Organized Report of the Retreat

2005 Retreat --> here

---

Friday

Physics and Astronomy Departmental Retreat Friday September 16

Summary Report (written largely by Peter Godman and Maura Da Cruz from UBC HR)

Background

The Friday half-day agenda of the Physics and Astronomy retreat was structured around questions drawn from literature on Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an organizational development intervention with roots in social science action research. The agenda was designed to bring to the surface aspects of the department that are working well, that "give life" to the department, and that faculty, staff, and students value most about the department. An AI approach assumes that what we talk about and focus on becomes our reality, and that if we talk only of problems within the department then all we see are problems, and the department itself becomes seen as a problem, to the extent that moving in a positive direction becomes extremely difficult, and can endanger the "soul" of the organization. On the other hand, by using and AI approach and focusing on what gives life to an organization and what members' value most about the organization it is easy and natural to work to amplify those qualities and move forward with positive changes.

An appreciative inquiry exercise can be thought of consisting of three parts:

1. Discover the best of ... search for the best examples of organization within the experience of organizational members.
2. Understanding what creates the best of ... seek to create insight into the forces that lead to superior performance, as defined by organizational members. What is it about the people, the organization, and the context that creates peak work experiences?
3. Amplifying the people and processes that best exemplify the best of ... through the process of inquiry itself, the elements that contribute to superior performance are reinforced and amplified.

For the first half of the afternoon those members of the department at the retreat broke into 9 groups and worked on four questions:

1. Who was involved and what were the factors in the organization during a time in the organization when you felt most alive, inspired, successful, and engaged?
2. What things do you value most about: The nature of your work?
3. What things do you value most about: The organization (department or UBC)
4. What do you consider to be the core factors that give life to this organization?

The members of the groups were chosen in random manner that ensured that each group was heterogeneous with respect to faculty/staff/technician makeup. Group members interviewed each other in dyads, then each dyad reported back to the larger group of ten. Each larger group reported out to the entire retreat.

Results

People

The 9 groups shared one broad category, which we think can be summarized as "people". During the group presentations a variety of themes emerged:

• "The core factor that gives life to the department is the people ... without whom we would not have a department."
• "Good people, good students…working together towards a common goal..."
• People are helpful to new staff and faculty. They have a positive spirit and attitude.
• People are important, people are creative; there is mutual respect.
• People provide stability and support: "People don’t quit, they retire...."
• People are here for the long term. The fact that faculty and staff have been here a long time suggests a stable research environment and that this is a good place to work.
• "A lot of people are driving for success and know where they want to go."
• We value "friendliness, sense of humour, pride in accomplishments, and communication." Influx of new faculty makes the department seem welcoming and as if there are "new horizons".
• "People are very important - their personalities, what they do, their experiences, and their challenges make the department."
• "Working with motivated people; enjoy the contact that happens through work, and the appreciation, friendly people."

Department and UBC Community

Another element of the importance of people is the comments that reflect the value of the department community:

• Sense of community.
• Ease of interdisciplinary collaboration (mentioned several times)...
• Learning community and supportive, democratic environment...
• Department works best when all members can feel some pride in the success in some of the members – sense of community.
• Anything that we can do to foster this sense of community will make our lives and our research more pleasant.
• Feeling of being part of a home and UBC being like a small town.

Groups spoke of valuing different elements of the community:

• The technical shop infrastructure allows you to focus on interesting problems.
• People working in the front office are not rigid – they can get together to help make changes.

Academic Environment and Culture

A third "life-giving element" identified is the academic environment and culture:

• Pursuance of your own interests, your hobby as your job.
• Value on truth, freedom of direction, the freedom to go off and work on your own.
• Freedom to travel and do research, non-rigid time schedules, learning community, and challenging problems.
• Work is "cool, original, and creative."
• People appreciate that they’re working for an organization that is driven by curiosity ("not profit driven") and doing "cool stuff." Different projects ... challenging projects requiring creative input ... work is interesting and fun.

There were a number of comments on the ease of interdisciplinary collaboration and flat hierarchy such as:

• Success in research depends on our ability to get valuable support from technical staff.

