Career Interview Series: Deborah Skapik Leans Into Research Skills With Her Students

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, and enthusiasts. These interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals who have navigated both traditional and non-traditional paths in the field.

Deborah Skapik traces her interest in space back to 1977, when a partial eclipse captured her interest. She built a shoebox diorama of the event on her own initiative. “I remember cutting out a circle on the side to put a flashlight. I even remember the color of the flashlight was this red plastic flashlight that my parents had, and putting that in the side of the box and hanging a styrofoam ball and making a shadow and just the visualization in three dimensions of what was going on.” 

Deborah Skapik

This wasn’t the only astronomy project Skapik tackled as a child interested in space. She also glued pastina—pasta shaped like stars—onto black construction paper and recreated the cosmos for herself. When Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos released in 1980, Skapik was mesmerized. She naturally gravitated to space and science, and felt fortunate to be in a public school system that encouraged STEM for all pupils. Her seventh grade science teacher allowed her the space to explore what it means to be a scientist as he led the class through multiple dissections that year. Skapik vividly remembers dissecting sharks outside and the smell as they dug into the process. “I didn't love that part of it, but the fact that we were so hands-on…he allowed me to explore and really do what felt like research science in seventh grade and use the tools of a scientist.” That same teacher assigned research papers, and Skapik enjoyed learning the scientific process of research as she looked up information in encyclopedias.

That encouragement came at just the right time. Instead of falling away from STEM, like so many can in middle school and junior high, Skapik pursued science and math. By the time she was a senior, she had taken every science and math course she could and headed to Swarthmore College with the idea of pursuing particle physics. Her first week on campus, Skapik needed to find a part-time job, and she hoped to find one related to astronomy. She knocked on the door of Sproul Observatory to ask if anything was available. A professor in a white lab coat opened the door. “He looked like Doc from Back to the Future,” Skapik recalls. 

“Can I help you?" he asked her, speaking with a German accent. Skapik asked for a job, and the professor immediately ushered her inside. “Yes, you will be working with this.”

He took her inside the dome where a 24-inch refractor telescope stood. Skapik was stunned. She had only used backyard telescopes to this point. The professor, Dr. Wolf Heinz, wanted her to observe binary stars using the telescope’s photographic plateholder. It was 1987. Skapik loaded glass plates into the plate holder to capture images. Skapik held this job throughout her college years, spending many nights in the observatory learning how to operate the 36-foot-long telescope, built in 1911. 

The next semester, when she met with the assigned class advisor, she said, “I want to do astrophysics.”

“No, you don’t,” he replied. “You want to be a physics major.”

“I don’t want to study physics,” Skapik replied.

“Yes, you do. Minor in astrophysics,” he advised her. “That was an incredibly wise piece of advice,” Skapic says. The advisor understood physics would give Skapik more flexibility and ground her well. 

While at Swarthmore, Skapik landed an REU opportunity at Kitt Peak in Arizona. “I was in love with the telescopes. I spent a lot of time at the summit, living up there, working on the 0.9-meter, doing a research project on quasar photometry, making some contacts, meeting some people, and meeting other people my age who were going into the field, but it really anchored me in knowing what I wanted to study.”

Skapik did her graduate degree in astronomy at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. She’d moved away from high energy astrophysics to quasar photometry. She also did another REU at NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia, which taught her that she didn’t like radio astronomy. 

In Hawaii, she ran across the idea of colliding galaxies and became a research assistant studying the Butcher-Oemler Effect. While she was in the middle of this research, Skapik was also teaching and realized how much she enjoyed explaining these complicated theories to her students. At the same time, she observed how busy the professors were writing proposals to search for funding for their research and doing a lot of administrative work as well. It dawned on Skapik that she didn’t want to devote her career to that. 

She decided to take a job as an observatory supervisor, which included mentoring teaching assistants, at Williams College in Massachusetts. Skapik continued her PhD at the University of Hawaii by spending a lot of time on the phone with the telescope operator and flying out to Hawaii. Then she went to the University of Pennsylvania to help develop an astronomy education program, as well as running two observatories. She also had three children and decided she wanted to pursue education more than astronomy. Instead of finishing her PhD, she got certified to teach. She interviewed for a teaching position at Friends’ Central School and was hired to teach AP Physics, the same subject she didn’t think she wanted to pursue in college.

“Twenty-five years later, almost, here I am… I love doing research with my students. I am a researcher. I understand the tools, I understand the techniques, and I can teach them how to do it at the high school level.” Skapik’s students are currently looking at images taken on Haleakala to try to re-image an asteroid field to see if the object they previously found was actually a new asteroid. She is hopeful they can publish the data. 

