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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development. 

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JACK DEVINE, HOST: Welcome to another edition of Alumni Aloud. We’re here with Michael Redlich. Thank you. So. Much for joining us. 

MICHAEL REDLICH, GUEST: Thrilled to be here. 

DEVINE: So before dive into your experience at the Graduate Center and your time afterwards. What was your journey like into undergraduate education? What did you do before you arrived at the grad center? 

REDLICH: Yeah. So I am originally from Illinois, I was born and raised there and I did my undergraduate in physics at the University of Illinois. And I had a great time. That was a fantastic school. I enjoyed all the coursework that I did, and I even got a little bit of an opportunity to pursue undergraduate research while I was there. I was analyzing stellar data from the Sophia program, which is now since scrapped. But OK. I knew when I was there, engaged in the in the academic process that I knew I really wanted to pursue research right. I knew that the bachelor’s degree wasn’t going to be enough. I wanted to go to grad school. And I was kind of interested in particular in astrophysics. That was my bachelor degree specialization. So I’m there. I’m taking the astrophysics classes. I did a little bit of the research. I’m talking to the professors who are kind of mentoring me, encouraging me to go to grad school. And I decided this is, this is what I’m going to do. So I made a a big list of all the R1 institutions in the United States that did astrophysics research, places I could get a PhD in astrophysics, made a big list and kind of paired that down to something a little more manageable, you know 15 or 20 that I could actually apply to sort of when I was ready. And so my last year as an undergraduate, you know, I take the GRE, I type up my essays, I apply to a bunch, and I got some acceptances.  

And CUNY was one of them. One of things that attracted me to CUNY was one, obviously, it’s in a deeply interesting place. I mean, to live in New York City would be a lot different than being in Champaign-Urbana, which if you don’t know is a giant college town surrounded by 100 miles of corn in any direction, it’s cathartic place to spend a few years. But it’s different than New York, right? CUNY is kind of exciting for that reason. . So it was sort of a it was a big place. There was a lot to do there within the institution. I didn’t know precisely what I wanted. And so I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to experience a lot of different labs a lot of different kinds of physics research and find my particular niche. 

DEVINE: That’s really great. So you went to the University of Illinois. You’re big 10 graduate. I’m a fellow Big 10 grad. I went to Michigan, so I’ve had the Midwest experience as well. At least for undergrad, I didn’t grow up there. I’m from New York. You’re there and you discover this passion that you have for astrophysics and you want to continue to pursue that and find somewhere you can do that at a graduate level. So you do your research, you find a bunch of institutions, but you end up landing at the CUNY Graduate Center. Because of the opportunities that you have in New York with all the different labs that you connect with, so you wanted to kind of continue with your passion, continue your research at the Graduate center. So what was the first year or so of grad school like and what questions drove your research at the CUNY Graduate Center? 

REDLICH: Yeah. So. I get to CUNY. In the first year, at least in the physics program, it’s all about taking classes, right? So I’m taking my first semester. I take mathematical methods, mechanics like classical mechanics, and then a quantum mechanics class. In the second semester, I’m taking another quantum mechanics class, statistical mechanics and electromagnetism, all at the graduate level. It’s kind of it’s kind of an intimidating set of classes to be taking. But OK, I’m there with a cohort. There’s about 20 of us that are brought into this year’s PhD program. We’re all taking the classes together. And pretty quickly, you know, we form a pretty tight bond, right? We’re all, we’re all in this together. And so it’s actually kind of fun and you’re learning a lot. You’re surrounded by a lot of other young, interesting people who have their own interests and they want to do their own research. And so the classes, as it turned out, were an excellent experience. And you really learn what it is to solve proper physics problems. You really begin to feel like a physicist, like you’re really coming to grips with the thing. At the end of the first year, we take the qualifying exam, which asks you some complicated questions about each of the four topics, classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, and if you pass the qualifying exam, then you can go forward and actually begin to do research. So the qualifying exam does cause quite a lot of anxiety, at least it did for me.  

Also during that first year, though, you get the opportunity to rotate around labs, right? So I rotate around four or five labs. Some of them were assigned to me. Some of them I got to choose, and these were just professors in the CUNY system, physics professors, mostly who would have openings for students and were willing to sort of host someone briefly for a month or two to give them a sense of what their research was like. And so I tried a bunch of different labs. It wasn’t just astrophysics labs. That’s what I came in thinking I was going to do. But I was open minded and I tried some other things as. As I got towards the end of the year and the anxiety is ramping up for the qualifying exam, I was thinking a lot more seriously about OK, what am I going to be doing for the next sort of half decade of my life? What am I going to? What lab am I going to join? How do I make this decision? And I decided that. At least for me, I figured it didn’t really matter what I chose in the sense that no matter where I went, I would probably get at least a little burned out at some point, right? Five years is a long time to spend. And graduate research is kind of intense, no matter what’s gonna happen. There are gonna be some days where I think to myself, man, I need a break. I need to.  

