Grit and Sisu

What does it take to succeed in academia?  How is success measured?

For students entering graduate school, at least in many physics departments, the answer would seem to be "high GRE scores."  Recently I attended the APS Bridge Program Summer Meeting 2013 where much attention was directed to another factor that is harder measure but, many believe, ultimately more reliable: perseverance and passion for long-term goals.  Sometimes called "fire in the belly", this personality trait is known in the world of social psychologists as Grit.  An inspiring introduction is given by Angela Lee Duckworth.

In my household growing up, the word for grit was Sisu -- a Finnish word that is central to my cultural background.  Finnish Sisu repelled the Soviet invasion in the Winter War of 1939 .  Although Finland lost 11% of its pre-war territory, it preserved its independence and gave the world a new word for "guts".  One young Finnish farm girl -- my mother -- later emigrated to the U.S. and taught her son the significance of Sisu.

Sisu got me into academia.  A rocky start in college led to an instructor advising me not to pursue theoretical physics.  After switching into radio astronomy I recovered well enough to get into the Princeton astrophysics graduate program, where I was initially assigned to work on a project in theoretical cosmology.  My preparation was inadequate for the problem at hand and after a semester I moved on.  However, I wanted to solve the problem assigned to me so badly that I spent two years teaching myself fluid mechanics and mathematical methods of self-similarity without telling anyone, until I made a breakthrough.  When I presented my first-year supervisor the draft of a paper and asked him if he recalled the project and would comment on the suitability for publication of my solution, he was stunned.  I learned that he, too, had been interested in finding the solution and had enlisted the collaboration of a senior theorist from Japan.  Independently, they had just completed a paper on the same problem.  Our methods differed but our results agreed, and my supervisor kindly encouraged me to publish my work as a solo paper.  It was my first publication and the launching point for a career in theoretical astrophysics.

The next time a colleague asks about an applicant's GRE scores or "intelligence", ask him or her if they wouldn't rather know about Sisu and other personal qualities that do not correlate with performance on standard exams.