IU College Insider Podcast: News + Events: College of Arts + Sciences: Indiana University

On this episode of the IU College Insider Podcast, host Prof. Mark Messier talks with IU physicists Hal Evans and Sabine Lammers about their work at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where IU researchers are helping install major upgrades to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. They explore what particle physicists are looking for, what the LHC can teach us about the universe, and why this fundamental research has so many impacts beyond the laboratory.

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at
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Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. We'll be sharing
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the voices and experiences of guests who shed light on what higher education is
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doing to educate, innovate, and build our shared future. Today we're focusing
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on a fascinating topic, the history of American religious belief in life in other planets.
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So today I'm joined by my colleague Paul Gutar who is the Ruth Nal's professor of English in the college of arts and
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sciences. He has written a new book uh faith in space which will be published
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in the fall. So let's get uh started and let me ask you some questions. Uh please
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tell us why you wrote this book uh what it means to you and why now is the right time.
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Okay. So great questions. Uh I often kind of think about like where does a
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book come from? Where what is the origin moment? And those are always hard to pin
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down. But for this book, I was actually working on something else. I was working
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on an article on Mormonism, and I ran across something where Joseph Smith's
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father Mhm. commissioned missionaries to the moon. Okay. And I was like, "Wow,
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there's a book in that." I mean there, you know, that was such kind of like an
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out there moment that that somebody in the 1830s would be like thinking about the moon as
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a missionary field. I thought there's something there. And that was like I don't know 1997. So
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I was finishing up my first book at that point and I really thought this was going to be my second book. I thought I
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thought this this is a good idea for a book. So, I started collecting materials for this book
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and then I just kind of started to hit roadblocks. I thought, man, this would
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be the easiest book to write. How many people have written on this? Well, it turns out there's a lot of stuff out there. And so, for the next literally 25
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years, I was collecting materials for this book. I did eight other books between this one
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and that one. And I was like, now I'm at the end of my career. I thought this is the moment. If I don't write it now, I'll never write it. So,
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okay. So, Joseph Smith's father commissioned missionaries to the moon.
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How were they supposed to get there? I don't think we have to dwell on the details there because I'm not sure that
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was clear to anybody, but they were so convinced that there was a life there, right, that uh and that they needed to
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reach that life. So, okay. And was this I I take it after
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Mormonism was a religion. Yeah, this is very early days. Early days. Okay. Early days.
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Um great. Well, this is such an interesting project and I wonder if you would um help us understand because it's
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it's a history of ideas project. It's a history of religious movements within
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the United States. uh it's many things but what it isn't it's a it's not a
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treatise that reduces any u particular religious belief to the belief on life
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in other planets what you do instead is trace that idea across a variety of
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different um texts in space in time not really beyond the United beyond this the
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earth but rather from Greek thought through contemporary times
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right I mean So with any kind of book, you have to like think about your boundaries, right? Like where are you
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going to start? Where are you going to end? How are you going to bound it in terms of kind of geography? And so for me, I'm
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an Americanist, so I thought, okay, we're just going to stick with American stuff. And originally it was going to
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start in the 19th century. But the more I studied, the more I found out that you
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know belief in life on other planets among kind of religious communities the
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United States goes back to the 17th century. So I had to go earlier. And
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here was the basic thing that I kind of tried to keep in mind is there's a lot of talk about like what if we discover
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what if we discover life? What would that mean for us? What would that mean for religious traditions? And I was not
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interested in the what if question. I was interested in the there is Mhm.
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proposition because these the traditions I deal with in this book, they believe
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there is. There is no what if. There they are like totally in on like there
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being life elsewhere. So that's that's how I bounded it. But I bounded it by
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like beginning of kind of Puritans all the way to the to the present American
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and uh the the traditions that really are very convinced there is.
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Okay. And so that there is you actually in the book call it extraterrestrial cosmology. So do you want to talk about
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that term and what it encompasses? Sure. Um, cosmology is like like a
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really fancy word for talking about like how we conceptualize our our ourselves
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in relation to the universe. What are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our place in a grand scheme?
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That's what a cosmology is. And you know, whether we know it or not,
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we all function with cosmologies. We all have a kind of an idea of like how things began, how things might end, what
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that means for the middle of our existence. What extraterrestrial cosmologies was
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about is like what happens to your cosmology once you are absolutely convinced there's life elsewhere. So how
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does that kind of inlect your cosmology? And that was the question that I was
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really interested in is like once you start to believe there's life elsewhere, what does that mean for your life here?
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And what I found that was interesting kind of the connective tissue across the various different chapters and sections
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is that your discussion focuses on religious communities, but it also
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traces um the popular culture of the times and how there were u poems,
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almanacs, all sorts of casual references or maybe not so casual to this idea of life elsewhere uh that permeated the
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culture in ways that um people in the 21st century may not be aware of.
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Right? And I think one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that, you know, the ideas do not
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pop up in a vacuum, right? They're always part of kind of a larger cultural conversation. And often that happens at
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a very popular level, sometimes at elite levels. But
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you know what you have is you have these ideas circulating and then somebody picks up on something and starts to pull
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the thread and then builds out of that. Right? So
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um let me give you an example here. One of the things you'll find in this book is
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that a lot of these cosmologies, a lot of these religious beliefs are responding to technological changes.
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Okay? So there's big or like gargantuan shifts in technology happening at
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various times and like the three big ones that are easy to kind of point to is the uh the telescope. Telescope
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becomes uh much more refined during the 18th and 19th centuries. Observatories
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pick up. Once you have a good telescope, you can start to look for life elsewhere, right? Like are there men on
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the moon? Is that what we see? I mean Mars, is that what we see? So they respond to that change in
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technology about the telescope. They they respond to the the telegraph. The
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telegraph all all of a sudden becomes a way that disembodied voices, you know, you no longer need to send a letter. You
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can just kind of hear it through these wires. And that, you know, spiritualism picks up on that in a big way. And in
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the 20th century, it's the atom bomb. It's like all of a sudden we have a bomb that can destroy the earth. What does
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that mean? And a lot of these religious traditions respond to that kind of threat, that kind of like once now we
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have the ability to destroy ourselves. Have we like have we moved on beyond our
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ability, our moral ability to make good decisions about our technology?
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Yeah. And so you also allude to shifts in the mass printing and so the media
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and its distribution and its wide outreach to people who all of a sudden don't need uh someone who translates the
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Latin for example into the vulgar but instead they can read religious tracks themselves
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right and I mean so in in one way this is a book about big
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ideas okay and those big ideas usually come from prophetic figures. A lot of
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these traditions have prophetic figures. But also these figures then have to get
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their their teachings out there, right? And print in the 19th century becomes
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the way to do that. Okay? And then radio becomes a way to do that in the early
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20th and then TV and movies and so these ideas
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come from people but then they need to circulate, right? And how do these figures circulate their ideas? And that
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becomes kind of a a really interesting question about like, you know, again, ideas don't exist in a vacuum, but how
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do you get get them into the kind of the media sphere? So, yeah. And so, let's let's go back a
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little bit in time. And um some readers may be surprised to learn that leading
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figures in American history since we're looking towards the 4th of July in the the sequ sequenced
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its 250th birthday as a nation. So Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas
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Payne all believed in a universe full of populated planets. How influential were
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they in expanding that belief in American uh culture about
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extraterrestrial life would you say? Okay, so again really interesting question.
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A couple things are happening here. Um you'll have figures like John Adams.
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Okay, John Adams goes to Harvard. He's introduced to this idea of life on other planets. He journals about it. it does
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not like fill his whole field of vision. He's not thinking during the revolution. Ah, we not also have to think about
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aliens, right? Like he's like he's pretty focused. Um Benjamin Franklin also uh believes in
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life elsewhere and he puts that in his almanac, you know, he he'll mention it every once in a while that there's
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worlds elsewhere, right? Not a you know, again, not a guiding principle for him, but an interesting
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one. Mhm. But you get to a figure like Thomas Payne who is really important in terms of kind of uh both kind of the pamphlet
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culture but you know revolutionary thinking about
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uh you know democracy and those kind of things. Um he writes a book called the
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age of reason. In the age of reason he argues against kind of traditional views of Christianity. One of his arguments is
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that there that there's got to be life elsewhere. Okay. And once you start to think about that, that makes you have to
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think about like your own Christian beliefs. And he will kind of go to go to
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town on this idea that Jesus, if there are is life elsewhere, what is what is Jesus doing? Does he have to die on
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every other planet? Okay. And if he has to die on every other planet, does he have any time to
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do anything else? Because there's going to be so many planets that he needs to visit. So, you know, he uses that as
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kind of an ironic critique, but out of that kind of Thomas Payne
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thinking, a lot of religious thinkers come right against that. They write a
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lot of things to kind of argue against what Payne is saying. So, and so that's an interesting moment
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because when you're talking about the technological shifts, you talk about the telescope, it's it's what we would think
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of now as citizen science people out there being naturalist trying to understand through their own experience.
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And then you have Thomas Payne taking extending the logic of Christianity and applying that to uh the idea of life in
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other worlds and coming to the logical conclusion that this can't all fit,
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right? Yeah. And so different different founding father
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figures have different relationships to their beliefs in life and other planets. And for most of them it's it's cocktail
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party conversation, right? It's like, you know, it's there's probably life out there. Don't know what it's like. Pain
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will take it to a whole new level, right? He will really use it in in talking about like the importance of
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reason and how we need to trust reason rather than faith. you know, rationality is the
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is the key. So Harvard figures multiple times as
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this Yale University, you're a professor in an English department writing a book about the belief in uh the other worlds
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within religious cultures. How does education uh higher education as an institution
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and the pursuit of scholarly research in the humanities, how do these all align
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and give rise to thoughtful, substantive discussions about people's beliefs that
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don't make people um be reduced to just one aspect of their ideas?
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Wow, that is that's a great question. Um
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okay so Harvard and Yale figure prominently early on because they're leading institutions right um one of the
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things that's very true of kind of early American education at the collegiate and
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university level is they have a very keen sense of the importance of humanities. Okay. And for them,
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what they like to think about is kind of moral issues and what it what does it
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mean to be human and what does it mean more importantly to be humane? Like like
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what does it really mean to like care, you know, for those around you, to build
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communities, to, you know, to kind of interact with the local landscape, whether that be, you know, farming or
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shipping or whatever. And so, but they're always trying to bring kind of a moral veilance to this, right? And
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that's really important to them. And so you just get a kind of a kind of a moral
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overlay to a lot of education that I think if you look at the humanities now
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I think that is still still the task right what does it mean to be humane in
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this world um what they're not fight what we fight
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more currently against is more kind of a transactional world where that is not as
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valued probably as it was in like the 1700s when John Adams like that that
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crew is is you know metriculating that they
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they just have a different kind of sense of like what education meant and it
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wasn't all always like just uh thinking about making money or like
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scientific progress. ress at all costs, those kind of things. They're always trying to kind
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of balance it. Um, it's an interesting kind of, and I'm not saying everybody,
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I'm sure there were people that were back there doing the same things we're doing now. But I mean, if you look at
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the curriculums, there's a, you know, everybody their senior year has to take a moral
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philosophy course, and that's that's all year long, you know, and that was that was a course that was supposed to like
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bring together everything you learned. And so there's a gradual shift in the
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people who play center stage in the religious communities that you discuss
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as as we move forward in time. You point to a pattern of having duos or two
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people. Do you want to talk about the significance of that since it it's not inherently one of these supernatural
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numbers like three or seven? Right. Um, one of the things that you always have to kind of keep center stage
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in your mind when you're talking about prophetic figures is prophets are really important. Okay?
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And they're prophets for a reason. They're important because they kind of break new ground, all that kind of
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stuff. But you also need to keep in mind that they they too do not live in a vacuum, right?
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that they are interacting all the time, not only with their culture, but with their followers. And there's always kind
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of this dialogic thing going on that like they are being their attitudes, their teachings are
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being adjusted by just the m the moment they live in, the communities they have
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to interact with, the communities that hate their communities and they have to interact with, you know. So, there's
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that kind of thing going on. And what a lot of these uh a lot of
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these communities actually end up having kind of these two figures that come up.
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And one is a prophetic figure and one is what I would call like an executive figure. Somebody that like takes the
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prophet's energy and teachings and has the ability to mobilize it, right? Like
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put it into pamphlets, publish it, get it onto the airwaves. And you see a lot of those kind of
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tandem relationships that and it's impressive like some of these people would not be
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where they were without their little helpers and their helpers are the are the people that can kind of uh put feet
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to their ideas. Okay. So Paul, could you give us an example about those duos? One historical
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and one more contemporary. Okay. So the 7th day Adventists
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um this is this is a tradition that is actually
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larger than Mormonism. Okay, there are like 20 20 million Adventists around the
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world where Mormonisms are is a little behind that.
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Okay. So it it also runs the largest like nonprofit health organization in
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the world. I mean these people are like majorly committed to kind of issues of health global you know domestic
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whatever. Um their founding prophet uh is a woman
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named Ellen White okay and she has a series of visions over a number of years
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and she writes big books really big books okay about
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prophecy. her husband um is the one that really
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manages her career. Okay. While she is like prophesying, he's copying it down
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or getting secretaries to cop it down. Copy it down. And then he thinks about ways to publish it and distribute it.
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Okay? And he is massively successful in this. I mean, he is like really good at

