Advice to PHENIX Graduate Students
(Below are excerpts
from a letter I sent on February 7th, 1999 to all PHENIX graduate students
as we prepared for our first
run at RHIC. Some have pointed out to me that it would be useful to have
this information available to all incoming students- hence this page.)
You have been identified to me as someone who will
write a Ph.D. thesis on PHENIX (or-- you may not have declared formally your intention to
do so, but your adviser or I think you are a likely candidate to do so.) There's a fair
amount in this message, so I hope you will read it to the end. But first:
!! C O N G R A T U L A
T I O N S !!
You are in a unique position-- you will be taking
your thesis on a world-class experiment at a new collider exploring new physics. These days, such
opportunities where all those factors converge occur only once or twice in an
experimentalist's career; to have it so for your initial foray into research should be
tremendously exciting (and perhaps a little intimidating).
Therefore, I thought it would help to contact you personally and to
let you know that I'm interested in you and your thesis work, and that I want to make sure
that your degree work is a rewarding experience, both for you and for PHENIX.
To insure that this happens, you should
A. Sign up for at least one Physics Working Group, and participate actively
in its work.
B. Begin (or continue!) work in one of the detector sub-systems.
C. Note that in most cases, both A and B are best achieved while in
residence at BNL.
All of this may be self-evident to you. Clearly, BNL is the place to
be to explore, run, operate and maintain the complex object
that is PHENIX. But finding your way to your thesis topic is not necessarily obvious, so it's
important that the process is made as clear as possible. I can think of no better
"reference guide" than one that Mike Marx pointed out to me
http://www-d0.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/d0news?read__GENERAL__5498
entitled "Advice to D0 Graduate Students on
Choosing a Thesis Topic, etc.", by Prof. Mark Strovink of UC-Berkeley. This is an
excellent and thoughtful guide for D0 graduate students that also applies very nicely to
PHENIX students. I strongly suggest that you read it in its entirety, but there are some
parts that deserve special emphasis:
Work on the detector is particularly important. The knowledge
thus gained is useful not just because you may have to build a detector yourself
some day in the future. Rather, by coming into intimate and serious contact with the
detector, your understanding of the data deepens.
This is precisely the difference between doing a thesis on data that
you yourself were responsible for, and trying to do the same on
someone else's data set from PRL. There is all the difference in the world, and it is an
essential part of any thesis work in experimental particle or nuclear physics.
Please also note Prof. Strovink's Section 2, where he decries in
detail the work performed in "Year-3" and "Year-4" of a typical
graduate career, which he assumes takes place while largely resident at the host lab.
Finally, the section on "Pitfalls To Be Avoided" (such as
working in isolation, or picking your topic before you understand the detector and the
analysis) is essential reading.
I have set up a little page for thesis students
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/phenix/WWW/publish/zajc/sp/theses/theses.htm
which is accessible from my "Spokesperson's
page" at
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/phenix/WWW/publish/zajc/sp/index.htm