Student Interaction

Another aspect that was valued and noted as giving life to the organization was student interaction. Seven of the groups weighed in with comments in this area.

• Value solving various problems related to student development...
• Value the nature of interactions with students.
• Contributing to student's development and the impact on students.
• The satisfaction of good teaching.
• Enjoy helping students and appreciate working with students.

The interaction with talented undergraduates who have a natural talent for research

After answering these four questions participants took a break, and then came back to work in groups.

Three Wishes

We asked this question as a different approach to getting an idea of things that participants felt would heighten the vitality of the organization – what they would like more of. The answers to this question tended to be rather pragmatic, with 3 themes emerging:

Physical Infrastructure

Seven of the groups touched on themes related to the department’s physical infrastructure. All but one had to do with the need for a new/better building; and having the whole department under one roof, more meeting spaces, classrooms, and technical shops, a better computer room and a new telescope. The exceptions were request for covered bicycle parking and more (loud) music. With the exception of the bicycle parking, it is possible to tie these ideas to the preceding section – a common building, more meeting space, classrooms and technical shops would contribute to sense of community, and facilitate student, staff and faculty interaction.

People

The second most common theme had to do with more directly with people: more international students, more support for international visitors, more women faculty and students, more family friendly policies and support for people using those policies. Also included in this category are management training for faculty, ways to help staff enjoy their work, more community in general, a more comprehensive leave policy, and a strategy for staff replacements.

Resources

The third theme that emerged we labeled resources: more money (salaries and conference support, more support staff, more instructors, and more endowed chairs).

Saturday

Undergraduate Experience

The discussion on the undergraduate experience focussed on the first-year courses and the curriculum as a whole; this reflects a general division between the service courses offered by the department and the courses for the specialists.

First-Year Courses

We would like to give the students in the first-year courses (both those who intended to major in physics and those who don't) a sense of what scientists (physicists in particular) actually do. This is possibly our most important service to the students and determining how best to do this is crucial. An excellent approach is inquiry-based learning to develop the rationale behind the scientific method and give students practical experience with the abstract concepts introduced in the lecture. Of course, it would be ideal if the students could discover these concepts themselves through well designed and well supervised experiments, possibly in a setting that combines the best aspects of the lab, tutorial and lecture such as the TEAL Studio program at MIT.

The general impression of those in the discussion was that as a department we are doing well. The students generally master most of the concepts and enjoy the experience. The success may be attributed to the use of new technology in the laboratories and to a close-knit instructional team for the multi-section lab courses at least in part.

Laboratories

The laboratories play an important role in the "inquiry-based" learning process, for it is in the laboratories that the students inquire. The laboratories provide the students with a critical sense for the measurement process and respect for the nature and limitations of data (measurement error and statistical uncertainty). Furthermore, the students also get practical experience from the labs that can either frustrate or reinforce the learning process. We would like to explore how we can improve the lab experience The students have welcomed several recent innovations in the laboratories such as LoggerPro.

To get the most out of the labs, there must be a close synchronisation between the lecture material and the lab exercises (one limit would be the Studio system where lecture and lab are one in the same). Syncronising the material allows the labs to reinforce the lectures and vice versa -- increasing the retention for the students and while decreasing the effort need to learn the underlying concepts. An important step to increase the relevance of the labs to the students would be to have a lab session at least once per week instead of the system of alternating labs and tutorials currently in place. This, of course, would require additional lab space as well as additional lab exercises. Secondly because the lab courses generally serve students in other departments of the faculty of science, one could gear the various lab sections to different themes or foci: e.g. life sciences, chemistry and specialist physics.

With the introduction of a new and more comprehensive lab program comes the necessity of providing more training and support for the lab teaching assistants, financial support for the maintaining and improving the labs and demos and adequate, modern lab space. Perhaps laboratory TAs should be required to take a three-credit course on physics/astronomy eduction including mini-lessons in front of their fellow students. The Botany department already does this. Such a program might be coordinated with AMS and TAG. A less formal option would be more comprehensive orientation sessions, possibly coupled with practice teaching similar to the Astronomy Journals Club. The TAs would complete each lab under faculty supervision to ensure that they can perform the lab as well as explain the concepts clearly.