And so, my reasoning was that I should choose something that I think is inherently meaningful. Right. I should choose something that I think to myself. Yes, I understand why this is this is important. It’s not just interesting to me. It’s insufficient that it’s interesting. It has to be really meaningful. And so that actually not that astrophysics isn’t meaningful. But that drove me more towards the lab I ended up. Which was in biomedical physics. So this was a lab at Hunter College, run by Professor Hyungsik Lim, who has since moved to Indiana University. But his research had to do with designing imaging systems for biological microscopy, so building lasers take pictures of mouse brains and retinas, and that sort of thing with the ultimate goal of trying to work out whether there were, whether we could determine then disease processes. Whether you could envision or visualize literally disease processes and in that way come to understand diseases sort of earlier in their pathology. And I thought to myself, OK, this is. This is important. This is something I sort of believe and like I’m I can be emotionally invested in this in a way that. That that was kind of unique to me. And so that’s kind of. That’s kind of the mind space that drove my selection of a research group. 

DEVINE: That’s really fascinating. So you, you get there your first year and you’re taking all these classes and  it’s really compelling material you’re meeting with really intriguing people and people who are kind of just as passionate about physics as you are. And I remember having a sort of similar experience entering the history department and getting to know people and diving into material in the way that you really never got the opportunity to before and it’s real. It’s an amazing time, but then you’re also really nervous about your exams. We also we had our written exams and our oral exam and that all kind of is hanging in there. It’s looming over you at all times. A bit of a specter, but and then you’re very happy. You pass, you move on and you, you focus more on your research. So for you, you had this you originally had this passion for astrophysics, but you wanted to do something more where you had a greater impact in people’s lives and could kind of change them and improve them. You’re kind of switching this where biomedical sphere and dealing with countering diseases. So what is the rest of your grad school career like, and what role did the Graduate Center have in your intellectual development? 

REDLICH: So at the end of the first year, luckily, I did pass the qualifying exam. I was thrilled. Never before or since possibly have I been so relieved. Then I’m launched as you say, straight to the rest of the grad school career. So there there’s some classes still. Like I take my core classes the first year for the next two years, I think I still had to take some classes, but I got to choose what classes, though. Those were so it was more for personal interest and enjoyment. I believe I took I took Bayesian statistics, stochastic optimization, bioinformatics, and then a class called Finance for physicists which was which was pretty interesting. But finance didn’t come up a whole lot when I was doing the mouse brain stuff. But you know it. It was enriching nonetheless. But the classes really weren’t the point. The main focus was diving into that research lab. So I was brought into the research lab. There it was. It was a small lab that I was part of. I think there was one other graduate student when I got there, maybe a lab tech. And then of course, the PI Professor Lim. And particularly that first year or two, it’s all about learning how to do research, just how to be a good researcher. And at first that means I I go in and the professor says, look, I I have this idea for a research project. We’ve maybe done a little bit of work on it. Here’s what we think we need to do for the next steps. Let me teach you how to. How to operate the setup? Just how do you turn on the laser? How do you take an image? How do you handle the mice? How do you do the surgeries to to put in a cranial window? Let me just teach you sort of the lab basics and that’s kind of where you start. And then when you’re able to operate the system, we’re able to take data, then you’re following the procedures that the professor or another graduate student or someone kind of laid out.  

And overtime you develop your own kind of sense of independent research. You kind of get better at you get a sense for it you say? Oh now that I’ve taken data a few times, I know how to do it in the right way or I know how to optimize it a bit better and you become a little more independent and a little more independent and eventually you find yourself, you know, talking back a little bit to your professor and saying, yeah, you know what I actually wanna do this a little bit differently. I think, you know, I was doing some reading. I did some literature review and someone else did this. And I think that would be interesting and relevant. You come to really understand and eventually become come to really own your own project. And when that kind of comes about, when you feel like you really have ownership of the project, when you understand it better than anyone else, then then you’re really steeped in the research. Then you’re you’re really kind of ready to go and you become quite productive. It starts to feel really good. You know, you, you stop feeling kind of awkward and new about it, and you start really embodying what you’re doing. And then so for me, I think that that really happened. There’s a kind of critical point maybe about a year and a half or two years after I joined the lab when I really felt pretty good. And that point I had, I’d gone to conferences, right. So I’d gone to a conference. I had my poster board. I presented stuff that I talked about. I had given talks. I think the first talk I gave was at the CUNY  ASRC Advanced Science Research Center, which is pretty neat. So I’ve given talks, I’ve given poster presentations. I felt really confident about that. And I published a paper. I published my first paper 2-3 years in that feels pretty good, right? To understand what it means to publish something. And then it was time to publish a second paper, and now I felt even more independent, sort of from scratch. From the start. I could do it all the faster, right. I knew what it. What was required to publish?  

I had this idea of what a good scientific question would be. I had some notion of how to design experiment plans, you know from scratch, as it were. And so now I’m I’m really moving and I I feel. A lot better about myself, feel like an independent scientist. Kind of sort of obviously still getting a lot of input from my PI who is deeply brilliant, deeply capable and help me troubleshoot a lot of issues. So eventually I managed to publish a second paper. Here and rounding the corner, ready to publish a third paper ready to start work on my 3rd paper. So my first two papers had to do with mouse brain imaging. The 1st paper was essentially how well can we use harmonic generation. That was the technique I was using. Doesn’t really matter what it’s called, but how can I use my technique to image mouse brains. I was looking at violin, OK, using commercially available laser systems like everyone uses Tie SAP. This is the laser system. That’s our commercial off the shelf that you can just go buy if you have a quarter of $1,000,000 lying around and how well can you do the imaging with that? My second paper was, hey, we have this different kind of niche laser. That’s done. How can we? How well can we use that to do this imaging? And the answer is you know if you have your niche laser system, it does a bit better, right? You get to see it a bit more. You can see deeper into the brain. You can see more details. That’s all the better.  