Skapik’s advice on teaching, and on career paths in general, is simple: “Follow your heart and do what you love, because if you don't love what you're doing, you're not going to enjoy your life. And I know what I love doing; like I said, I get really excited doing the research. But it's not just doing the research alone—it's doing it with the students because they have so much energy. They're fifteen years old, and they're getting excited about a movement on a screen. They come back here, and they're excited to tell me about their paths that they've followed.” 

Skapik has former students at NASA and remembers one who told her how important it was to have a female role model like Skapik, even though she didn’t realize it at the time. “So I do think it's really important for women to be in these higher positions, but I think contact with students on a day-to-day basis is also really important, and showing confidence and competence, and not minimizing what astronomy educators do, or physics educators, for that matter." It’s hard, but to have a research background is so valuable because I can say, "These are the tools. This is what you have to do later. It's not all academic.’” 

Deborah Skapik currently teaches at Friends Central School and also teaches astronomy at St. Joseph’s University and Delaware County Community College. 

Skapik at UPenn in 2002.

AASWomen Newsletter for March 16, 2018

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of March 16, 2018

eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Christina Thomas, and Maria Patterson

This week's issues:

1. Autism Isn't the Problem              

2. Science — without the mansplaining

3. Same Course, Different Ratings

4. Female researchers publish childcare recommendations for conference organizers

5. Watch: Female Astronauts Speak About Women in STEM

6. Senior female scientist dropout rate causing concern

7. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

9. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Peer Review as a Lens Into Bias

I have been working to incorporate themes of equity and inclusion into my physics classroom teaching. I’ve blogged about it a bit and some of you have kindly shared your ideas (see here, here, and here). 

In a recent upper-level Astrophysics course, I assigned students a term paper, and required that they participate in a double-blind peer review for their first drafts. (We used a tool called “Peerceptiv” because my University has integrated it into our learning management system, but there are many ways to include peer review in your curriculum.) I wasn’t originally intending this assignment to lead to a conversation about bias, but my students came to me with concerns about the “fairness” of the process: What if another student had a poor opinion of the topic they selected? What if their reviewers didn’t do a good job? Why were we doing it blind, so they didn’t know whose review to take more or less seriously, based on their experience of that student? How could they properly review the paper if they didn’t know who wrote it?

Guest Post: Confessions of a Teaching-Focused Astronomer

Our guest post today is from Dr. Jillian Bellovary. Jillian Bellovary is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Queensborough Community College in Queens, New York. She is also a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History and serves on the Committee for the Status of Minorities in Astronomy. She is passionate about equity & inclusion, knitting, and roller derby.

In August 2016 I started a tenure-track position at Queensborough Community College, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system and located in Bayside, Queens.  This job is my dream job, and one I’ve been aiming for for quite a while.  But I didn’t always know this was what I wanted, and I’ve definitely felt like I’m not supposed to want a job like this.  Thus I’d like to share my story.

"Phynd the Physicist": A Game to Open Dialog About Inclusion in Physics

Today's guest blogger, Misty Bentz, is an Assistant (nay, Associate!) Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University. Misty is an expert at making black hole mass measurements using reverberation mapping techniques, which she uses to study the broad line region and the relationship between AGN and their host galaxies. Misty's post is the second in a new series of blogs (the first is here) that describe how instructors tackle social justice issues in their physics and astronomy classrooms.

For the past few years, I have been teaching a required course for entering physics majors, “Gateway to Physics”, at Georgia State University. The course is intended to introduce students to the wide world of exciting physics research and (hopefully) kindle their enthusiasm for studying physics even as they work through their introductory courses.

To this end, we don’t spend time solving problems about balls rolling down inclined planes. Instead, the course is formatted as a seminar that meets once per week for 2 hours and is centered around visits from physics and astronomy faculty, each visitor spending an hour discussing their research and their physics subfield. The students also have semester-long group projects where they independently explore a physics topic to learn the current state of the field (past topics have included wormholes, spacecraft propulsion, extremophiles, quantum computing, biomimicry, and skyscraper design). The last meeting of the semester is a “behind the scenes” tour of several physics research labs.

Social Justice in the Physics and Astronomy Classroom

At the beginning of this winter term (in Montreal we don't even try to call it the "spring" term), I tried for the first time to directly address social justice issues, including racism and harassment, in my physics classroom.

In the months leading up to this attempt, I read that having diverse role models in the sciences is a good place to start, but not a replacement for an open, candid conversation about bias in STEM. (If you have a reference for this study, please contact me. I can't relocate it!) I'm a white women and a physics professor and perhaps that's a useful combination for some students to experience, but my mere presence doesn't prompt them to think about the core issues that lead to bias in physics and astronomy. Me standing there doesn't openly challenge them to consider racism, ablism, unconscious bias, or even gender discrimination. My desire to talk about these issues crystallized at the end of last year when Justices in the US Supreme Court used the physics classroom as an example of a place where diversity couldn't or shouldn't matter, to the outrage of many physicists and astronomers, outrage also articulated eloquently by Jedidah Isler in her NY Times Op Ed, The ‘Benefits’ of Black Physics Students.

