UW Bothell

All right folks – I have a new job, and I have actually started it. I am an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington – Bothell (UWB). UWB is one of three campuses of the UW (the other two are Seattle and Tacoma). UWB is essentially all undergrads (there are some graduate degrees in business and nursing and so on): about 5000 students, almost half of whom are first-gen and almost half of whom are students of color. It’s a sweet little campus and it’s where the crows go. I’m excited to be here! 

Physics at UWB is too small for a department: I am part of the School of STEM, and the Physical Sciences Division Chair is the closest thing to my department chair. Physics at UWB is quite new but growing fast… the first physics major graduated two years ago, and there are 40+ in the pipeline. Whoa. I am only the third tenure-track physics faculty member (and we are all women! which is pretty awesome; there are also multiple non-tenure-track faculty, of other genders). The first TT physics faculty was hired three years ago, and the second one was hired in September. I competed for her job. :) But my job is even better (for me): I’m 50-50 research and teaching. So I have half a stable salary, and also get to keep a lot of the research time and freedom that I have become used to.

Here is a news article introducing me (scroll down to Jan 10), and here’s my faculty profile page. I’m not teaching yet (they gave me the first quarter off), but I’m on campus, I have an office, I go to faculty meetings, I meet people, I learn how things work. Half the time I feel a wonderful excitement about what I can contribute (like when they decide they want to make a physics teacher track), and the other half of the time I just have no idea what they’re talking about. Especially about teaching. I know so much about physics teaching, and yet I have spent 20 years not acquiring the practices of a regular physics professor. I don’t know what the regular sequence of undergraduate courses is, I don’t know what to do on the first day, I have never made a syllabus, I don’t know how to use Canvas. It’s going to be okay; I wanted a new adventure, and my imposter syndrome is at a manageable level. When in doubt, I try to make my office a little nicer. (I'm waiting for them to paint the wall where more shelves used to be.)