29 Hours in Edinburg, Texas: A Visit to the University of Texas Pan-American
2007 February 9--10
Tids on the prowl
- Lecturer Position
The Physics and Geology Department of the University of Texas Pan-American (Pan-Am) called me in for an interview for a lecturer position.Probably rules about what a lecturer is vary all over the country.
But I think a common designation is someone who is part of the faculty, but is not tenure-track and has more teaching and less research/service responsibility.
In fact, officially maybe 100 % teaching and 0 % research/service.
But at the same time, unofficially you are encouraged and maybe even expected to do service and research: certainly it was that way at Washburn and seems to be that way at Pan-Am.
The lecturer position maybe time-limited or maybe continuing. Pan-Am has both.
The job I interviewed was time-limited (to 3 years), but could be converted to continuing. Continuing may work out to be long-term, but every year is a new renewal in either case.
Pan-Am lecturer could easily find him/herself out of a job if they decide to hire a tenure-track astronomer: they are trying to build up their research cred, and so why pay a salary to someone who isn't going to do that officially.
One thing is certain: if you are hired as a lecturer, you are never converted to tenure-track. Maybe in the past that happened in some places, but nowadays I think never.
You can, of course, apply for tenure-track jobs locally---but that probably seldom works out since every tenure-track job has at least 100 applicants---and often far more.
By the way, in the UK, a lecturer has a different status and is more like our assistant professor.
- Getting There
From Oklahoma, it's not that hard.A 3 hour trip with a connection in Dallas-Fort-Worth.
You land at McAllen International Airport in McAllen, Texas.
Pretty small for an international airport, but I guess they get a lot business travel.
- Terrain
The whole area is the south end of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley.It looked awfully flat. Oklahoma with palm trees.
Lots of square green fields. I was told they are brown later.
It's an agricultural area with oranges and grapefruit as specialties.
I was told that their oranges are sweet, not like those sour oranges from Florida and California.
To make good-looking, long-lasting oranges, California and Florida bred the flavor out.
The same happened to apples. Delicious apples are fine for decorating a table, but by golly they taste rotten.
- Urban Landscape
It's the most god-awful urban landscape.I only saw Edinburg, but I've got a feeling much of the lower Valley is the same.
Endless new suburbs and commercial strip.
Downtown Edinburg is only commercial strip as far as I could see.
All the streets, outside of the subdivisions, are 6-lane plus the center turning lane.
Pan-Am is surrounded by 6-lane streets. There's no easy walking off campus. And we thought the Boyd Speedway was bad.
It's totally a car place: no one can walk anywhere.
They're all huge cars too---it's the SUV Nation.
I don't know why people bear such urban ugliness.
For me that was the most negative aspect of the place. I really hate places which are just car places and everything beautiful has been sacrificed for the convenience of cars.
It's depressing.
We are lucky to have Campus Corner. It could be better: there could be more small specialty stores, book stores and the like; there could be a park and a public bandstand and stuff.
Campus Corner has a way to go to be like Massachusetts Avenue in Lawrence, Kansas. On Saturdays and Sundays people and kids are strolling up and down and in all the stores and eateries. It's just very pleasant and restful and humane.
It's not that Edinburg lacks money that it's such a soulless place.
Apparently, the area is making lots of money.
Agriculture, of course.
But also tourism to coast area---South Padre Island---and shopping tourists from Mexico. Apparently, the Mexicans just pour over the border to visit the malls.
The industry is in Mexico. Apparently, lots of assembly plants are just on the other side of the Rio Grande. Parts are shipped in from all over the US and Canada to assembly plants there. Remember Ross Perot and his great sucking sound---the jobs sucked to the other side of the Rio Grande.
There are also retirees. California and Florida and Nevada even, are getting full and expensive, but retirees can still find cheap land and homes in the lower Valley and live winter-free.
The high daytime temperature was 90 degrees when I was there: the locals admitted that this was a bit warm for February.
In summer, over 100 degrees is typical. But they say it's not that humid.
If I went there, to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara, I'd never be cold again.
