It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and there’s nothing to do. Instead of playing another round of Halo, head over to CII 3051 and check out this week’s physics colloquium. Sure, the details of the talk will be mighty elusive, but then not many are really going to understand it anyway. The purpose is to get an introduction to some cool experiment that someone is doing.
Colloquia of all shapes and sizes pepper the campus on any given weekday afternoon. Nearly all departments—including Information Technology, Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems, Management, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and more—hold them regularly, either inviting a speaker from another school or presenting the work of one of RPI’s own.
The wide variety of academic lectures on campus satisfies a severely under-recognized need of RPI’s student body: curiosity. As students of science, engineering, and other technical disciplines, RPI students are inherently curious about the world, and not just the specific discipline within a major.
Often, departments will have several special lectures per year, in which a guest from a well-known university will make a presentation, such as the annual Resnick Lecture of the Physics Department, named for the author of a well-known and well-used Physics I textbook. These lectures become important events for department students and faculty alike. Most departments also have a regular schedule of weekly seminars.
Going to a colloquium or two, or three, or a hundred, allows anyone on campus to dabble in side interests. IT majors can get a bio lesson, physics majors can pick up some management skills, and mechies can learn about the latest abstract mathematical quandary.
Another beneficial aspect of the cornucopia of lectures at RPI is the general interdisciplinary exchange they facilitate. Combining the philosophies of different fields often results in new approaches to old problems and new fields of innovation, as the development of the new Biotechnology Center rightly shows.
Also, exchanges between similar—or even widely different—fields can result in collaborative efforts between research groups on similar problems, creating new opportunities for research at RPI.
Attending lectures in one’s own field can be beneficial as well. Students can see what people in their field are actually doing, which is often a welcome change from 300-year old theory.
In addition, the colloquia offer a way to meet professors outside of the classroom, and possibly cultivate a deeper relationship there. And of course, one can always enjoy the refreshments.
Sampling a wide variety of the colloquia can help avoid the over-specialization that occurs for scientists in many fields. Going to the lectures can stimulate casual interests in other subjects.
Keeping an eye on other fields can be a serendipity-inducing thing for a scientist to do. For example, knowing about the latest developments in computer science could yield the perfect software for solving a chemistry problem.
But above all, attending the colloquia is just fun, not in the humorous or entertaining sense of the word, but simply because RPI students like learning about all kinds of things, especially the ins, outs, and idiosyncrasies of another field of study. The “Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s interesting,” feeling is what makes it all worthwhile.
