I do want to search for the Higgs in Run 2, but in the shorter term we are going to focus on Bs mixing, which is going to be an important analysis with high chances of success.”
As it turned out, after contributing significantly to the Bs mixing discovery Christoph would indeed spend many years searching for the Higgs boson, and end up being a convener of the Higgs group in CMS thirteen years later, when the particle was finally found. The discussion with me left him perplexed: he was the one hiring, and he was not prepared to have to bargain. So I decided I had had enough fun, and I brought the slightly surreal conversation to its logical end.
"I see, but I believe one has to start refining the tools early on for the Higgs search, so I'm not enthusiastic about B physics, even as an interlude. Anyway, I don’t mean to argue on the merits of different research plans. I must tell you that I have already been offered a post-doctoral position with the Harvard group, and I am going to accept it, as unlike the MIT, they are interested in pursuing the Higgs search.”
I soon left Christoph alone
with the unhappy task of reconsidering his applicants list, and spent the rest
of the day playing chess in the bakery at the corner of Harvard square in
Cambridge. On the following morning Michael and I did the necessary paperwork:
while I did not technically have a Ph.D. in my hands yet (my thesis was yet to
be written) I was already a post-doc, effective October 1.