the nuts and bolts. So that's the, you know, that's just one example in the in the 19th century. You
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get to the 20th century, the most famous kind of uh UFO religion of the 20th
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century is Heaven's Gate. Okay? And it's not because they're the largest. In fact, they're probably the smallest
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among the ones that I talk about. We're talking about like biggest number probably they ever had
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was 150 people. Okay? and but they're famous because of their mass suicide at
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the end of the 1990s. Okay, this is a group that is led by two people for uh
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its first 10 years. Okay, and one one of them was kind of a prophetic
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figure and the other one kind of viewed himself as her like megaphone that and
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he would talk about himself in those terms that like she gives the teaching and I make sure it gets out there. And
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so again, very similar to Seventh Day Adventist in the sense that that you
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have a prophet and then you have somebody that helps that message get out. Heaven's Gate was very much like
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that in in its early days. I remember I was in graduate school when the Heavensgate suicide happened and I
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was in Los Angeles. So I mean the just the images of of the members covered in
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blue blankets. I it's indelibly burned into my my awareness, but I I know that
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this is not a group necessarily that will resonate with younger audiences. So, it's it's good for you to discuss it
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at the end of the book to see how it's a it's an outgrowth of the previous
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movements that you discuss. But the seventh day Adventist is something that um I am familiar with and I growing up
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in Puerto Rico seen schools and they were vegetarian. they observe uh their
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um Sabbath on Saturday. So there are distinctive elements about that but they came out of or they evolved out of a
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previous movement. Do you want to talk about that a little bit cuz people may not know that history? Okay. So they come out of what uh a
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movement called the Millerites. Okay. So Miller was a guy that uh
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he believed that he had kind of cracked the mathematical code for uh when Jesus
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was going to return. Okay. And so he has a date in mind, you know, 1844. And it's
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going to be the date. It is going to be the date, right? and uh
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and he gets he is helped by a duo. Okay, his his helper is named Joshua and
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Joshua is an absolute master of mass publicity. I mean like this is a guy
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that would give PT Barnum a run for his money. I mean this is a guy that just knows how to publish stuff and
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distribute stuff. Okay. So, Millerites uh never kind of formed their own
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denomination. A lot of people in different denominations became kind of followers of Miller. Okay.
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Because of his his apocalyptic last days stuff. Uh what happens though is
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uh you know figures differ about how many people were really kind of believing what
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Miller had to say but you know some some scholars will say hundreds of thousands
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were like listening to him. Now were they all like waiting on a mountaintop in 1844 for Jesus to come? Probably not.
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But a lot were a lot were like selling their stuff, right? Like selling their houses, their horses, their farms
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because they didn't need them anymore. Jesus was going to come. Jesus does not come. Miller has to
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retrench. He does like a different date about nine months later. Still doesn't come. And this is called
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the great disappointment. Okay. And out of the great disappointment, uh, the seventh day Adventists arise. Okay.
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These are Millerites. These are followers of Miller that um
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slightly change the teachings to mean, you know, they have an explanation for why Jesus didn't appear on earth at that
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moment. And then they change different things like when they hold the Sabbath, what they eat, and their really
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pronounced vision of kind of healthc care. And that starts really early. And
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if seventh day adventists to this day run really good hospitals, have amazing medical schools. This is a long
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tradition for them. So, so one of the interesting things that that I learned by reading this book is
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that although there's many religious traditions who believe in life, life in
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other worlds, what the relationship of those inhabitants are to humans on Earth
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differs. And so I want to ask you if you could to differentiate between uh for
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example um Mormonism, 7th Day Adventist and the Nation of Islam because they
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they all imagine different relationships uh to that. And since I mentioned the
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Nation of Islam, throw in Scientology too because there's a connection there I was surprised to learn about.
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Yeah, a lot a lot in that question. Um,
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okay. So, you start to believe in life on other planets, then you have to ask yourself,
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what is our relationship to that life? Uh, for the Mormons, uh, they believe
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that life elsewhere is human uh, or humanlike, right? And that if you follow
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a certain kind of spiritual progression um of faithfulness on the earth on the
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earth we'll just talk about our earth uh you will be rewarded with a a planet
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right you'll get to be your own god in a way so it's kind of and that
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would fit into a larger kind of hierarchy of planets so that's how they
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explain it 7th day advent They're much more handsoff. Okay, there's life elsewhere,
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but that life watches the earth because the earth is the only place Jesus had to die. Every place else, they're unfallen
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worlds. But what what we have is the most wicked world.
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Jesus had to die here. One of the things that happens in that moment though is that the entire
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universe sees the mercy of God. Okay? So we become like a giant visual aid for
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God's for God's character. Okay. So more hands off. We get to
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Scientology. Okay. Scientology.
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This is a this is complicated story, but one of the things that kind of comes out of
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Scientology later after Elron Hubards had some time to think about it is that
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beings from other planets have been consigned to the earth as a kind of prison planet. Okay? And what happens is
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these beings named theans can attach themselves to humans in the thousands if
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they have to. Okay. So traditional Christianity would call this
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a demonology. Would call this kind of like how do we explain bad things? We
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explain bad things by aliens having been exiled to the earth and now attaching themselves to us and doing bad things
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with us. It's kind of a a view of possession.
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So that's not a really kind way of kind of thinking about our interactions with life on other planets. Uh
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you know, Nation of Islam is they do believe in life elsewhere, but it's it's
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not center stage in the same way that it would be in Scientology. So
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they for instance believe uh Farrakhan believes that he was has
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been taken up on a spaceship. So there is life elsewhere and we have
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some contact with them. But it's it's not the kind of central motif that it
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would be in Scientology. What you want to do with that
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becomes kind of interesting. Okay. So sc let's go back to scientology for a minute. It it explains a lot, right? It
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explains why we all act so badly and why we need to go get audited so that we can
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be better. Okay. What has happened with the Nation of Islam is they have become interested
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in Scientology and they have gone in recent years have become very interested
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in Scientology and made a lot of people go to Scientology training because they
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are also interested in making us better and they believe that Scientology is a way that we can improve our human
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condition. So they become kind of helpmates and nobody saw that one coming I don't
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think but it's an interesting connection. Okay. I want to ask you about a totally
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different group of people but this whole idea of a moonchild and the antichrist. I I think we should discuss the negative
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or or less than positive um connection between those beliefs and life
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elsewhere. Okay. So
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one of the things that you find with prophet figures is they often take a very kind of messianic role. Okay? And
they will to varying degrees claim kind of a messiahood whether they be the
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agents of salvation or they're one step away. Okay.
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What happens with like things like spiritualism? Okay. Spiritualism.
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When people think of spiritualism, they usually think of this. They think of people at a seance or around a Ouija
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board contacting the dead. Okay, that is spiritualism. That's central to
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spiritualism is contacting the dead. What people don't realize is a lot in spiritualism is also about contacting
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life on other planets. Okay? And that seems to have totally dropped off the
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radar you know but that is very much part of spiritual uh spiritualism.
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What ends up happening out of spiritualism is various traditions grow out of that and some of those are very
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closely associated with black magic and demon worship and devil worship.
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And what happens is some there are figures particularly in England around the turn of the 20th century that get
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very involved with a kind of a thinking about like we can turn these spirits
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from elsewhere to our own ends, right? And so whether they be on other planets
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or whether they be dead people, it just depends on who we're talking about. But that the you know contacting life beyond
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the veil can can eventuate in certain kinds of things. And and there is a school of
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thought that believe that you know we could actually create a moonchild or an
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antichrist out of this kind of mixture.
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wild stuff but like uh pronounced and it did have a following.
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So So the other thing that I was surprised to see is a long history or I guess not surprised but I I was happy to see that
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the the imagined locations of life elsewhere were stayed fairly close to
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our solar system. uh Mars, Jupiter, right? Saturn. Um in if you had to rank
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the best place to be another life form, I I gather that the moon's not ideal.
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No. And I think No, the moon's not ideal. Okay. Either
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is Jupiter. And like the earlier, you know, the farther you go back, the more that they're
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interested in kind of putting Mercury in the or Venus in the discussion, right? Like, you know, these are other planets.
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We don't know what they're like, but they could be habitable and they could be good. Mhm. You get to the 20th century, everybody
33:18
thinks, you know, probably not, right? Like I know Musk wants to go to Mars,
33:24
but like it's not hospitable, right? They It's very cold planet. there's like
a lot of bad things going on there. And so
33:36
what you have is a growing uh conviction that any kind of heaven is more interdimensional, right? Like it's it's
33:43
not uh so much a physical place as a place that exists outside of what we
kind of know. Um that's not true of everyone. The heaven's gate really did
33:56
think that it was on another planet. Heaven was on another planet. Spaceship was going to take you. It was a very
34:02
physical thing. So you would get on that spaceship, you would go to that planet. So and we have been building spaceships as
34:09
you mentioned and there has been of late the government has released a lot of files uh showing the stuff we have about
34:18
that. So is that a great disappointment or is there any interesting thing in there? Okay,
34:26
that that answer functions on two levels for me. Okay, all this talk about disclosure, all
34:33
these UFO files. Um, personally, I am thrilled. I am just
34:39
thrilled this because, you know, my book is hitting at the right time, right? like the sure let's just talk
34:46
more and more about UFOs and like um so I'm thrilled that that's kind of
34:54
in the being talked about in different media outlets.
34:59
That said, is anything kind of new or like every time I read read through some
35:06
of that material or read about that material, there just is not anything new there, right? There's no alien autopsy.
35:14
There's no DNA from ancient aliens. There's no there's just it's pretty disappointing.
35:21
So, um I would say
35:28
we're having a moment. I'm not quite sure that there's a lot of new stuff out
35:33
there that's going to like revolutionize us. Okay. Your book though opens with
35:38
another moment we were having in 2016 when NASA funded a study asking what it
35:44
would mean for the world's religions if we discovered life on another planet. And you say that you rather that rather
35:50
than speculate about the future, we should look at tthan speculate about the future, we should look at the past. So what do you mean by that? And how would knowing more
35:57
about the past and those those views on life elsewhere help us uh or help inform
36:04
our present? Okay. So NASA
36:09
was asking the what if question, you know, what if Buddhism had to deal with
36:15
aliens or Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity? What would that look like?
36:22
What would that do to people? How upsetting would that be? Or would would that be exciting or whatever? And it
36:29
probably be several things at once, right? So um and I think it's an interesting
36:35
question and really some interesting work came out of out of out of that grant but um for me I I I kind of
36:45
thought you know we have a lot of information about like religious traditions and how
36:51
they they deal with this possibility of life on other planets. would probably be
36:56
good to kind of look at like people that have like a 150 year 200 year uh
37:03
perspective on this, right? Like and it really has informed their religious communities already. So I what I was
37:13
trying you know maybe overstating the case a little bit but I think you know
37:19
you can learn things from the past and maybe you know looking in the rearview mirror
37:25
would be profitable in this kind of in this kind of endeavor because yeah we can talk about what if but there's a lot
37:31
of people that have been given this a lot of serious thought for a long time. What what has it done to them? Why does
37:36
how does it affect their you know views of how to live on
37:42
this earth? So who is the ideal audience for your book? Is it religious people?
37:48
Is it people who are interested in extraterrestrial life? Is it people who are lining up to go see the new Steven
37:54
Spielberg movie? Who should read this? Who would you like to see read this book?
37:59
Okay, so who's my ideal reader? Okay. And I'll tell you, my ideal reader is
38:04
the educated non-speist who is really curious. I love people that just love to
38:10
learn. So, I wrote this book. I pitched this book to the kind of to people that are not
38:19
going to be like experts in religion or experts in technology, experts in astronomy. I pitched this to like I
38:26
wanted to tell a story. I wanted to tell a story and I wanted it to be engaging
38:31
enough that people would like say, "Hey, that's kind of interesting. Never knew
38:37
that." Wow, really? You know, so I would
38:42
be happy if uh people came to this book and felt like I learned something from this book
38:50
and it was a it was a good read. Mark Twain has this great quote about like it's not that hard to be funny. Just
38:57
tell the truth. Okay. So, I thought about that a lot and I said, I just, you
39:03
know, I don't have to try that hard. I just need to kind of try to tell the story and the story will drive itself.
So, so anyway, thanks for listening and for I'd love that last
39:18
question. Well, thank you. So, I think that's a good place to stop and I do encourage
39:23
people to go out and pick out a copy of this book when it's published. It's very accessibly written, not at all jargony,
39:29
and it tells a really compelling yarn of who's related to who uh in terms of
39:34
whose ideas influence other people. Thank you so much, Paul. And thanks to
39:39
everyone watching and listening. This has been a fascinating conversation. If you'd like to check out other episodes
39:46
of the IU College Insider, please subscribe and share. and we'll see you next time. Thanks again.
40:11
Hey, hey,