With the proposed revitalization of the labs and first-year programs comes the necessity for additional space, personnel and equipment. Any new building design must have adequate lab space with room for anticipated expansion. The particular layout of the new space must be carefully addressed, particularly if the department decides to pursure a Studio-type program. There is a general sense that the lab equipment is antiquated. Rediscovering Faraday's law with Faraday's apparatus might be of historical value but it doesn't have much pedagogical value. New labs require new equipment. Some portion of the lab might consist of numerical experiments to address questions that cannot effectively be explored with available lab equipment.

Curriculum

An important first step to examining the curriculum is establishing ways to evaluate the success of what we are currently doing. Within the Engineering Physics program we can get some feedback through job placements but for the other programs feedback is lacking. We should survey graduates 2 and 5 years after graduation to find out what turned out to be most and least useful, what was unique about their experience at UBC and what they felt was lacking in their UBC experience. These surveys could be the job of the undergraduate advisors, the curriculum committee or both.

Honours Program

Within the honours programme it is important to introduce the students earlier to scientific computing which is such an important aspect of research. Unfortunately the computer science department does not offer useful courses in this area. We could either introduce a physics computing course in the second year or introduce computing requirements into other courses. This may dovetail nicely with the redesign of the lab program in general or be included within PHYS 209. Students should appreciate the difference between linear and non-linear physics.

Within the astronomy program all of the specialist courses are the same for the majors and the honours students. Although it may be difficult to teach at an appropriate level to both groups, there are several advantages to mixing students of differing abilities together, not the least of which is reducing the teaching load. Presently PHYS 301 (E&M) has been taught in this manner for the last five years. It would be interesting to examine whether this approach would be useful for other physics courses and perhaps to adopt a similar scheme with some fourth-year and graduate courses; for example, ASTR 402/500 has the same lectures for both sets of students but additional assignments and exam questions for those students in the higher-level course.

Outside Requisites

Our courses in the physics and astronomy department often require courses in other departments as prerequisites or corequisites. We must examine these other course to verify that they still meet our needs. Although there is a formal mechanism to track these changes, the information doesn't filter down effectively. The curriculum committee should gather current course syllabi and notes from the required courses in other departments.

Exposure to Research

Our students should be more aware of the exciting current research and discoveries, especially from our own department. There is a general sense that we are not doing enough. Although UBC pays lip service to its being a "world-class research university," do our students actually get a concrete impression of the research that we actually do. Instructors should incorporate their research into their lectures and labs, where possible. The main lobby, the lobby to Hebb theater and the exhibits in the Hebb building are great venues to show off what we do in the department -- we don't seem to be doing this as effectively as we could. PHYS 209 and ASTR 304 provide two examples of what were are doing right in this regard. In PHYS 209 one six-week lab has replaced six one-week labs and we have a regular lab stream along with two new longer term labs. This has allowed the students to generate and maintain an experiment directly related to the instructor's research. It is unclear whether the students still learn the broad basics of lab skills and techniques and whether the extra work for the instructors is justified.

ASTR 304 is a course based on recent "hot topics" in astrophysics: high-energy astrophysics, dark energy, exoplanets, neutrino astrophysics, CMB. It exposes students to current and exciting research much of which is performed within the department. The research topics provide a framework for teaching more general physics and astrophysics concepts, and several instructors may share the course in a straightforward manner.

Graduate Experience

Admissions

There is a general sense that the current admissions policies are satisfactory. However, there are seveval areas of potential improvement. To better understand a student's research experience we should request a CV including a description of the student's research experience. It would be helpful to place these CVs along with the rest of the student's applications online so that faculty can easily access them. We should place an emphasis on the knowledgeable impressions of a student from a past or potential research supervisor regardless of whether the student is new or continuing her studies at UBC. Furthermore, we should exercise more flexibility in how and whether we admit foreign students with M.Sc. degrees into the Ph.D. program and prepare more comprehensive guidelines for this process.

