The Power of a Brief Exchange
Matthew Jungwirth
CyberOptics Corporation, USA
For a bit of context, I attended the University of Arizona for my PhD in optical sciences so I had John for a professor. In fact, my first memory of John was from my very first day of graduate school. John’s class, Introduction to Geometric Optics, was famously at 8 in the morning. (Perhaps I should say infamously since 8 am is a rather early time for a sleep-deprived grad student.) Anyway, just as class began, John looked at us all and said, “This is the first class for most of you, so let me just say, ‘Welcome to grad school.’” And away we went.
My favorite memory about John, though, was in my second year at Arizona. I was a teaching assistant on a late undergrad course on radiometry for (then) Prof. Michael Descour. I had finished grading the first exam and was planning to assign grades based on the distribution (as John does); i.e., make a histogram of all the scores and hand out the A’s, B’s, and C’s based on the breakpoints in the distribution. As you might surmise, this activity has a thick thread of art involved since the chosen bin size has a meaningful effect on the grade assignments. Thus, I wanted to check with the boss (Descour) to ensure buy-in on my method.
While waiting, John happened to walk by on the way to his office. We briefly exchanged pleasantries and he asked what I was up to:
Me: “I’m assigning grades to an exam for radiometry. I wanted to check that Prof. Descour agreed with my distribution.”
John: “Oh, you are giving grades as I do in Opti 502 (his course in geometrical optics)?”
Me: “Yes, I am. It seems Descour is busy right now. Would you be able to take a look, Prof. Greivenkamp?”
John: “Absolutely. And you can call me ‘John.’”
At this point, I performed the briefest of double takes. Did a well-respected professor just ask me to call him by his given name? I was slightly aghast. But, then it dawned on me: John respected me. It seemed he now saw me not just as some grad student but as a burgeoning optical scientist. No, I had not crossed the proverbial Rubicon yet, I still had the qualifying exam and that fussy dissertation to write after all, but I felt that I was now knee deep in that storied river and thus well into my journey to the big leagues in science.
So, thank you, John, for being one of the first professionals to show me that I was on the right track.