In this episode of the IU College Insider Podcast, we talk with Ruth N. Halls Professor of English Paul Gutjahr. His forthcoming book, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life (out September 2026), traces more than three centuries of American religious traditions that have built elaborate cosmologies around the conviction that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at
0:07
Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. We'll be sharing
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the voices and experiences of guests who shed light on what higher education is
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doing to educate, innovate, and build our shared future. Today we're focusing
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on a fascinating topic, the history of American religious belief in life in other planets.
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So today I'm joined by my colleague Paul Gutar who is the Ruth Nal's professor of English in the college of arts and
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sciences. He has written a new book uh faith in space which will be published
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in the fall. So let's get uh started and let me ask you some questions. Uh please
0:57
tell us why you wrote this book uh what it means to you and why now is the right time.
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Okay. So great questions. Uh I often kind of think about like where does a
1:09
book come from? Where what is the origin moment? And those are always hard to pin
1:15
down. But for this book, I was actually working on something else. I was working
1:20
on an article on Mormonism, and I ran across something where Joseph Smith's
1:28
father Mhm. commissioned missionaries to the moon. Okay. And I was like, "Wow,
1:38
there's a book in that." I mean there, you know, that was such kind of like an
1:44
out there moment that that somebody in the 1830s would be like thinking about the moon as
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a missionary field. I thought there's something there. And that was like I don't know 1997. So
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I was finishing up my first book at that point and I really thought this was going to be my second book. I thought I
2:05
thought this this is a good idea for a book. So, I started collecting materials for this book
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and then I just kind of started to hit roadblocks. I thought, man, this would
2:17
be the easiest book to write. How many people have written on this? Well, it turns out there's a lot of stuff out there. And so, for the next literally 25
2:25
years, I was collecting materials for this book. I did eight other books between this one
2:30
and that one. And I was like, now I'm at the end of my career. I thought this is the moment. If I don't write it now, I'll never write it. So,
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okay. So, Joseph Smith's father commissioned missionaries to the moon.
2:44
How were they supposed to get there? I don't think we have to dwell on the details there because I'm not sure that
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was clear to anybody, but they were so convinced that there was a life there, right, that uh and that they needed to
2:59
reach that life. So, okay. And was this I I take it after
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Mormonism was a religion. Yeah, this is very early days. Early days. Okay. Early days.
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Um great. Well, this is such an interesting project and I wonder if you would um help us understand because it's
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it's a history of ideas project. It's a history of religious movements within
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the United States. uh it's many things but what it isn't it's a it's not a
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treatise that reduces any u particular religious belief to the belief on life
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in other planets what you do instead is trace that idea across a variety of
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different um texts in space in time not really beyond the United beyond this the
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earth but rather from Greek thought through contemporary times
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right I mean So with any kind of book, you have to like think about your boundaries, right? Like where are you
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going to start? Where are you going to end? How are you going to bound it in terms of kind of geography? And so for me, I'm
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an Americanist, so I thought, okay, we're just going to stick with American stuff. And originally it was going to
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start in the 19th century. But the more I studied, the more I found out that you
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know belief in life on other planets among kind of religious communities the
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United States goes back to the 17th century. So I had to go earlier. And
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here was the basic thing that I kind of tried to keep in mind is there's a lot of talk about like what if we discover
4:38
what if we discover life? What would that mean for us? What would that mean for religious traditions? And I was not
4:45
interested in the what if question. I was interested in the there is Mhm.
4:50
proposition because these the traditions I deal with in this book, they believe
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there is. There is no what if. There they are like totally in on like there
5:02
being life elsewhere. So that's that's how I bounded it. But I bounded it by
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like beginning of kind of Puritans all the way to the to the present American
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and uh the the traditions that really are very convinced there is.
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Okay. And so that there is you actually in the book call it extraterrestrial cosmology. So do you want to talk about
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that term and what it encompasses? Sure. Um, cosmology is like like a
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really fancy word for talking about like how we conceptualize our our ourselves
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in relation to the universe. What are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our place in a grand scheme?
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That's what a cosmology is. And you know, whether we know it or not,
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we all function with cosmologies. We all have a kind of an idea of like how things began, how things might end, what
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that means for the middle of our existence. What extraterrestrial cosmologies was
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about is like what happens to your cosmology once you are absolutely convinced there's life elsewhere. So how
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does that kind of inlect your cosmology? And that was the question that I was
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really interested in is like once you start to believe there's life elsewhere, what does that mean for your life here?
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And what I found that was interesting kind of the connective tissue across the various different chapters and sections
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is that your discussion focuses on religious communities, but it also
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traces um the popular culture of the times and how there were u poems,
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almanacs, all sorts of casual references or maybe not so casual to this idea of life elsewhere uh that permeated the
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culture in ways that um people in the 21st century may not be aware of.
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Right? And I think one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that, you know, the ideas do not
7:07
pop up in a vacuum, right? They're always part of kind of a larger cultural conversation. And often that happens at
7:14
a very popular level, sometimes at elite levels. But
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you know what you have is you have these ideas circulating and then somebody picks up on something and starts to pull
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the thread and then builds out of that. Right? So
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um let me give you an example here. One of the things you'll find in this book is
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that a lot of these cosmologies, a lot of these religious beliefs are responding to technological changes.
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Okay? So there's big or like gargantuan shifts in technology happening at
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various times and like the three big ones that are easy to kind of point to is the uh the telescope. Telescope
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becomes uh much more refined during the 18th and 19th centuries. Observatories
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pick up. Once you have a good telescope, you can start to look for life elsewhere, right? Like are there men on
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the moon? Is that what we see? I mean Mars, is that what we see? So they respond to that change in
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technology about the telescope. They they respond to the the telegraph. The
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telegraph all all of a sudden becomes a way that disembodied voices, you know, you no longer need to send a letter. You
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can just kind of hear it through these wires. And that, you know, spiritualism picks up on that in a big way. And in
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the 20th century, it's the atom bomb. It's like all of a sudden we have a bomb that can destroy the earth. What does
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that mean? And a lot of these religious traditions respond to that kind of threat, that kind of like once now we
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have the ability to destroy ourselves. Have we like have we moved on beyond our