My 3rd paper was going to be what if I design a laser from scratch optimized for this specific purpose, so I was going to be in the lab building the lasers, the little fiber and everything. Well, that was around February of 2020. So a bit of an awkward time for that. Eventually we got sent home. I had to abandoned the laser design instead, worked on a computational project, some kind of super resolution project in in MATLAB. Not super important, but this is how I kind of rounded out the research portion of my sort of grad school career in that last year, I took my second exam. So far, the first exam is the qualifying exam previously mentioned, the second exam for the sciences is where you propose your research to your dissertation committee, so you formally bring your dissertation committee together for the first time, and you propose your research and say, hey, this is what I want to do. And This is why I think it’s. A good research project. Plan. And they can kind of pick you apart. Or maybe they pass you some people do their second exam kind of early, which makes sense, right? When you kind of first have your idea for what research is going to look like, you’re going to do for the next couple of years. My advisor said, you know what, let’s not do it early. Let’s do it really late. After you’ve already published, because then the second exam will be a slam dunk, right? If you say this is my research plan. And by the way, I already published. That’s a lot more. That’s a pretty compelling argument. You know, what can what can your committee say about it? So anyway, I did it kind of late and that was fine. And then in. January of 2021 on January 6/20/21, I defended my dissertation. It was a it was a big day for us all.  

When you defend, there are sort of three possibilities. Let me back up a little bit for me what I did for my dissertation is I basically stapled together my three papers. You can do this if you publish a bunch. You can instead of writing sort of a separate dissertation in the sciences, you can just put together your papers and say this forms a coherent set of research right. There was sort of a clear narrative through these 3 or 4 or whatever. And you write introduction to conclusion, kind of make it all come together. So that’s why I did the dissertation. Writing itself wasn’t super involved because it had kind of already been done, although making out merging all the citations took a whole lot of time, I can still remember well, let’s not complain too much about that. So I get the dissertation together. You give it to your committee members. They get a couple weeks to read it and prepare some questions during the defense, they’re going to ask you about it. And that’s a little nerve wracking, right? No one knows the research as well as you do as the researcher. At least I like to think. So you know, I was the one actually doing the experiments. I was overseeing the technicians as the case may be. But the committee would ask sort of bigger questions like well. What would you do next now that you’ve done this? What makes sense as a next stage of research? Why did you choose to focus on this? Set of biological variables, whatever it is, rather than this set, how did you come to this? They were asking kind of these big questions. It wasn’t so much is your research bad? It wasn’t sort of down the weeds, it was more like do. You understand what you did? Are you are you a competent researcher? Do you understand what it means to do research? Did you make good decisions when you’re doing research? 

So when you do your defense, there are basically 3 outcomes. You can be more or less failed told. No you can be passed, said told yes, this is this is perfect. Just deposit it in the library. You’re done or you can pass with revisions, which seems to be the most common. At least that’s what happened to me where they say, OK, that was good. Make some of these changes. And then then you’ll be good to go. So I, as I said at my defense, was in early January, I had to get the dissertation into the library by the end of January or to graduate on February 1st. So there was kind of a mad dash there for my last three weeks getting these things together, getting my PI to sign off on the changes. But I got there in time. Deposit the nicely formatted dissertation of the library and I was officially graduated haha so. OK, that was a lot of stuff kind of summarize.  

Grad school is unlike undergrad. It’s also unlike that first year where you’re mostly taking classes. It was sort of big and complex. It was multifaceted. It wasn’t just solving physics problems, it was. It was messing with the laser. It was overseeing lab techs explaining to them what you wanted to do. It was going to conferences. It was designing figures. It was tying for classes. It was this big, complicated thing. It was sort of like professional. In fact, it is professional training. And so the Graduate Center plays a really pivotal role in. Building 1 up. As a professional, right, you’re really become prepared to be independent researcher on your own. You’re kind of doing it all. And my time at the Graduate Center is absolutely indispensable. For that, I’ll also throw in. As an added bonus, the Graduate Center has an excellent series called GC Presents where they do public programming on all kinds of issues, mostly related to kind of culture and politics. At least those were the events I gravitate towards. But every couple of weeks I would go and I would attend these sort of public forum events. I saw Paul Krugman on stage more times than I can count, and that was a deeply enriching process. Even though most of those had nothing to do with physics. Right? The Graduate Center in general is just sort of alive with this academic culture. This kind of ethos of public service. And so in that sense, even for topics that didn’t have to do with imaging mouse brains, it was incredibly enriching place to be. 

