PHYS 496 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Course Description

Course Objectives

The purpose of this course is to teach you valuable writing, presentation, teamwork, leadership, and organizational skills that will better prepare you for a successful career in science or technology. You will learn good communications practices and standard conventions for physics talks, abstracts, journal articles, and figures, and you'll learn how to communicate your science to general audiences as well as to specialists. You will be exposed to forefront physics research and the variety of career options that are available for physics majors.

Course Components

The course will consist of in-class writing practice, lectures, formal and extemporaneous student presentations, and in-class activities, written homework assignments, and colloquium reports. No formal exams will be given, and no textbook is required.

Classes will be conducted in person, and may be recorded for asynchronous viewing depending on class needs.

An integral part of the class is "Writing Workshop" (WW), a series of in-class activities designed to improve your writing skills by analyzing and editing examples taken from published physics papers. These examples have been chosen to showcase specific, common scientific-writing flaws.

The homework assignments consist of specific writing tasks, including written evaluations of presentations and papers, abstracts, outlines, figure captions, and articles for a general audience. You will also learn how to create effective figures and captions to illustrate your written work.

PHYS 496 students are also required to attend at least two departmental colloquia (in-person or virtual) during the semester and prepare a short written analysis of each, using the "Colloquium Report" template. If your schedule does not permit you to attend the Physics colloquia, make alternative arrangements with the instructor as soon as possible.

Presentations will include an informal short presentation, a short science talk, a scientific poster session presentation, and informal individual and group presentations as part of in-class activities. Refer to the grading matrix and written assignments for additional details and deadlines.

Grading

Timely submission of written assignments is required. You will be given feedback on both the physics and the technical writing components of your assignments, and each will contribute to your final grade.

Each WW exercise will be reviewed, and points awarded for completing it. The WW exercises are graded binarily; if you show up and make a good-faith effort to complete the exercise and participate in class, you will receive full points, even if you don't have time to finish the exercise. If you don't, you will receive 0 points for that exercise. Missed WW exercises may not be made up, unless prior arrangements are made for an excused absence.

Each homework assignment will be scored and points allotted. The total points for each assignment are provided in the written instructions for that assignment and on the grading matrix.

To give you an incentive to complete your assignments on time and to revise your work, you will be able to earn additional points for rewrites on some assignments, provided the initial draft is submitted by the posted due date and time. Late submissions will be ineligible for "rewrite" points.

You will be able to earn additional points for each eligible revision, up to 98 percent of the original points assigned to that exercise.

Final letter grades will be determined by the total points you earn, the distribution of point totals among the whole class, and your class rank. Do not worry about grades; concentrate on learning and improving.