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ability, our moral ability to make good decisions about our technology?
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Yeah. And so you also allude to shifts in the mass printing and so the media
9:09
and its distribution and its wide outreach to people who all of a sudden don't need uh someone who translates the
9:16
Latin for example into the vulgar but instead they can read religious tracks themselves
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right and I mean so in in one way this is a book about big
9:28
ideas okay and those big ideas usually come from prophetic figures. A lot of
9:35
these traditions have prophetic figures. But also these figures then have to get
9:40
their their teachings out there, right? And print in the 19th century becomes
9:46
the way to do that. Okay? And then radio becomes a way to do that in the early
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20th and then TV and movies and so these ideas
9:58
come from people but then they need to circulate, right? And how do these figures circulate their ideas? And that
10:05
becomes kind of a a really interesting question about like, you know, again, ideas don't exist in a vacuum, but how
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do you get get them into the kind of the media sphere? So, yeah. And so, let's let's go back a
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little bit in time. And um some readers may be surprised to learn that leading
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figures in American history since we're looking towards the 4th of July in the the sequ sequenced
10:34
its 250th birthday as a nation. So Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas
10:40
Payne all believed in a universe full of populated planets. How influential were
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they in expanding that belief in American uh culture about
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extraterrestrial life would you say? Okay, so again really interesting question.
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A couple things are happening here. Um you'll have figures like John Adams.
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Okay, John Adams goes to Harvard. He's introduced to this idea of life on other planets. He journals about it. it does
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not like fill his whole field of vision. He's not thinking during the revolution. Ah, we not also have to think about
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aliens, right? Like he's like he's pretty focused. Um Benjamin Franklin also uh believes in
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life elsewhere and he puts that in his almanac, you know, he he'll mention it every once in a while that there's
11:34
worlds elsewhere, right? Not a you know, again, not a guiding principle for him, but an interesting
11:40
one. Mhm. But you get to a figure like Thomas Payne who is really important in terms of kind of uh both kind of the pamphlet
11:49
culture but you know revolutionary thinking about
11:54
uh you know democracy and those kind of things. Um he writes a book called the
12:00
age of reason. In the age of reason he argues against kind of traditional views of Christianity. One of his arguments is
12:07
that there that there's got to be life elsewhere. Okay. And once you start to think about that, that makes you have to
12:14
think about like your own Christian beliefs. And he will kind of go to go to
12:21
town on this idea that Jesus, if there are is life elsewhere, what is what is Jesus doing? Does he have to die on
12:27
every other planet? Okay. And if he has to die on every other planet, does he have any time to
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do anything else? Because there's going to be so many planets that he needs to visit. So, you know, he uses that as
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kind of an ironic critique, but out of that kind of Thomas Payne
12:46
thinking, a lot of religious thinkers come right against that. They write a
12:51
lot of things to kind of argue against what Payne is saying. So, and so that's an interesting moment
12:57
because when you're talking about the technological shifts, you talk about the telescope, it's it's what we would think
13:04
of now as citizen science people out there being naturalist trying to understand through their own experience.
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And then you have Thomas Payne taking extending the logic of Christianity and applying that to uh the idea of life in
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other worlds and coming to the logical conclusion that this can't all fit,
13:23
right? Yeah. And so different different founding father
13:29
figures have different relationships to their beliefs in life and other planets. And for most of them it's it's cocktail
13:35
party conversation, right? It's like, you know, it's there's probably life out there. Don't know what it's like. Pain
13:41
will take it to a whole new level, right? He will really use it in in talking about like the importance of
13:47
reason and how we need to trust reason rather than faith. you know, rationality is the
13:54
is the key. So Harvard figures multiple times as
14:00
this Yale University, you're a professor in an English department writing a book about the belief in uh the other worlds
14:09
within religious cultures. How does education uh higher education as an institution
14:16
and the pursuit of scholarly research in the humanities, how do these all align
14:21
and give rise to thoughtful, substantive discussions about people's beliefs that
14:26
don't make people um be reduced to just one aspect of their ideas?
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Wow, that is that's a great question. Um
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okay so Harvard and Yale figure prominently early on because they're leading institutions right um one of the
14:49
things that's very true of kind of early American education at the collegiate and
14:55
university level is they have a very keen sense of the importance of humanities. Okay. And for them,
15:03
what they like to think about is kind of moral issues and what it what does it
15:09
mean to be human and what does it mean more importantly to be humane? Like like
15:15
what does it really mean to like care, you know, for those around you, to build
15:24
communities, to, you know, to kind of interact with the local landscape, whether that be, you know, farming or
15:32
shipping or whatever. And so, but they're always trying to bring kind of a moral veilance to this, right? And
15:37
that's really important to them. And so you just get a kind of a kind of a moral
15:44
overlay to a lot of education that I think if you look at the humanities now
15:51
I think that is still still the task right what does it mean to be humane in
15:56
this world um what they're not fight what we fight
16:02
more currently against is more kind of a transactional world where that is not as
16:08
valued probably as it was in like the 1700s when John Adams like that that
16:15
crew is is you know metriculating that they
16:21
they just have a different kind of sense of like what education meant and it
16:27
wasn't all always like just uh thinking about making money or like
16:36
scientific progress. ress at all costs, those kind of things. They're always trying to kind
16:41
of balance it. Um, it's an interesting kind of, and I'm not saying everybody,
16:48
I'm sure there were people that were back there doing the same things we're doing now. But I mean, if you look at
16:53
the curriculums, there's a, you know, everybody their senior year has to take a moral
16:59
philosophy course, and that's that's all year long, you know, and that was that was a course that was supposed to like
17:05
bring together everything you learned. And so there's a gradual shift in the
17:11
people who play center stage in the religious communities that you discuss
17:16
as as we move forward in time. You point to a pattern of having duos or two
17:22
people. Do you want to talk about the significance of that since it it's not inherently one of these supernatural
17:28
numbers like three or seven? Right. Um, one of the things that you always have to kind of keep center stage
17:35
in your mind when you're talking about prophetic figures is prophets are really important. Okay?
17:43
And they're prophets for a reason. They're important because they kind of break new ground, all that kind of
17:49
stuff. But you also need to keep in mind that they they too do not live in a vacuum, right?
17:56
that they are interacting all the time, not only with their culture, but with their followers. And there's always kind
18:02
of this dialogic thing going on that like they are being their attitudes, their teachings are
18:09
being adjusted by just the m the moment they live in, the communities they have
18:14
to interact with, the communities that hate their communities and they have to interact with, you know. So, there's
18:20
that kind of thing going on. And what a lot of these uh a lot of
18:26
these communities actually end up having kind of these two figures that come up.
18:32
And one is a prophetic figure and one is what I would call like an executive figure. Somebody that like takes the
18:39
prophet's energy and teachings and has the ability to mobilize it, right? Like
18:46
put it into pamphlets, publish it, get it onto the airwaves. And you see a lot of those kind of
18:53
tandem relationships that and it's impressive like some of these people would not be
19:00
where they were without their little helpers and their helpers are the are the people that can kind of uh put feet
19:09
to their ideas. Okay. So Paul, could you give us an example about those duos? One historical
19:16
and one more contemporary. Okay. So the 7th day Adventists
19:22
um this is this is a tradition that is actually
19:28
larger than Mormonism. Okay, there are like 20 20 million Adventists around the
19:34
world where Mormonisms are is a little behind that.
19:40
Okay. So it it also runs the largest like nonprofit health organization in
19:46
the world. I mean these people are like majorly committed to kind of issues of health global you know domestic
19:54
whatever. Um their founding prophet uh is a woman
20:00
named Ellen White okay and she has a series of visions over a number of years
20:05
and she writes big books really big books okay about
20:12
prophecy. her husband um is the one that really
20:18
manages her career. Okay. While she is like prophesying, he's copying it down
20:24
or getting secretaries to cop it down. Copy it down. And then he thinks about ways to publish it and distribute it.
20:31
Okay? And he is massively successful in this. I mean, he is like really good at