DEVINE: That’s a really compelling narrative of your time at Graduate School, at least after your first year, where you’re still taking classes, but you really focused on your research and kind of this, this process of going from the student to becoming the master. Like first you’re told that to learn, you know, the basics of the lab techniques and how to utilize all the equipment and then. Soon you’re saying no. I want to take my own initiative. I want. We want to take it in this direction. My research is pulling me towards this and you’re publishing papers about how different kind of laser systems can be used for mouse brain imaging. It’s so you’re developing along the way and you kind. Of you, you take this unique step where you’re publishing before you’re putting together your proposal. You wait, and then you come together and you bring all that published work together. It’s your dissertation. So I think each person really has their own path. It seems a little bit different than what I’ve done myself, but  also history is very different than physics, so there’s everyone takes their own path, but it’s that that’s really compelling. The way that you went about it. But I think what really rings true to me and what you’re saying is 1 is kind of You’re learning to be a professional and what you do you’re taking. It’s this professional training. You’re learning to become an expert researcher and able to convey that information as well, not just knowing how to do the research, but knowing how to talk about it, knowing how to write about the research. And then you’re also part of this larger system of sort of public knowledge where you’re going to these talks, these conferences. You’re not just sharing what you learn, but you’re learning from other people as well. So I think that was really fascinating to hear. So what came after Graduate School, what were what were some of the challenges you encountered as you transitioned from Graduate School to your career? 

REDLICH: But as I said, I graduated in February of 2021 and at that point basically the jig was up. I had to get a real job. I had run out of academia and been thinking about work post graduation work for a little while. I think kind of back up to the summer of 2020. I’ve been sort of seriously thinking about it. So right after Graduate School actually in believe in January as I was kind of defending. I officially got an offer from what would come to be my job afterwards at the National Reconnaissance Office. So the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is a Department of Defense Agency that develops, builds, launches and operates spy satellites. And they hire scientists. In fact, at the time they had a program to hire technical stem PHD’s straight out of grad school. Right? So they had physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, all kinds of people. And idea was to pull them straight out of grad school and to bring them into this agency. And I’ve worked there since so my EOD, my start date at the NRO was March 15th 2021. So 4 years ago, almost to the day. In the intervening period, between February I move myself from New York to Virginia, which was it not very hard as a graduate student. At last, I did not have much stuff at all fit into the car actually pretty easily. And so it only took one trip to to make it down there. But I’ve been with the NRO since, and in my time there I’ve had. I’ve had three jobs, so I’ve moved around. Kind of a bit. 

DEVINE: So you you’re going into you, you’ve got to graduate and you don’t decide immediately. I’m gonna pursue, like, a a job as a professor. You wanna do something else outside, outside of academia, and maybe we’ll talk about how you return in a moment. And in certain ways. But so you end up at the NRO, which is part of the DoD, and it’s kind of working on spy satellites, which sounds really interesting. So what did you first do there? 

REDLICH: My first job as part of this program to hire PhD straight out grad school was to engage with and oversee research and development portfolios. So the NRO builds satellites. They want their satellites to be really good, the best in the world. In order to do that, they need some active research and development going on. But in order to understand the R&D… They need researchers, right? So what was my job? My job was to sit there and understand the organization basically. What are the needs of the NRO?  What are they trying to do? What are they interested in? What are sort of the technical bottlenecks? What are they kind of struggling to do? What they like to do. And then to turn outwards and say OK, what does the state-of-the-art look like? In the world in academic labs, in companies, wherever the research may be done, what’s the state-of-the-art here? And how can we? How can we bring that in?  What is it that we need to develop? What should we be going and how should we be interacting with the research community in order to get some of the things that we’d like? Right. So. I’m trying to figure out what tech we want and how to get this. How to get the funds there to kind of pursue that research. And in that way I ended up overseeing a bunch of projects. So I developed, I had a specialty area, one of my specialty areas was in quantum sensor development. And my job was to oversee these projects so we’d have active projects going on. PIs would be working. On stuff that was of interest to us, my job is to do things like. Help them plan experiments to say here. Here’s here are some of the things that we would like to see. The NRA would like to see, and I’m communicating on behalf of them. Here are some things that we would like to see, you know, is this possible? What do you think? Is this a reasonable experiment plan? And they would say yes, we can do this. We can do that. And I meet with them pretty regularly. And they would come back and they’d say, you know, Gee, we’re having, we’re having some real problems. We’re having some difficulty with this. And then I could say well, this is really important to us. You know, spend some time characterize that difficulty, let’s understand more or I could say maybe well, you know what that that’s actually not that’s really the main focus of what we need. Let’s put that to the side and focus our energies more on this. And so I was sort of like, I was called a PI, not quite in the same sense as like a university professor, but I’m overseeing projects, and I’m helping people design experiments. Sometimes I’m going to the labs and doing stuff myself. But for the most part I’m sort of giving guidance. 