With considerable trepidation, I tackled this the way brand new faculty tackle most things, I just tried something. And yes, it was clumsy. I share my experience here because I want to embolden other junior (and senior) faculty to take a stab at this conversation and because I would like to learn from those of you who have made (or will make) similar attempts.

Here's what I did:

1. On day one, near the start of class, I gave a short anonymous survey:

Find a piece of paper, DON’T write your name on it. 

Answer these simple questions:
   –  Take a moment to look around at the members of our class. Does this class look normal to you? In what ways yes, and in what ways no?
   –  What are you most excited about learning in this class?
   –  What is your greatest anxiety about this class?
   –  What are your greatest excitements/anxieties outside of this class?

Pick one answer and share it with the person sitting in front of or behind you...

Turn your questionnaire in when you pick up PS #1 at the end of class.

2. Then I introduced myself, talked about my research interests, told them about my unlikely career path, and also about my attempts to learn about and work toward equity and inclusion in STEM. I used both my non-traditional career path and my own commitment to equity to segue into a description of the fraught comments from the US Supreme Court.

3. As a part of the latter bit, I read out loud Sarah Tuttle's essay, Racism Doesn't Belong In My Classroom.

At the end of this 1-2-3 my classroom was dead silent. If you could look at my slides, you'd see that the next one features a linearly polarized plane wave. Seriously. The transition was just about that abrupt. I desperately wanted to bring this conversation to my students, but I didn't manage to make it a conversation at all. I could hear them thinking, "We're in Canada, what does the US Supreme Court have to do with us?" "Why are we talking about this?" "Are we ever going to talk about Optics?" "Does she even know anything about Optics?" "Is this going to be on the exam?" And I wanted to scream, "Didn't you hear the part about training revolutionaries?"

It was awkward. You can see my impostor syndrome kicking in as I struggled to express how much this conversation meant to me and how clearly I saw that I hadn't approached it well.

After that, I provided my students with several excellent suggested reading lists from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and John Johnson (here and here; which mercifully do include some discussion of race and racism in Canada). And I dropped it.

My actual, real, live discomfort with talking about discrimination in a physics classroom manifested in me: (1) not making it a real conversation with my students, (2) not having a plan to meaningfully integrate either the student surveys or the concepts themselves into future discussions, and (3) not returning to it as a theme over the rest of the term.

Which doesn't mean that I won't try it again.

As I finally sat down to write this post, I rediscovered an excellent set of blogs from Moses Rifkin. He describes a rich 6-day curriculum which draws from his training as a physicist and teacher. The AIP also has a nice set of Teaching Guides on Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences. And I'm sure there are other great resources out there.

My first foray was not a smashing success, but I remain committed to this endeavor. It's too important to the future of physics and astronomy, and for people inside and outside of STEM, for me to drop it altogether. These actually are our future leaders. So, if you have additional resources and/or have tried to facilitate a similar conversation in your physics classroom, please contact me. I would like to learn, to learn from, and (if you're game) possibly to share your story.

Further Reading:

1. An open letter to SCOTUS from professional physicists drafted by the Equity & Inclusion in Physics & Astronomy group and signed by over 2000 astronomers and physicists

2. The ‘Benefits’ of Black Physics Students by Jedidah Isler

3. Racism Doesn't Belong In My Classroom by Sarah Tuttle

4. A U.S./Canadian Race & Racism Reading List by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

5. Required reading for those who prioritize diversity by John Johnson

6. Teaching Social Justice in the Physics Classroom by Moses Rifkin

7. Teaching Guides on Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences from the American Institute of Physics

UK's 'Your Life' Campaign: Government, Industry, and Universities' Concrete Steps to Recruiting Women in STEM

In early May the UK launched its ‘Your Life’ campaign, a new STEM initiative focused on spreading the message that science and math are the pathway to a successful and well-paid career*. The initiatives concrete goals are to:

• Increase the total number of students studying A-level Maths and Physics by 50% over the next three years.
• Double the proportion of undergraduate engineering and technology degrees that are taken by women to 30% by 2030 and increase the numbers taking these degrees overall.
• Increase the number of women in STEM careers (no clear numbers/benchmarks are assigned to this goal)

Over 170 businesses, universities, schools, and other organizations have signed personalized pledges stating specific steps each company/organization will take to support these goals. The numerous pathways/programs fall under three main categories:

• STEM companies are providing financial support for a new scheme called ‘Maths and Physics Chairs’ to recruit post-doctoral graduates to become science and math teachers, particularly for 14-16 year old students. This will inject teachers with top-level expertise at this critical age when girls are choosing non-STEM trajectories. 
• New partnerships between universities and STEM companies to provide additional internship opportunities and improve targeted recruitment of women into STEM companies. 
• Universities and STEM companies have pledged to identify women in STEM role models from within their organizations and provide support for these role models to participate in career panel discussions, classroom visits, online webinars, etc. The primary audience for these role model interactives will be 14-16 year olds as well as undergraduate students. 