the nuts and bolts. So that's the, you know, that's just one example in the in the 19th century. You
20:43
get to the 20th century, the most famous kind of uh UFO religion of the 20th
20:48
century is Heaven's Gate. Okay? And it's not because they're the largest. In fact, they're probably the smallest
20:55
among the ones that I talk about. We're talking about like biggest number probably they ever had
21:01
was 150 people. Okay? and but they're famous because of their mass suicide at
21:07
the end of the 1990s. Okay, this is a group that is led by two people for uh
21:14
its first 10 years. Okay, and one one of them was kind of a prophetic
21:20
figure and the other one kind of viewed himself as her like megaphone that and
21:27
he would talk about himself in those terms that like she gives the teaching and I make sure it gets out there. And
21:33
so again, very similar to Seventh Day Adventist in the sense that that you
21:38
have a prophet and then you have somebody that helps that message get out. Heaven's Gate was very much like
21:43
that in in its early days. I remember I was in graduate school when the Heavensgate suicide happened and I
21:51
was in Los Angeles. So I mean the just the images of of the members covered in
21:58
blue blankets. I it's indelibly burned into my my awareness, but I I know that
22:03
this is not a group necessarily that will resonate with younger audiences. So, it's it's good for you to discuss it
22:10
at the end of the book to see how it's a it's an outgrowth of the previous
22:16
movements that you discuss. But the seventh day Adventist is something that um I am familiar with and I growing up
22:24
in Puerto Rico seen schools and they were vegetarian. they observe uh their
22:30
um Sabbath on Saturday. So there are distinctive elements about that but they came out of or they evolved out of a
22:38
previous movement. Do you want to talk about that a little bit cuz people may not know that history? Okay. So they come out of what uh a
22:45
movement called the Millerites. Okay. So Miller was a guy that uh
22:56
he believed that he had kind of cracked the mathematical code for uh when Jesus
23:02
was going to return. Okay. And so he has a date in mind, you know, 1844. And it's
23:10
going to be the date. It is going to be the date, right? and uh
23:16
and he gets he is helped by a duo. Okay, his his helper is named Joshua and
23:22
Joshua is an absolute master of mass publicity. I mean like this is a guy
23:28
that would give PT Barnum a run for his money. I mean this is a guy that just knows how to publish stuff and
23:35
distribute stuff. Okay. So, Millerites uh never kind of formed their own
23:42
denomination. A lot of people in different denominations became kind of followers of Miller. Okay.
23:48
Because of his his apocalyptic last days stuff. Uh what happens though is
23:56
uh you know figures differ about how many people were really kind of believing what
24:03
Miller had to say but you know some some scholars will say hundreds of thousands
24:09
were like listening to him. Now were they all like waiting on a mountaintop in 1844 for Jesus to come? Probably not.
24:17
But a lot were a lot were like selling their stuff, right? Like selling their houses, their horses, their farms
24:24
because they didn't need them anymore. Jesus was going to come. Jesus does not come. Miller has to
24:31
retrench. He does like a different date about nine months later. Still doesn't come. And this is called
24:38
the great disappointment. Okay. And out of the great disappointment, uh, the seventh day Adventists arise. Okay.
24:46
These are Millerites. These are followers of Miller that um
24:52
slightly change the teachings to mean, you know, they have an explanation for why Jesus didn't appear on earth at that
24:59
moment. And then they change different things like when they hold the Sabbath, what they eat, and their really
25:07
pronounced vision of kind of healthc care. And that starts really early. And
25:12
if seventh day adventists to this day run really good hospitals, have amazing medical schools. This is a long
25:18
tradition for them. So, so one of the interesting things that that I learned by reading this book is
25:25
that although there's many religious traditions who believe in life, life in
25:30
other worlds, what the relationship of those inhabitants are to humans on Earth
25:37
differs. And so I want to ask you if you could to differentiate between uh for
25:42
example um Mormonism, 7th Day Adventist and the Nation of Islam because they
25:48
they all imagine different relationships uh to that. And since I mentioned the
25:53
Nation of Islam, throw in Scientology too because there's a connection there I was surprised to learn about.
25:59
Yeah, a lot a lot in that question. Um,
26:05
okay. So, you start to believe in life on other planets, then you have to ask yourself,
26:10
what is our relationship to that life? Uh, for the Mormons, uh, they believe
26:17
that life elsewhere is human uh, or humanlike, right? And that if you follow
26:26
a certain kind of spiritual progression um of faithfulness on the earth on the
26:32
earth we'll just talk about our earth uh you will be rewarded with a a planet
26:40
right you'll get to be your own god in a way so it's kind of and that
26:46
would fit into a larger kind of hierarchy of planets so that's how they
26:51
explain it 7th day advent They're much more handsoff. Okay, there's life elsewhere,
26:56
but that life watches the earth because the earth is the only place Jesus had to die. Every place else, they're unfallen
27:05
worlds. But what what we have is the most wicked world.
27:10
Jesus had to die here. One of the things that happens in that moment though is that the entire
27:16
universe sees the mercy of God. Okay? So we become like a giant visual aid for
27:22
God's for God's character. Okay. So more hands off. We get to
27:28
Scientology. Okay. Scientology.
27:33
This is a this is complicated story, but one of the things that kind of comes out of
27:39
Scientology later after Elron Hubards had some time to think about it is that
27:47
beings from other planets have been consigned to the earth as a kind of prison planet. Okay? And what happens is
27:55
these beings named theans can attach themselves to humans in the thousands if
28:02
they have to. Okay. So traditional Christianity would call this
28:07
a demonology. Would call this kind of like how do we explain bad things? We
28:12
explain bad things by aliens having been exiled to the earth and now attaching themselves to us and doing bad things
28:18
with us. It's kind of a a view of possession.
28:24
So that's not a really kind way of kind of thinking about our interactions with life on other planets. Uh
28:32
you know, Nation of Islam is they do believe in life elsewhere, but it's it's
28:38
not center stage in the same way that it would be in Scientology. So
28:44
they for instance believe uh Farrakhan believes that he was has
28:50
been taken up on a spaceship. So there is life elsewhere and we have
28:56
some contact with them. But it's it's not the kind of central motif that it
29:02
would be in Scientology. What you want to do with that
29:10
becomes kind of interesting. Okay. So sc let's go back to scientology for a minute. It it explains a lot, right? It
29:16
explains why we all act so badly and why we need to go get audited so that we can
29:23
be better. Okay. What has happened with the Nation of Islam is they have become interested
29:29
in Scientology and they have gone in recent years have become very interested
29:35
in Scientology and made a lot of people go to Scientology training because they
29:40
are also interested in making us better and they believe that Scientology is a way that we can improve our human
29:47
condition. So they become kind of helpmates and nobody saw that one coming I don't
29:54
think but it's an interesting connection. Okay. I want to ask you about a totally
30:00
different group of people but this whole idea of a moonchild and the antichrist. I I think we should discuss the negative
30:08
or or less than positive um connection between those beliefs and life
30:13
elsewhere. Okay. So