And the real trick of the whole thing was to make all these programs work coherently, right? Because I’m overseeing not just one set of experiments at one institution, but I’m seeing multiple at many institutions, and they need to fit in together in a kind of way. They need to fit in such that something we learn over here. Can be joined with something we learn over there to bring us the technology that we need, right? It has to be a coherent set of programs. And at the same time. So I’m doing that looking inwards, much like my time at Graduate School, in a sense, at the beginning I get there, I’m told. Here are some programs I spend time really learning about them, learning about the NRO. But eventually you start to get a little competent, which is fun. Then it really gets fun and I can start making requests of my own leadership and saying, hey, you know, I’ve been here for a little while. I’ve been really thinking about these technical problems. That we have, and here’s what I think. Here’s a road map that I have now. Here’s I would like additional funding. I would like funding reprogrammed for these kinds of projects. And now I’m championing my own projects. Right. And so just like it was in grad school, you start out kind of. You know, kind of ignorant in a way, not really knowing much, but you take on information, you talk to people. You do the work that you have, you think about it a lot and suddenly you become the expert and then and then you can you really come into your own and you can make things happen. So that was that was sort of my first job. It was more very directly kind of R&D stuff, a pretty good extension of my time in Graduate School. I didn’t, as I say, spend a whole lot of time in a laboratory environment. But it was still very much as a very much an extension of the kind of research ethos that that I was inculcated with in grad school. 

DEVINE: So you’re in some ways kind of like a liaison between the research labs and the NRO and kind of coordinating different projects and managing what’s going on and trying to kind of make seamless collaboration happen, make sure that people are working on things in an efficient manner and over time, you’re learning more and more about your role and sort of translating knowledge you have from Graduate School into the NRO and it’s kind of it’s tend to go reaching out into the in the research labs throughout the country so where do you go from there? 

REDLICH: But as I say, that was my first job. This kind of direct R&D stuff. I like to think that I did pretty well on that, but I was eventually recruited to do something a little less directly R&D. So still within the NRO, but I was pulled to serve as the technical lead for a new satellite system, so the NRO would like to produce new satellite. These are cutting edge. They’re different than others perhaps, and they require technical people to work on it. And in particular my job title was as a systems engineer. So there will be different engineers looking after different subsystems. There will be for instance like a propulsion expert who cares a lot about propulsion. Then there’ll be a payload design expert who cares a lot about the payload, but there’s someone who has to sort of sit at the top, as it were, and make sure that all of these things are coming together. And that was the idea of a systems engineer. So you couldn’t just be an expert in one thing or the other thing. You had to have sort of a broad base of technical expertise and ability to communicate really well. Right, so you need to communicate with all the engineers who know their specific thing. You need to identify if there’s any problems and all this fitting together, and then you need to communicate up to the leadership who is not necessarily technical, right? You need to talk to people who are doing budgets and contracts and management. And maybe congressional liaisons, things like that. People who don’t have PHD’s or any kind of background engineering or science. Right. So it became simultaneously still a kind of technical role. You can get down in the weeds with these with these subsystem experts. But it’s really more about a communications role.  

It’s about, it’s about talking about the system. It’s about managing your non-technical leadership, it’s about going onto the field and talking to people who will use whatever the satellite does. It’s talking to the end users and understanding their needs and sort of bringing that back. And so for the first time, kind of catapulted into a kind of a higher role in a sense where I don’t need to be. In fact, I shouldn’t be. The greatest expert in this specific thing I have to rely for the first time others to have expertise and it’s on to it’s on to me to pull that all together and that was a little bit tricky, right? You know, I went through the whole process of getting the PhD. I knew what it was to be an expert. I had sort of a tendency to want to do that. Right. And it was hard for me a bit at first because I would have exactly that tendency, I would say, oh, this is a technical problem. Let me really, really dig into that so that I understand it. I need to understand it as well as the expert for me to do my job and that that was just incorrect. There’s just not enough time to do that, even if I wanted to, if I was inclined to do that, you have to learn to know enough to ask the right questions and to otherwise rely on other people to say, you know what, I’m not going to be the greatest expert on any one thing. I have to rely on others. And that that becomes a little bit difficult, but it is incredibly worthwhile journey. 

DEVINE: Centralizing ways. This this role took letting go, knowing that you’re not going to, you’re not going to have the exact details on everything, you just need to know kind of the broader outlines so that you can communicate it to people who are not experts and you don’t have the sort of training that you do. So taking your sort of the using communication skills and translating in information that is being produced by experts towards people who are in the more kind of policy realm or in politics, and so that sounds really interesting. So what was your third job? 

REDLICH: My third most recent job there again. I thought. I think I’d done a good job as a systems engineer. I was pulled again to serve as a flight director for a satellite initialization. So when a satellite is built it goes up. But it doesn’t just sort of immediately turn on and work you have to. Take it through its paces. You have to let it warm up, and this takes a little bit of time. And this was to be clear, our satellite system other than the one that I was working on in my second role as systems engineer. So I was brought to this whole new system. And my job was to oversee this process of initialization. So similarly like with the second job, there are a lot of people there who know a lot about the satellite. They know all about their individual subsystems. Someone’s the propulsion expert, someone’s the navigation expert. My job there was to serve again, kind of at the top of it, kind of bring it all together be the sort of a technical person to understand what was going on as we were kind of slowly taking the satellite through its paces, making sure that it that it was working. That job was pretty straightforward until things were off nominal. If there were any problems, then the flight director now has authority to start doing things. If there are no problems, then we just there’s an established, you know pathway like building something from IKEA. You know there are instructions and you just put it together as long as things keep seem to work, you just keep putting it together and there are no issues. But as soon as something’s off nominal, as soon as something unexpected happens, if you’re getting bad readings, if something’s happening that you don’t want to happen, then as flight director, now you have a lot of responsibility. Right. Your job has been to be paying attention. And to understand not just this subsystem or that subsystem, but all of them, so that when something goes wrong you can make a good call to keep this thing safe. Because after all, satellites are expensive and they’re winding up in space, you can’t just kind of go up there and tinker with them, right? You don’t you got to keep them safe.  

