The Uses of Academic Travel

This post is about the necessity and advantages of academic travel. Before I enumerate them, a few images from Darmstadt where I visited the Technical University.

Hochzeitsturm (Wedding Tower) - a major landmark in Darmstadt.

Russian Church in the Vortex Garten.

Waldspirale - no two windows are the same.

The Wedding Tower A Russian church in the Waldspirale - no two windows

(Hochzeitsturm) - a major Vortex Garten. are the same.

attraction in Darmstadt.

Background

Some colleagues travel during the semester while they are teaching courses. They maintain their teaching remotely, via Zoom etc. I generally prefer not to do that, as it disrupts my teaching rhythm. So the only in-semester travel I undertake is during the week-long fall and spring breaks. The core of my travel happens during the 1-month winter break and the 3-month summer holidays when regular classes close and the students go home.

Typically, I visit physics or related departments at other universities for delivering seminars or colloquia. Sometimes I attend workshops, which are a week or two in duration. Rarely, if ever, do I attend conferences (I prefer to send students and postdocs to them instead). I have been undertaking such travel for about 15 years now. Below, I try to list the benefits of such travel.

1. Advertisement: The first benefit of speaking at other universities is that it helps people become familiar with your research. Even those who may have been reading your papers may have missed some of them (or not heard the ideas expounded in detail), but also you can reach academics in other disciplines, who might have never heard of you otherwise. Sometimes these disciplines can be slightly related, a benefit of which is that these people now start recognizing and citing your work. In all cases, a personal appearance is a chance to make your case in an appealing manner.

   
   

2. New ideas/collaborations: When you visit a department, typically you don't just give a talk. You meet a number of researchers in person (people who expressed interest in meeting with you + people you expressed - typically to your host - interest in meeting with). This also includes - sometimes rather extensive - tours of laboratories. This often leads to new collaborations, or stimulates new ideas for research, or awareness of the scale of the local effort, or concretization of the capabilities of the place in your mind. For example in a recent visit to Valencia I became aware of how massively capable in telecom the Nanophotonics Technology Center was. A good thing to keep in mind when planning future research.

   
   

3. Getting to know people in your field better: A substantial part of the time is spent with the host, and often their students and postdocs. This is very beneficial. Although such meetings can happen during conferences as well, they are rarely so relaxed as when they happen in the natural habitat of the host. Talking to the professor gives insights into their research program, future directions, and possibilities for collaboration. Talking to the students helps you gauge if they would make a good postdoc hire for your group. Sometimes these postdocs and students later become junior colleagues in the field, and it helps to establish relationships with them early on.

   
   

4. Connecting to the academic grapevine: There is also the important element of catching up on academic gossip. Visiting places and talking to the professionals clarifies the inner workings of the field. Often news of who has moved to which new positions, who is thinking of retiring in a few years, which collaborations have newly formed, which grants have been awarded or secured, who is putting together a review of the area, which governments are supporting my kind if research, etc. can be gained. This helps understand the dynamics of the field. For example, some months ago, I heard an experimental group was thinking of moving ahead with an idea we had proposed. More recently, I learned that they had secured a grant on the topic. Knowing they were seriously acting on my ideas strongly motivated me to work further on the subject.

   
   

5. Learning functioning and history: Talking to colleagues in other departments also reveals insights into teaching and administration. Academics love to compare notes on which courses are taught at which stage in the curriculum, how large the graduating class is, how the masters program is run in their department, etc. Since there are often variations in style and philosophy, useful hints can often be picked up and applied back in my home department.

   
   

   Lastly, a physics departments usually has a long past associated with it and some if not several distinguished people. So visiting them sharpens my sense of history. For example I learnt that the Nobel-prize winning chemist Gerhard Herzberg was in the department at TU Darmstadt before he moved to Canada and wrote the 5 volume work on spectroscopy that was so helpful to me as a graduate student.

Caveat

Having counted the benefits of academic travel, one must be a little careful about expounding its glories without limit. For example, I have heard some senior people say they do not take seriously grant applications from people who do not travel around - the logic is they are not doing anything impactful if no one is inviting them for talks. This might be a bit extreme. I know very good scientists who do not travel, e.g., due to family reasons.