30:20
one of the things that you find with prophet figures is they often take a very kind of messianic role. Okay? And
they will to varying degrees claim kind of a messiahood whether they be the
30:31
agents of salvation or they're one step away. Okay.
30:38
What happens with like things like spiritualism? Okay. Spiritualism.
30:43
When people think of spiritualism, they usually think of this. They think of people at a seance or around a Ouija
30:50
board contacting the dead. Okay, that is spiritualism. That's central to
30:56
spiritualism is contacting the dead. What people don't realize is a lot in spiritualism is also about contacting
31:04
life on other planets. Okay? And that seems to have totally dropped off the
31:09
radar you know but that is very much part of spiritual uh spiritualism.
31:17
What ends up happening out of spiritualism is various traditions grow out of that and some of those are very
31:25
closely associated with black magic and demon worship and devil worship.
31:32
And what happens is some there are figures particularly in England around the turn of the 20th century that get
31:38
very involved with a kind of a thinking about like we can turn these spirits
31:43
from elsewhere to our own ends, right? And so whether they be on other planets
31:49
or whether they be dead people, it just depends on who we're talking about. But that the you know contacting life beyond
31:57
the veil can can eventuate in certain kinds of things. And and there is a school of
32:03
thought that believe that you know we could actually create a moonchild or an
32:10
antichrist out of this kind of mixture.
32:17
wild stuff but like uh pronounced and it did have a following.
32:23
So So the other thing that I was surprised to see is a long history or I guess not surprised but I I was happy to see that
32:30
the the imagined locations of life elsewhere were stayed fairly close to
32:37
our solar system. uh Mars, Jupiter, right? Saturn. Um in if you had to rank
32:46
the best place to be another life form, I I gather that the moon's not ideal.
32:55
No. And I think No, the moon's not ideal. Okay. Either
33:00
is Jupiter. And like the earlier, you know, the farther you go back, the more that they're
33:06
interested in kind of putting Mercury in the or Venus in the discussion, right? Like, you know, these are other planets.
33:12
We don't know what they're like, but they could be habitable and they could be good. Mhm. You get to the 20th century, everybody
33:18
thinks, you know, probably not, right? Like I know Musk wants to go to Mars,
33:24
but like it's not hospitable, right? They It's very cold planet. there's like
a lot of bad things going on there. And so
33:36
what you have is a growing uh conviction that any kind of heaven is more interdimensional, right? Like it's it's
33:43
not uh so much a physical place as a place that exists outside of what we
kind of know. Um that's not true of everyone. The heaven's gate really did
33:56
think that it was on another planet. Heaven was on another planet. Spaceship was going to take you. It was a very
34:02
physical thing. So you would get on that spaceship, you would go to that planet. So and we have been building spaceships as
34:09
you mentioned and there has been of late the government has released a lot of files uh showing the stuff we have about
34:18
that. So is that a great disappointment or is there any interesting thing in there? Okay,
34:26
that that answer functions on two levels for me. Okay, all this talk about disclosure, all
34:33
these UFO files. Um, personally, I am thrilled. I am just
34:39
thrilled this because, you know, my book is hitting at the right time, right? like the sure let's just talk
34:46
more and more about UFOs and like um so I'm thrilled that that's kind of
34:54
in the being talked about in different media outlets.
34:59
That said, is anything kind of new or like every time I read read through some
35:06
of that material or read about that material, there just is not anything new there, right? There's no alien autopsy.
35:14
There's no DNA from ancient aliens. There's no there's just it's pretty disappointing.
35:21
So, um I would say
35:28
we're having a moment. I'm not quite sure that there's a lot of new stuff out
35:33
there that's going to like revolutionize us. Okay. Your book though opens with
35:38
another moment we were having in 2016 when NASA funded a study asking what it
35:44
would mean for the world's religions if we discovered life on another planet. And you say that you rather that rather
35:50
than speculate about the future, we should look at tthan speculate about the future, we should look at the past. So what do you mean by that? And how would knowing more
35:57
about the past and those those views on life elsewhere help us uh or help inform
36:04
our present? Okay. So NASA
36:09
was asking the what if question, you know, what if Buddhism had to deal with
36:15
aliens or Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity? What would that look like?
36:22
What would that do to people? How upsetting would that be? Or would would that be exciting or whatever? And it
36:29
probably be several things at once, right? So um and I think it's an interesting
36:35
question and really some interesting work came out of out of out of that grant but um for me I I I kind of
36:45
thought you know we have a lot of information about like religious traditions and how
36:51
they they deal with this possibility of life on other planets. would probably be
36:56
good to kind of look at like people that have like a 150 year 200 year uh
37:03
perspective on this, right? Like and it really has informed their religious communities already. So I what I was
37:13
trying you know maybe overstating the case a little bit but I think you know
37:19
you can learn things from the past and maybe you know looking in the rearview mirror
37:25
would be profitable in this kind of in this kind of endeavor because yeah we can talk about what if but there's a lot
37:31
of people that have been given this a lot of serious thought for a long time. What what has it done to them? Why does
37:36
how does it affect their you know views of how to live on
37:42
this earth? So who is the ideal audience for your book? Is it religious people?
37:48
Is it people who are interested in extraterrestrial life? Is it people who are lining up to go see the new Steven
37:54
Spielberg movie? Who should read this? Who would you like to see read this book?
37:59
Okay, so who's my ideal reader? Okay. And I'll tell you, my ideal reader is
38:04
the educated non-speist who is really curious. I love people that just love to
38:10
learn. So, I wrote this book. I pitched this book to the kind of to people that are not
38:19
going to be like experts in religion or experts in technology, experts in astronomy. I pitched this to like I
38:26
wanted to tell a story. I wanted to tell a story and I wanted it to be engaging
38:31
enough that people would like say, "Hey, that's kind of interesting. Never knew
38:37
that." Wow, really? You know, so I would
38:42
be happy if uh people came to this book and felt like I learned something from this book
38:50
and it was a it was a good read. Mark Twain has this great quote about like it's not that hard to be funny. Just
38:57
tell the truth. Okay. So, I thought about that a lot and I said, I just, you
39:03
know, I don't have to try that hard. I just need to kind of try to tell the story and the story will drive itself.
So, so anyway, thanks for listening and for I'd love that last
39:18
question. Well, thank you. So, I think that's a good place to stop and I do encourage
39:23
people to go out and pick out a copy of this book when it's published. It's very accessibly written, not at all jargony,
39:29
and it tells a really compelling yarn of who's related to who uh in terms of
39:34
whose ideas influence other people. Thank you so much, Paul. And thanks to
39:39
everyone watching and listening. This has been a fascinating conversation. If you'd like to check out other episodes
39:46
of the IU College Insider, please subscribe and share. and we'll see you next time. Thanks again.
40:11
Hey, hey,