And so that was a lot of fun. It was a little more stressful. Because you have sort of this operational responsibility, there’s a it’s like an asset, a thing that you’re responsible for. But it’s sort of fun and fast-paced in that way. And at this point, now I’ve kind of moved pretty far away in a sense from my research days, right, we go from at the Graduate Center, actually at Hunter College, where I doing my research, but like messing with the with the laser system aligning the mirrors or the lenses doing the mouse surgeries, taking these pictures again, go to the in a row and I’m overseeing R&D programs. Then I’m doing. I’m serving as sort of a technical expert of a satellite, but now I’m now I’m ideally, there’s no more research and development. The satellite is up there and we’re trying to fly it, but even though it’s not a technical position, being this flight director I noticed that there were they required a lot of the same skills, a lot of the same things I learned doing research kind of came back to me. So when things are off nominal, when something weird happens, your natural question is well, why did that happen? What’s going on? As it turns out, that’s kind of that’s kind of a scientific question, right? I mean that’s a question whose answer has a physical basis. And you can kind of do experiments to figure it out. Or you can look at the past data and say, well, you know, here’s what seems to be suggested. And so I noticed that the same kind of skills that I learned and honed in the research labs at CUNY really came back here, so that when people came to me as a flight director and said, hey, here’s some data that I collected. I could analyze that critically and say, well, OK, that’s good data. But you know, I think there’s something confounding here, a confounding variable, or you have not. You’re not presenting in a way where your claim is obvious. You should go back and see if we can collect this data or that data. And suddenly, I really felt like. I felt like a PI in a way, you know, like I’m. I’m looking at these figures and I’m sending them back or I’m saying I like this or I want you to do it this way. It was shocking to me how much that those, those skills, those experiences that I had in grad school came back to help me in this seemingly very disparate kind of circumstance. 

DEVINE: So you become a director and you’re overseeing  a satellite launch and trying to make sure that everything is going according to plan, but and on the surface level it seems so different than what you were doing in grad school. But actually the skills that you accumulated and what you learned how to deal with kind of arose once again. Even though at one level it seems so different than what you were doing, what you had done in the past really helped you in your role at that moment. That’s really compelling. So were there any other career paths that you considered? 

REDLICH: Yeah, absolutely. So. Much like when I was choosing my graduate lab years ago, as I was getting to the end of Graduate School, I had had this idea that, well, I wanted to choose something that obviously was most interesting to me, but also sort of personally meaningful with the same idea that no matter what career you choose, you know eventually there’s gonna be a day where you think I don’t really want to, you know, go in or out, feeling a little burnt out. And so I thought I have to choose something again. That’s sort of personally meaningful to me. At the same time, I wasn’t too keen on going into academia. There’s nothing wrong with academia. I sort of considered it, but I thought, man, there’s a lot of other things out there. I think I would like to try them. I think there are other things that would interest me so. My career path search sort of went into 3 buckets. There were national labs. Those are a little bit different than academia. There’s a slightly different kind of culture and vibe there, but there, there are some similarities. Two, I was thinking about going into working at a research hospital, so this would be fairly similar to academia. I was doing biomedicine as I said for my PhD, and I had some contacts, some colleagues who are working at research hospitals in New York. And so I had some sense of what that would be like. And I thought, OK, that would be I think a particularly stimulating environment I think I could like pivot to that or work for other government agencies, so national labs are part of the government. They’re kind of separate they’re DOE labs, but they’re a little different. And so those were the kind of the three lines of thought that that I was applying to with respect to the government agencies at at some point.  

I think over the summer of 2020. Eight months, nine months before I was going to graduate, I went on Wikipedia and I made copied a big list of like, basically every government agency into an Excel spreadsheet, and I picked out the ones that I thought might conceivably hire a physicist. Right. So the Air Force research lab? Yes, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Yeah, probably not. Right. And you, you know, you work your way down, you come to your to your list of things. Recall that this is basically the same way I chose the list of graduate schools to apply to excel is a frequent visitor in my life. So OK, so I had made this list of government agencies that I that I thought would hire physicists. I’d just kind of trolled their websites and looked for openings, which is how I came to the inner originally. But yes, there were absolutely other career paths. I think there were a lot of interesting things out there that that I could have done and kind of just so happened that. The NRO was hiring. They got back to me really quickly. I thought it was a pretty good offer and I took. It I think that was a good choice. 

DEVINE: So you looked at a lot of different options. The national labs and potentially working at a research hospital. And then when you ended up landing on was a government agency, but you looked at a wide variety of government agencies just ended up with at the place that kind of got back to you the quickest and seemed like the best fit. So I understand now they were actually back in school as well. So what are you doing in school? 