We should try to improve both our recruiting and success rate by encouraging early applications, provide financial incentives and improving our web presence. Each summer many of the best physics and astronomy students in Canada and elsewhere attend the TRIUMF summer school; we should make a special effort to recruit at this event, perhaps even by paying for some or all of the students to stay in Vancouver a bit longer to interact with members of the department. We could improve our success rate by encouraging prospective students to visit at the same time so that the bulk of the faculty can make a effort to be here and by having a more formal procedure for visits (dinner and other social activities).

Program Requirements

We should formalize how students find supervisors in their initial months here at UBC. Although exploratory conversations with potential supervisors are useful, they are time-consuming for both the student and the professor. Perhaps a useful addition to the process would be a poster session where researchers would present the projects that they are interested in supervising and students to explore their options. Furthermore, researchers should update the information available on the web to make this process more straightforward for the incoming graduate students.

It is still unclear whether to require a comprehensive examination of our students. Furthermore, it is difficult to balance the focus of the examinations among the various sub-fields within the department. The most important benefit for the student is of course the preparation for the exam rather than the examination itself, but the immediate value of this preparation is clearly different for theory students than for experimentalists. Perhaps the comprehensive examination could be equivalent to a three-credit course effectively to reduce the load that students preparing have to carry. One result of requiring a comprehensive examination is that it would hopefully broadened our student's knowledge of physics and astronomy. Perhaps the goal could also or better be addressed by requiring additional specific courses such as more quantum mechanics, electrodynamics or statistical mechanics.

The faculty of graduate students has reduced the required number of credits for an accelerated transfer to Ph.D. to 12 credits, the department should follow this new requirement but still the supervisor has the ultimate discretion on whether a student can fast-track.

A extremely useful aspect of a graduate education is learning to talk and teach about science. Of course this helps one present one's research and ultimately teach future scientists. Therefore, every student (possibly only those in the Ph.D. program) should spend at least one term as a teaching assistant with student contact.

Financial Support

The current system, where we guarantee financial support through a combination of TAs and RAs , is generally satisfactory. However, we should consider providing tuition relief to the M.Sc. students as well as the Ph.D. students. As we build up our programs in biophysics, medical physics and planetary science we should examine how to support the financial needs of interdisciplinary students in a rational fashion.

Quality of the Experience

Although the computing facilities and social outlets for the graduate students are satisfactory, there is a room for improvement in the infrastructure that we provide them. The student offices on the fourth floor are substandard and those on the mezzanine are worse; renovations are required. Furthermore, a graduate lounge would provide a social venue for the graduate students making working here more pleasant and possibly fostering collaborations and discussions of each other's work. One must keep in mind that the graduate students themselves must play a leading role in maintaining the lounge.

Research and Hiring

Much discussion of strategies for attracting more applications from excellent women and minority candidates. Emphasis shifted away from assigning blame for present imbalances to making UBC PHAS more attractive to the best candidates.

Hiring Plan

The members of the department were generally satisfied with the hiring process since the last retreat. We considered opening a discussion about all the upcoming and unfilled slots after the currently advertised competitions end; there was little comment on this issue, except for a plan for flexibility in future hires from the members of the AMO group. Although we presently have several open slots, few new slots will open up in the next few years, so we should examine how to increase the number of available slots through partnerships with rapidly developing econmies in Asia (perhaps to sponsor endowed positions or industrial chairs). However, the uncertain renewal of CRC chairs and the possible end of mandatory retirement makes long-range planning difficult.

The department is satisfied with the balance of 40 percent theory and 60 percent experiment; however, forging a better balance between available faculty slots and infrastructure might be useful if the positions are somewhat fungible.

Equity

The ethnic and gender makeup of the faculty of the department does not reflect that of our students. Although there is a general consenus that we should try harder to attact more women, how to address the question of the ethnicity of the faculty was more ambiguous.