In this episode of the IU College Insider Podcast, an interdisciplinary group of experts—a sociologist, a developmental psychologist, and a national foundation leader—discuss what research tells us about youth suicide prevention, the role schools can play in fostering connection and belonging, and what communities can do to support student well-being.

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider Podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. We'll be sharing the voices and experience of guests who shed light on what higher education is doing to improve our communities, our health, and our shared future.

Today, we're focusing on one of the most urgent challenges facing young people, families and schools right now. Youth, mental health and suicide prevention. And what research is revealing about how we can do more and better to support young people.

I'm Rick Van Kooten, executive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. I'm joined today by three guests whose work is at the forefront of this issue.

First, we have Anna Mueller, the Luther Dana Waterman professor of sociology in the college and senior research program leader at the institute. She's also the author of Life Under Pressure The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them.

Next, we have Tiffany Benjamin, CEO of the Humana Foundation, which has invested significantly in school based youth suicide prevention, including a landmark grant right here at IU. She's also a proud alum of the College NIU. And finally, Natasha Chaku, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at IU Bloomington, whose research uses cutting edge methods to understand how and when students seek help and what sometimes gets in the way.

Before we start. If you or someone you know is experiencing mental health or substance use crisis, or is having thoughts of suicide, please call or text 988.
To reach the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and speak with a trained crisis specialist 24 over seven here at IU Bloomington. The crisis hotline is available to students 24 over seven by calling (812)Â 855-5711. Thank you for joining us. And let's turn it over to our guests.

Great. Let's get our conversation started. And your book, Life Under Pressure, examines communities hard hit by what you call youth suicide clusters. What did you find about why certain environments put younger people at higher risk? And what role do you think schools play in, in the clusters and the challenges we're seeing their.

Yeah. Thanks, Tiffany. So one of the things that we found in the book is that the social environment that surrounds kids in their everyday lives is deeply important to both their vulnerability to actually experiencing psychological pain, as well as their willingness to get help when they do go through those difficult times, which we know for all of us are just a part of life, right? That's going to happen. And in the community that we were working in, which, as you said, had had a series of recurring youth suicide clusters, which is basically when three or more youth die by suicide in a short period of time, all from the same community. And what we found was that in this particular community, there were several sort of what we call social roots of suicide that were embedded in the social environment, increasing youth vulnerability to suicide.

The first one was the least surprising, and that was that, unfortunately, mental illness and mental health help seeking was very stigmatized in the community. And so that, of course, made it way more difficult to say I need help when those difficult times came. The second was more unique to the community, and that was that. The community was home to, like, really clear, broadly shared and very specific and narrow beliefs about what made a good kid good.