REDLICH: Yeah. So I I’m still an NRO employee still working for the Department of Defense. They have a very nice program where they will send a cadre of people each year to the Harvard Candy School on a fellowship to study national security policy. So that’s where I am now. So I get to spend about a year here. It’s about 10 months actually. And it’s pretty open-ended in the sense that I kind of make of it what I will so while I’m here, I’m taking classes at the Harvard Candy School and also a few at the Harvard Law School, just up the way I’m attending lots and lots and lots of seminars every week. There are tons and tons of seminars, as you can imagine, a lot of programming goes on here at Harvard. And at the same time I’m doing my own kind of Policy Research. So my pitch for this program, and possibly the reason I was selected among a bunch of my other colleagues here, is that I have a research background. Now my research background as you will call was not in policy, right? I don’t, I don’t know a whole lot about government policy. Right. I’m a merely a humble physicist, but I do know what it is to ask a good research question. I know what it means to do literature review, right? I have a kind of sense thanks to my time at CUNY for what a good research product looks, what looks like and sure policy is a little bit different, but I thought I could. I could probably figure it out and I could probably learn it, I think. I think that was. Well, I’m still working on the program, but I think that’s been vindicated. It is a little bit different being here, but it’s kind of fun being a physicist in this world, in a world that is so totally different.  

And my goal for being here is to step away from my comfort zone. Right. Maybe my first instinct was to kind of double down on the fact that I’m a scientist and, like, do science policy and stuff. And yeah, I’ve done a little bit of that, but I’m really trying to reach out into other things and. OK, what can I see in economics or international relations or government administration? What can I see in those topics that is familiar to me? How can I think about those things through the lens of a physicist? Is there anything there? Is there something uniquely interesting about thinking? About government policy in that way. And so. But it’s been an incredible experience. I’m incredibly lucky to have to have this opportunity. At the end of this year, at the end of June, I will go back and I will go back with sort of the greater expertise in government, right. So not just a good physicist, not just good at doing scientific research, but now with a greater, more holistic understanding of what it is that the government does and how it goes about doing that. And so that means I’m going back with even more skills to take on maybe higher level positions than the DoD on my return. 

DEVINE: So you took kind of your background and your training as a physicist, as a intellectual and kind of the skills that you accumulated in that way and said I I’m a great person to go on this fellowship at Harvard, I can. I don’t have this government background, but I can apply these skills and use them at this fellowship and kind of bring a different approach than as  someone who’s in in the policy arena, maybe typically coming from something like political science or something that you’re coming from a different background and it works. You get this fellowship and now you feel like it’s giving you this opportunity where it’s going to open up a lot more potential jobs for you or things that you can do down the line. That’s. That sounds really great. But at the same time you’re also an adjunct professor. What are you teaching? 

REDLICH: So I am yes, I am an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College, so this is a Community College local to where I live in Virginia. I am on adjunct sabbatical for the year. That’s code for unemployed, but that’s OK. So while I’m in Virginia, I work as an adjunct. That’s a lot of fun. So I got to teach when I was in Grad school. In fact, there is a requirements, I think for the sciences that we teach at least one semester. Most of us teach a lot more than that. But when I was in grad school, I really just taught laboratory sessions, right? So you know you have a physics one class and there’s like a lecture and a recitation section. But then there’s like a lab section where you go in you, you know, you put carts on ramps and they accelerate and you measure them. And so I was doing that, and I did that for most of my time. In Graduate School, I really liked that. I perceive in academia there’s some people kind of like teaching a lot of people maybe don’t like it or kind of neutral about it, but I really like teaching. I really like it. I thought the students were pretty engaging. And if nothing else. You know, if I’m in my lab sometimes I’m doing research and I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. But at least if I’m doing the teaching, at least if I’m doing the undergraduate physics labs, we’re making progress. You know, some, something’s happening, time is passing. And so in that way, it feels kind of good. But it was really great interacting with students. I liked that a lot. And as I left, I kind of missed it. And I thought I would like to do with this. Yeah, I would like to teach. And getting a PhD, you know, in some ways it’s a superpower in that it unlocks the ability to teach at the at the tertiary level. That’s pretty much the only requirement. As it turns out, you don’t actually have to have a background pedagogy, which is kind of wild.  

So I was in Virginia, and I basically just called, emailed a bunch of Department heads kind of in the area, so mostly at Community College campuses. But I also live near George Mason University. And I said, yeah, I introduced myself, told them who I was. I got this PhD. I work as a research physicist for the government. And boy, I’d like to teach. Does your department have an opening? Thing and one of them got back to me at the Annandale campus and. They said, you know what? We do have an opening. We’ll set you up with the class. And so since then on Saturdays I’ve been teaching physics at Northern Virginia Community College. It’s really been a blast, so I’m teaching the whole class. The whole class is my own. It’s not just the lab section. I’m doing the lectures overseeing the discussion sections, and of course the lab sections. I get to write my own exams. I assign the homework. It is all mine and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of work, particularly the first time that you teach a class, cause you have to kind of build everything up, man. Once you have it built and you just gotta update every semester, boy it actually goes by pretty easily. And the students are pretty good for the most part.  