The faculty generally agreed that it would be very positive if we attached more applications from outstanding women candidates; however, how do this is unclear. Apparently the number of female applicants for our positions is quite low. Perhaps this is simply because there are few potential applicants, or we are not successful at recruiting women to apply to UBC. The first problem can only be addressed over the longer term, by encouraging women in the first-year classes to continue as physics or astronomy majors (perhaps by having more women teach these courses). Several faculty argued that their best students in their undergraduate classes were women, so it makes pragmatic sense to encourage these students to continue onto graduate school. We can look at physics, astronomy and other disciplines to see where on the track from high school to faculty positions do women leave, and we can try to address these issues at least here at UBC.

In general, we can get more women to apply for our faculty positions by making an extra effort at recruiting faculty candidates (men and women) and to take advantage of a potential pool of people who are reluctant to apply to UBC or to faculty positions in general for various reasons that we may be able to address. Unfortunately, it is exceeding difficult to access why a particular candidate does not apply here because we might not even know that they exist; however, it is possible to keep track of our alumnae (as well as alumni) to see where the end up and what they sought in finding postdoctoral positions (especially the second one) and faculty positions.

Instructors

Many of the research faculty have some portions of their teaching responsibilities bought out; consequently, much of the teaching load is handled by sessional lecturers, eespecially for the large introductory service courses. Several members of the faculty felt that it would helpful to formalise the role of these sessional lecturers by adding several instructor slots. In principle these additional slots could be part of a new undergraduate initiative (perhaps as described earlier in this document). However, this proposal was not met with uniform approbation. Specifically, several felt that all of the teaching should be performed by research faculty; this is a strength of an undergraduate education at a major research university.

Although no general consensus was reached, the simple fact remains that the number of research faculty less the teaching buyouts is insufficient to teach all of the courses that we offer. Many of these positions are currently covered by recently retired faculty who may not be willing to teach these courses into the distant future. Without formalized instructor positions it might be difficult to find the best teachers for these courses, although an alternative would be to rely more on research associates and adjuncts would may be willing to teach more of the upper level courses while regular faculty would take up the load in the service courses.

Infrastructure

In general more support is needed everywhere but our main challenge is in administrative support.

Administrative Services

About thirty million dollars per year passes through the department and this quantity has been increasing recent years without a proportionate increase in the staff to administer these funds. Furthermore, several tasks that until recently were the purview of the UBC financial services department have been offloaded to PHAS, again without an increase in funding for administrative support. The devolution of financial management may be a blessing in disguise because the department may be able to streamline procedures, exploiting the creativity of our staff, and decreasing the workload without sacrificing oversight. Many faculty cited the example of TRIUMF where dealing with financial matters is much less of a hassle than at UBC.

Much of the funds that pass through the department is for large-scale projects each of which would require a project manager at least on a part-time basis. The department should investigate hiring someone to oversee the execution of various projects. Although faculty members can and do this now, it would be much more efficient and effective to have a single point of contact for project management. Perhaps it is possible to get a larger fraction of the university infrastructure support to flow into the department. With the recent shifting of workload from financial services to the department, one could make a persuasive argument to shift some funds similarly.

In addition to project management, a facility for mass mailings, high-volume printing, high-volume scanning etcetra would be extremely helpful. For example, right now a faculty member prints an assignment or exam on his or her printer or a central printer, picks it up and photocopies it or brings it to a member of the office staff to copy it. In principle, several of these steps could be eliminated by attaching our existing photocopiers to the network so that professors could simple print 250 copies and have them collated and stapled ready for pick up. Similarly the copiers have a scanning facility as well that we cannot exploit. Room and projector reservations that are now handled by Bridget could easily be moved onto the web in a system like the WebCalendar that we use to schedule interview slots with faculty candidates. The general theme is that we should try to automate the processes that we can automate and leave the more challenging situations to the staff. This automation process would probably require additional computing support, possibly a dedicated webmaster.

Technical Services

The general sense was that the technical support for research in the department was strong save for computing. Computing has become as important a tool for research as traditional experiments, but our department lacks a "software shop". We require more support for clusters and research computing: parallel programming, websites, research analysis software, systems management, etcetra. The support could be made more efficient by standardizing our computer setups and possibly only providing support for certain platforms. Right now, individual faculty members manage their clusters individually; this is a waste of effort because the work required to manage a cluster scales more slowly than the size of the cluster.