- Faculty
I was met by Edgar Corpuz who would be the faculty person showing me around.Of course, it almost immediately transpired---note the correct usage---that he has been on staff only since last summer. The junior guy gets the chauffeuring and tour-guide duties for job candidates---at least for the lowly positions.
An interesting cultural point.
I was calling Edgar, Edgar, since we'd been emailing each other on a firstname basis.
But he was always referring to the other faculty as Dr. Padilla, Dr. Mazariegos, etc.
I grasped that was the custom here.
Most people seemed to refer to each other with title and surname.
This was quite unlike everywhere else I ever been where everyone is quickly on firstname basis: that's the just the modern custom.
I had to follow suit, since I wasn't getting any firstnames.
But I felt a bit self-conscious.
I had this feeling I was being impolite by saying Dr. so-and-so.
It's not actually disgraceful to have a Ph.D., but in most circumstances it should be left unsaid---like having hemorrhoids.
It's OK for students to call me Dr., but they are paying for it: I expect more disrespect from my colleagues.
I didn't meet all the faculty. Maybe half.
Some were quite interesting just on the surface---the others maybe deep down, of course.
Dr. Padilla is actually Mexican and senior and seems to have been a geologist with Pemex for many years. He's the only real geologist in the department. He was also a dean at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City.
He has a lot of research money for a Pan-Am person, but he's short of bodies. No postdoc money, no grad students---they don't have graduate degrees in physics or geology.
So he has to do a lot of the physical work himself setting up his lab. He's got a couple big rooms to work in.
He's an oil geologist. He's also trying to promote the idea to oil companies---where he has contacts---to build an energy center at Pan-Am---and get a graduate school going.
I said he'd have to become the director---but he said no, no.
Dr. Cortez also senior spent many years working for DOE at Los Alamos and Livermore.
He was also director of EMRTC (Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center) at New Mexico Tech (NMT), where I was 2001--2003.
EMRTC is a non-academic division of NMT devoted blowing things up. It's not actually a national lab, but sort of acts like one.
Dr. Cortez has been doing most of the astro-course teaching and is set to retire, which is why the lecturer for astronomy position has come up.
Dr. Mazariegos is the chair. He did a masters at OU in the early 1980s, but in geophysics, and so he doesn't know anyone here in Nielsen Hall.
By the way, they are hiring for a new chair.
I did ask if they were looking for a builder/visionary who would be given a lot of power to shape the department.
There was no straight answer actually.
But I'd guess they are. Why hire someone outside---in a friendly department---if you could always just press-gang someone inside to do the job if you really had too.
I was supposed to meet the dean of the College of Science and Engineering, but he was away in Laredo.
So I met the assistant dean and had a nice chat. There are questions I wish I'd thought to ask him.
He told me every faculty gets a computer and servicing by the university-wide system. He said they were getting a 96-node (?) cluster and there would be faculty workshops for learning how to use it.
It was after 2 pm and I was having trouble not yawning. He may have been having the same problem.
- Pan-Am
Pan-Am started out as a college in the 1920s and progressed to being a university at some point and then joined the University of Texas system about 1990. The Wikipedia Pan-Am article isn't one of the best.It's growing really fast.
The campus map. It's all surrounded by 6-lane streets cutting it off from the community as noted above.
There are almost no online images of Pan-Am anywhere that I could find. They have a virtual tour which doesn't seem to function.
It has 17,000 students and is expected to be over 20,000 in a couple of years.
Essentially, it serves the local community.
I don't think it draws many students from far away.
Most people who come here stay in the Valley. That's the same everywhere: some people go, some people stay.
Pan-Am's got money flowing in.
It has new science and engineering buildings.
The science building has this huge gate-way entrance that you could drive a double-decker bus through. I thought it resembled the Ishtar Gate of Babylon which has been recreated at the British Museum, where I failed to see it in 1994 if it was there then----but the science building gate is square not round and lacks gryphons, but it does have blue tiles and the height---and that must have cued my memory.
They are building a new health and recreation center.