THE ACADEMIAD

I’ll admit it – I’m an Olympics junkie. During these 17 days every two years, I stay up way too late to watch events I never think twice about otherwise. This summer they included synchronized diving, rowing, weightlifting, badminton, swimming – you name it, I’ve probably watched it. I’m addicted to watching thrills of victory and agonies of defeat, none closer to my heart this year than our local girl, Jordyn Wieber, who, though the 2011 World Champion in the All Around for gymnastics, failed to qualify for the same in the Olympics. My sister was a competitive gymnast, so I know her life, and my heart broke for Jordyn. However, as I watched her rebound during the team competition and witnessed the anxiety – and then the elation – of the close-knit teammates as they awaited the final score to post for the Team competition, I couldn’t help but think how much graduate school is like a gymnastics event. In fact, academia is very much like the Olympics in general.  You don’t believe me?  Let me explain… but forgive me if I stretch the analogies or flip-flop between ideas. 

Entering graduate school is like mounting a gymnastics apparatus – for a comparison, let’s just call it the beam, on which we have to balance the many aspects of our life as a graduate student. As we take courses, collect data, write programs, or build instruments, we are performing routines that get evaluated by judging advisors and reviewers.  Eventually, we dismount, graduating with a brain full of knowledge and a diploma in hand.  Sometimes we stick the landing, and sometimes we don’t. The anxieties and pressures are similar, and along the way, we might have to re-evaluate our progress and our goals, much as a gymnast must after a fall or an extra step. What is the new level we wish to achieve?  Or do we leave altogether?  Our team of friends, families, or advisors, who motivates us and cheers us on, despite extra steps and balance checks, helps us with those decisions.

To draw some uneven parallels, I think teaching is much like competing in the heptathlon, a collection of Track and Field events in which athletes compete in the 100-meter hurdles, the 200-meter sprint, the 800-meter run, the long jump, the javelin, the high jump, and the shotput. Since I try to expose my students to the whole Universe in just 15 weeks, I regularly sprint among topics and constantly answer questions that students throw at me.  Sometimes the hurdles of requisite math skills and expectations are easily overcome, but sometimes it’s a long leap for students to make the connections. Round and round I go with some of them! Honestly, when I’m finished teaching non-science majors about all things astronomy, I’m out of breath!

Research could be described as any kind of water event – smooth sailing, rough waters, or anything in between.  A team of colleagues analyzes the data and writes up the results, considering every stroke of the keyboard; sometimes it’s a crew of two, sometimes four, sometimes more.  We shoot the rapids as we discuss data and reviewer comments. Sometimes we go overboard, and sometimes not everyone has an oar in the water!

Though it is in meetings where we hone leadership skills, a professor’s greatest opponent has to be committee service and administrative work in general. Committees wrestle with policy, pin down curriculum modifications, or try to lift the institution and/or department to higher standards.  Weighty issues such as recruiting and retaining students and faculty are heavy responsibilities, but ones that need to be addressed.

Interspersed among all of these activities are the 100-meter dashes – short time-dependent events that need immediate attention.  For example, twice each semester, I’m reminded that the week of student advising is approaching and that I need to post a schedule (now) and notify my advisees (now) that it’s time to sign up for a meeting. Hallway (or doorway) conversations with my Department Chair take time, too, and refocus my attention from research to departmental issues, “for just a minute”.  Students stop in to ask about homework, have me sign a form, or just chat.  These events don’t take very long, but they draw my attention away and cause me to revisit the starting blocks of whatever I was doing before.

Academics aside, perhaps STEM in general could learn something from the 2012 Olympics. For the first time in history, Team USA had more women than men on it and the US women would rank #3 in gold medals (29/46), if they were ranked as a nation.  At the end of all competitions, women from all countries won more medals than men overall (60%), and more gold medals, too!

While the summer Olympics comes around just once every four years, the responsibilities of a faculty member never end.  As we compete in the academic arena, we have to remember to pace ourselves and remember that our presence as female participants is important.  Win lose, or draw, we, too, can inspire a generation!