A colloquium with a former thesis intern yesterday brought me to ponder again over the important question of determining whether a student should choose an experimental or rather a theoretical curriculum of studies. It is a problem that arises at a variable point of the student's trajectory depending on the way the university courses offer is structured, but the issue is universal as it revolves around the skills of the students rather than anything else.
It occurred to me that we maybe invest too little effort in helping students making that choice, given its relevance. While not necessarily irreversible, their choice is often a defining point in their scientific career. At the bachelor course in Physics at the University of Padova, during the first three years students take generic courses in basic physics and maths, and follow an almost entirely fixed path that aims primarily at providing them with knowledge in foundational aspects. Then, during the following two years of Master, students are asked to freely define their path by choosing most of their courses among a large pool of topics in all areas of Physics. This basically means deciding whether they will become theorists or experimentalists, because most of the time they will end up doing their thesis internship by working on one of the topics offered during those courses.


But what are the inputs that allow you to decide whether you can be a good theorist, or rather, a good experimentalist? This question corresponds to a restriction to the Physics domain of the complex issue of deciding what are your talents. While on a smaller scale, it contains all the elements of the wider-ranging choice of deciding what University courses to pick after high school.

For some students the choice is dictated by their mathematics skills. Virtually all freshmen students in Physics come in by believing that their maths skills are above average, yet many of them soon find themselves struggling with challenging courses in math analysis. The exam scores they obtain there somehow act as a chalk mark that determines where the conveyor belts will bring them: not only they will realize very clearly whether they are better or worse than their peer in calculus; the scores will also be something that professors will use to advise them, or even select them as laurea interns or not some years later. This imprinting is often sufficient to determine whether one becomes an experimentalist or a theorist.

For those students "in between", who did not get particularly high scores in the mathematics courses but did not suffer too much either, the choice is however harder, and it ends up being determined by chance, or rather, by the charisma of professors they meet as they choose courses in an exploratory way. In Padova we have a very strong group of theorists who are excellent mentors, and this does make a difference. But I feel a more informed decision could be beneficial, and I wish we could provide more help to the students who are still on the fence after two or three years of studies. 

There are a few things that are already in place and work out reasonably well, providing additional information and help:

- Seminars are constantly offered on a variety of topics, and they certainly help in showing what kind of research is performed in the different areas of physics within the department and elsewhere: often, students will be intrigued by a particular research topic to decide they will take the plunge and invest in it. 

- Guided tours to big laboratories (e.g. CERN) are occasionally offered. There, students can get privy to the instruments, the research activities, and the scientific goals pursued there. This is very useful, but often the students who participate are those who have already made up their mind.

- Occasional events where research groups present their activities are also useful. These events tend however to have a bit of advertising taste, and inform more on what the matter is than on the way research is really carried out.

- During the summer, stages are offered to students, where they get embedded in research groups and assigned some work or problem to solve. These are really useful in my opinion, and probably they should be made less occasional and random than what happens today, at least in Padova. 

I would imagine that a set of such stages in different areas of physics research would really provide the missing datum to students who have not understood well whether they prefer the life of a theorist or an experimentalist. Probably, making these stages a mandatory step in the curriculum of students during the first three years of their bachelor would be a good idea. 

But stages are not easy to organize. They first of all require mentors to make themselves available during the summer, when many people leave for vacations; a further hindrance is that the department closes for a couple of weeks in mid August. And finding good topics, setting up the work, finding physical space where the students can interact with the mentors, are all challenges. I often receive emails where I am asked to volunteer to offer stages to students, and I typically decline for one or more of the above reasons. But I am not a University employee, and thus I am not mandated to this kind of activities (I work for a research institute, the INFN, and all the teaching I do is on a volunteer basis). Maybe with some effort stages could be made more effective as a tool to create the required "self-awareness" of physics students.

Are you aware of other methods to determine whether a Physics student should pursue a theoretical or experimental curriculum of studies? I would be happy to hear what your experience is, in the comments thread!