Their teams are called the Broncos and baseball is king at Pan-Am.
The goal of the administration is---of course---to become the leading research university of southern Texas---beating out the University of Texas, Brownsville---but at the same time remaining student-centered---of course.
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[``We are student-centered here you know.''
You know it's an odd thing, but I've never actually been at a university which wasn't student-centered.
Now how unlikely is that?]
The students are 87 % Hispanic.
A lot of them prefer speaking Spanish which they did with Dr. Cortez I noticed.
I'd have to work on my Spanish. I could read it quite well once, but that's sort of worn off.
I worked in Barcelona for a year---but that is the Catalan-speaking part of Spain. Todos los dias la gente hablan Catalan---Catalan esto, Catalan eso.
Like everywhere else students are mixed lot in quality---except New Mexico Tech, of course. The NMT students are a cut above on average: it's a very small, selective science and engineering university: it's the all-nerd college: golf is the big sport.
Texas has this rule now that the top 10 % of any high school get admitted to any public university in Texas.
But, of course, they can't all be physically accommodated in the top universities (e.g., UT Austin), and so some of these students are at Pan-Am---some waiting to transfer to Austin or elsewhere.
I think this is a great rule myself.
It recognizes the fact that the dispersion of human talent is the same in all populations, but that for economic, cultural, and local school reasons some communities are favored on standard tests.
So to get the naturally talented you don't take the highest scores overall, you take the high scores from each community.
On the other hand, people were complaining about all the standardized testing in Texas where students were just being taught how to do well on the standard tests and had rather patchy educations particularly in sciences.
- Talks
I had to give a lecture to an actual intro astro class.They asked me to prepare far more material than I could deliver.
I should have known better.
That went OK.
I've a natural rapport with students though you'd never know it.
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[Boy, I had a hard time remembering how to spell rapport.]
That and several carefully scripted jokes got me through.
Later I gave talk on giant steps to whatever faculty felt like attending late on Friday afternoon.
The introduction to astrophysical radiative transfer was probably better than the giant steps part.
I need to work finding better word formulas to convey what is actually going on.
- What Job Entails
The job will be to teach two intro-astro courses: solar system and stars-galaxies. This includes laboratories. So 12 contact hours per week officially.The first course is a prerequisite for the second, and so there won't be any overlap unlike most places.
These are for non-science students.
I believe such courses should be fairly easy. Not bird courses---as we used to call super-easy courses in my day---but not overly alarming.
There are a couple of math tricks I insist on---but those are the only ones.
I've a nearly complete intro astro course online: Introductory Astronomy Web Lectures.
So I would not have a textbook. The online lectures are my notes, the students's notes, and the lecture tool.
At Pan-Am every class room has a PC and projector and document camera which can be used as an overhead or for displaying pictures from books. So Pan-Am's ahead of OU there.
The web lectures are a good tool for myself, but probably too idiosyncratic for anyone else to love them.
Students have more-or-less seemed happy with them.
So the intro-astro classes themselves would be a breeze.
But there are also labs which I've never done and the planetarium to run.
The colleagues kept assuring me this would be easy.
The planetarium lacks a projector at the moment, but they hope to get a modern one soon: cost 200 K or so.
It also needs a real website. Which I could do easily.
It's a been a kind of landmark at Pan-Am since 1963, and so they are keen to make use of it.
If the lecturer person ends up doing lots of shows, there might be release time from teaching or they may want to hire a planetarium person.
The office of the lecturer person will likely be right adjacent to the planetarium.
There is an astronomy club it seems. But it must be unofficial since it's not listed at Student Organizations.
No Society of Physics Student chapter.
Pan-Am has between 9 and 25 physics majors depending on who you ask.
I don't know if they have any regular physics colloquia in the Pan-Am Phy-Geo Dept.
I should have asked.
Maybe there is a journal club or a seminar class. Yes there is a seminar course in even academic years. But do all the faculty attend?
Maybe I'll have to try to start a journal club if I went there.
I tried that at ISU physics and got almost no takers.
- Getting There