Building

The ideal solution would be to start with a clean slate plan for a new physics and astronomy building with the PHAS, PITP, planetary science, classrooms, shops, loading dock, the clean part of AMPEL and vibration-free laboratory space. An important issue to address is the size of the offices. Those in Hennings are generally larger than allowed by the province. However, our offices are not only office space but also teaching and research space. This argument has succeed elsewhere so it may be possible to address the office-space issue. Although amagalamating our plans with our departments may make political sense, it might give us a solution in which the department remains geographically fractured -- adding other departments to the mix will require additional space dedicated to offices and classrooms, increasing the typical distance between members of our faculty, our labs and students. We should look at the positive attributes of Hennings especially its location and the proximity of teaching and office space and build a plan for a new building from there. A new building by design will lack most of the things that make Hennings unsatisfactory (i.e. age-related issues), so in making the plan we should not focus on Hennings' inadequacies but rather what we need.

External Relations

Several members of our faculty expressed the concern that our department is viewed as insular among other departments within UBC, other physics and astronomy departments across Canada and by others. The goal is to to raise external profile of the department to attract top students, PDFs, faculty and research funding.

Getting External Input

Sometimes it takes a external point of view to provide a solution to problems. As a department we can foster this external input both from within and outside the scientific community by setting up a visiting committee of physicist s and astronomers to visit the department periodically interview our faculty, researcher and students and provide a detailed assessment of what our department is doing well and what can be improved. This has the second benefit of providing several high-level scientists a detailed impression of our department.

Secondly, we could estabilish an external advisory committee, possibly a mixture of scientists in academic and industrial positions and members of the general public to provide guidance on new initiatives and provide additional points of view. It is crucial that the committee have a well-defined mandate that they feel they can really contribute to. Generally members of such committees need to be persuaded how they can be useful to us (not the other way around).

Promoting to the Public and Scientific Community

An important aspect of external relations is promoting our accomplishments to people outside the department. There are many ways that we can improve our promotion starting locally. We are not using the display space in Hennings, Hebb and Hebb theater as effectively as we could. For example, does anything identify the lobby of Hebb theater as part of PHAS? This would be a great place to increase the exposure of the department to UBC students and faculty through displays and demos.

Beyond the walls of Hennings and Hebb, we can make our promotion more effective by improving our web presence. We should streamline access to our researchers' websites. Currently it takes four clicks to go from the PHAS homepage to our websites. It could be reduced to two clicks. Generally our computing staff is overtaxed, and tending to our website may not be an effective use of their skills; the department should consider hiring a webmaster. Ultimately we can make the most impact by promoting our results through the press. To do this effectively we need to write polished press releases addressed for the general public that reporters can use quickly and simply. In order for our stories to get picked up, we must minimizing the effort on the part of the reporters; this has the side benefit of increasing our control over the message that ultimately reaches the public

Encouraging Visitors

Although PITP is making a difference in this regard, the number of sabbatical visitors to our department seems smaller than it should be. If we had detailed balance between our faculty on Sabbatical at a given time and the Sabbatical visitors we should have at least 3-6 professorial visitors here at a given time. There are many avenues that we could pursue to encourage visitors from a formal exchange programs such as the Wurzburg program or the building relationship with the APCTP to externally endowed chairs for visiting professors. On the latter initiative it would be valuable to draw up plans for several chairs in different research areas to pass along to the Dean to present to prospective donors. Although as a department we cannot pursue fundraising directly we can make it convenient for the Dean's office to do it for us.

In a less formal vein we could encourage sabbatical visitors through advertising, offering top-up funds (possibly in exchange for light teaching) and finding accommodation. In principle we could gather funds for a visiting professor position (six months or one year) without an endowment. In this way donors could see the fruits of their labours without a large initial investment. The general consensus was that focussing these efforts on the Asia-Pacific region (especially China) could provide the largest rewards. These programs would also be effective at other levels, such as student exchanges and possibly interviewing graduate students abroad.