During the summers, the summers are very crowded. I get a full class of about 30 and that’s a lot of fun because there’s a lot of students. There’s a lot, lot of energy. But during the semester spring, it’s usually a little sparser. I’ll get maybe a dozen students, and that’s fun too, because a little more intimate, you get to know people a lot better. And the students are, I think, pretty motivated and pretty interested for the most part in physics. And maybe you would have to be to take an all day Saturday physics class, right? Maybe I’m only getting the students who are, like, really, really excited about this. But I have a lot of fun with them and I think it’s a fantastic, it’s fantastic in a couple of ways. One, it just feels good, right? Because you get to see the students developing, you feel like you’re imparting something and you’re maybe moving the needle a little bit with them. But selfishly, it’s also kind of good because it keeps me technically sharp, right on some of these fundamental concepts. It means every semester I’m thinking about. Really fundamental stuff. I’m really, really thinking about whatever angular momentum or I’m thinking about Ohm’s law or impedance in a really deep way to make sure that I’m able to engage well with the students and that helps keep me kind of technically sharp, right? It’s good to do that once in a while. And if you if you don’t have this kind of teaching thing going on, maybe you don’t think about. The fundamentals as often. And then finally, I think it does. Pretty well for one’s communication skills.  

I certainly don’t mean don’t mean anything improper by this, but teaching certainly makes me better at talking to my own senior leadership, right? And it’s not that they’re. It’s not that they’re, you know, the same as undergraduate students or anything like that, but having to think critically about tricky concepts. How you communicate tricky concepts that is wildly important, right? And nowhere is that more crystallized than in the classroom, where you’re trying to explain. Where you’re trying to explain quantum mechanics to people who have never heard of it before, who have never engaged with before you’re trying to. You’re trying to bring it down to its simplest elements to give them intuition for it, and that’s exactly the kind of stuff you have to do. Or at least I have to do when I’m back at my job and I’m talking to people about the satellite system or the thing that we’re trying to initialize or the R&D projects that I’m. And what we’re seeing, it’s a little more complicated. It’s a little bit different. The seniors that I report to, you have different questions. But the basic communication skills are the same, so absolutely teaching has been a joy and it’s incredibly rewarding thing to do. I highly encourage anyone as they, even if they leave academia after their PhD to keep themselves a little bit sharpened away by by taking on some adjusting if they can. 

DEVINE: I’m really glad that we got to discuss your current adjusting experience because I think it highlights something that’s really great about getting your PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center and being in the CUNY system as a whole is that there’s a lot of opportunities to teach while you’re there. It’s and it’s been one of the best experiences that I’ve had kind of teaching American history and some other course to students at College of Staten Island and at City College, and I think I think a lot of what you’re saying really rings true, especially kind of communicating this expert level knowledge you have in a way that is relatable to people who are not spending all day doing it. And it’s really fascinating how that translates for you in your job and helps you kind of, even though obviously it’s a different group of people, but kind of communicating expert level knowledge to people who are not experts in that field than how it can be useful to them. So just have one last question for you. What would you recommend to current graduate students interested in pursuing a path similar to your own? 

REDLICH: A good question. Obviously at this exact moment, it’s a little bit awkward for federal hiring, so I won’t in general, I think my experience in the federal government has been fantastic in the sense that. The federal government is a big place. Even this agency I’m part of is a big place. That means that you have a lot of room to sort of make it your own. You get a lot of agency to go and determine what it is you want to do and to make a success of. That but sort of putting the federal government aside for a moment, thinking about this more broadly, I think a couple of the things I learned are one. The skills I learned in academia are applicable pretty widely. Maybe going into academia or when I was in Graduate School, I kind of thought, man, there’s kind of a pipeline here and if I deviate and I go into industry or government or something else… It’s not going to translate super well or it’s going to be awkward. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think the skills I learned in academia are incredibly applicable to places outside of academia, right? In particular, the ability to do research transcends fields. The point of getting a PhD, I think, is not just about. Developing this particular expertise and becoming the expert in this thing, it’s understanding. What it means to develop expertise and importantly, what it means to discover something new, to discover new knowledge, and to add something to add something to the existing body of knowledge, and so that general concept that transcends fields and that is exceptionally valuable. I think wherever you go, that’s a mindset that is. Kind of unique to people who have done research of any kind, so. 

That what you learn in grad school, the kind of person you become that is valuable elsewhere. It doesn’t just have to be academia. Simultaneously, I think I learned, or the advice I would give is don’t close yourself off to other fields. You know, don’t just see yourself as a laser physicist, and you do laser physics and everything else kind of isn’t your domain doesn’t belong to you. Maybe it’s less interesting or less important, or it’s just not your responsibility. I highly recommend do not do this. Continue learning right? See yourself fundamentally as a researcher, or maybe as a scientist, something broad right that will allow you to give you the that will give you the leeway to continue incorporating new knowledge to continue to be curious about things that aren’t. Laser physics or mouse brains that are maybe budgets or contracts or government relations or something like that. So, in summary, one being a researcher is extremely valuable wherever you go to. Continue to be curious about the world around you, not just your own specific field. 

DEVINE: Those are really great pieces of advice and I think an important reminder to PhD candidates at a moment when the academic job market, especially in certain fields, is not the best that their their skills, that they’re learning, that their time has been worth it, that you’re learning how to do something that is truly valuable and can translate to a lot of different sectors of the economy and to remain, to stay open minded about what you can learn and how learning new things can help you down the line as well. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us on alumni aloud. It was really great speaking with you. 

REDLICH: Thanks for having me.