And I am definitely using quotes around the around the word good, right. Because there's so many ways to be good. But and basically what that meant is one of the things we know about human psychology is it's very hard to disappoint people. It's very hard to not meet expectations, particularly when it's people that we really admire and care about, like our parents, our teachers, or even the popular kids in school.

So what we saw was that those narrow expectations really intensified pressure on kids in the community to live up to that particular way of being. And it meant that kids actually had intense fear of failure and experienced a lot of shame around things that, frankly, I did all the time as a teenager, like getting a B or dropping out of an honors high school course.

And so that was like that just essentially intensified the psychological pain that they were experiencing over things that I would consider somewhat normal parts of adolescence. We can't all get Aids all the time, right? And then the third thing we found in the social environment was perhaps the most surprising, and that was that this community was so highly socially connected.

Everyone knew everyone. Everyone cared about everyone. And there was actually a beautiful amount of social support flowing through these neighborhood social ties. But the problem many of us who've lived in a small town can begin to anticipate is that that also meant that information flowed freely through the gossip networks in the community. And what that meant was that deeply private, sometimes painful information could easily slip into the public domain.
And since mental illness or having mental health struggles was so stigmatized and was seen as antithetical to being that good kid that kids were supposed to be, that really intensified the threat that came alongside help seeking and just made it way harder to seek help when needed. And we actually saw those factors tied to kids risk of suicide among the youth who had actually died or attempted suicide in the community.

So to your second question, schools have a wonderful opportunity to be a great disrupter in these kinds of problematic sort of cultural environments. But they can also be places where that those cultural expectations and messages get intensified. Schools are also a wonderful place to, you know, insert programing to destigmatize mental health. Actually, in the state of Indiana, we've got some great programs that our schools use, like bring change to mind or Sources of strength.
And there's others. So we have tools that we can use to address these in our school environments. School staff also have this wonderful opportunity to help us identify kids who are struggling and connect them to the care that they need, without them having to ask for it. Right? Which is so crucial sometimes. So I think those are kind of some of the main things that schools can do to help prevent suicide and promote happy, healthy child development.

Yeah. As a as a mom of a 16 year old and a 14 year old, and I also got a ten year old, I think what you said there is, is really real.

And I think sometimes as adults, we take for granted that the stressors that sit in kids lives these days and how elevated they can be because of how isolating there is a stance, is in ways that are a little bit different than the ways that we were isolated in our youth.

That's so true. And youth are sort of going through a very specific developmental stage, right, where these peer relationships can be more important than, you know, I mean, we as adults might say than they should be, but it's just a part of child development, right? To turn to peers, to to begin to pursue independence and figure out who you are.

So, yeah, we have to be attentive to how society changes and how that changes what our kids are experiencing and our own memories of what it was like versus what it's like to be an adult.

Natasha, you bring a developmental psychology lens to this work. You focus on what's actually happening inside adolescents cognitively and emotionally.
What does that perspective add to how we think about prevention? That it's whether it's a purely social or systems approach or what we might be missing in this broader discussion.

That's a great question. Anna really set me up perfectly when she started talking about the heightened importance of peers in this developmental stage. So when I think about development, or I think when most people think about development, we think of it as this very linear, straightforward process.

If you think about infants and young children, we can track their milestones in terms of physical development. Eventually an infant lifts their head and they roll over and they sit up, and then they stand and then they walk. And all of those milestones are met with so much excitement by parents and educators and caregivers. But then as their social world expands, they move from just being with their nuclear family to then starting to venture out into the world and then into schools, and then into even larger school ecosystems, and then eventually into the world.

Development doesn't seem to be as straightforward or as linear, and we find that kids take different paths and end up in the same place, and sometimes they start in the same place and then take different paths and end up in different places. And I think understanding the individual differences between young children and how they emerge, intensify and persist across adolescence is a really key piece of my work, and also the work that Anna and I do together.

So right at the start of adolescence, kids start to go through puberty. This dramatic biological, psychological and cognitive transition that really has some interesting physical aspects of it. But it also spurs on the second accelerated period of cognitive development. And I think that period of cognitive development is really interesting because adolescence focus turns both inwards and outwards. So whereas as a young child, they might have all sorts of opinions about themselves.
Like I like the color green, I love trucks like Sally is my friend when they become an adolescent, as these cognitive abilities lead them to be able to think and more abstract and and unconventional ways, they start to think about more evaluative things like, well, what am I like? How am I perceived? And what do I want to do in the future?

And I think those things are really positive for young people, because adolescents tend to find their passions, their career trajectories, they tend to find their best friends, their future partners. But it can also turn negative when they don't perceive themselves as fitting in all, as having friends or as liking themselves, really. And so I think this duality is really interesting about adolescence as a period of really positive growth and development, and and sometimes it can sort of turn on them in ways that we can help sort of address and prevent if we consider their social environment in conjunction with what's going on inside their bodies and brains.

Natasha, I just really appreciate you highlighting the lack of sort of a one size fits all and that different kids are on a different journey in this time. I think oftentimes
When we talk about mental health or emotional health, health, we we sort of look at everybody through the same lens. But that's not the reality of everybody's journey. right? And so, you can put structures in place and also understand that different kids are going to need different things. based on where they're at in that cognitive process you were talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the more work we do in this vein, the more and more so. And, I mean, parents and parents have always known this, right? Like no child is just exactly like a different child. But every child is unique. Educators, I think, grow to learn this very rapidly when they enter the classroom. There's no average student or typical student.

And I think mental health care workers are of course aware, like there's no average patient. And so the more I think actually our research can come into line with the sort of personalized or individualized work, the better and more precise, like our interventions and prevention strategies will eventually become.

So now we're going to turn it back to you. Tiffany, I know the Humana Foundation is really passionate about this topic of mental health and suicide prevention. And so I wonder if you could share from your perspective some of the things that you really value in this work and some of the work that the Humana Foundation has been doing, and kind of your approach to this topic?

Yeah. First, I just want to say thanks to Anna, we've really been honored to uplift the work you're doing around youth and frankly, how thoughtful the work is about intervening and making a difference. And that sort of just the reporting out. So for us is the human foundation. We are very focused on health equity generally, and we have two focus areas which are mental health and then food insecurity and nutrition.

We came to this work around youth suicide prevention actually in sort of a secure way. We initially had a lot of focus on seniors and older adults, and then we transitioned to doing some work around veterans, but we just started to see the data led us to the fact that you can't start talking about mental health when someone turns 55.

And then, frankly, I think Covid really laid bare for all of us. How significant mental health is and how important emotional health is to people, and the distinction between mental health and mental illness. Right. So for us, we just followed the statistics. And if you look at the statistics, suicide is the second leading cause of death among those aged 10 to 14.

And for us, we also do work with veterans. And what we saw as veterans had a suicide rate that was 60% higher than the civilian population. And so the data told us we had to go here. And so we started to really think about the ways in which we could support work across the country, and really leading experts who are doing work at academic research institutions.

But then people doing on the ground work as well. And so we fund things in places like Florida, Texas and Louisiana. We've got a great project in Texas with Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. We're doing some work in Florida as well. And then we we really tried to think about, like, what are people doing on the ground? But then how are we proving out solutions that can be scalable?
And that's how we came to the work with you, Anna, and thinking about how we can really get people across the country to understand there are some really simple and sometimes difficult solutions that can be scaled or implemented in your geography. We just talked about schools, the ways in which schools can operate. As Natasha said, it's positive places, but also places for opportunity to to look at challenges.

And so we've just been trying to think about like, how do we get solutions on the ground to people and then how do we share that so that more and more people can learn?

I love that. I mean, yeah, I think we share that approach entirely. And part part of my reason for caring about doing work in that way is that suicide prevention, it's going to take us all.

But also a lot of the people who are on the front lines of suicide prevention are people who have a lot on their plates. And so we have to find ways that we can identify barriers that they are directly experiencing and nudge them out of the way so that we make it easier to turn towards supporting youth mental health and connecting that with them when they're in those moments of not just crisis, but also just pain or suffering or distress.

Right? That's another thing that I've really tried to do in my work is to sort of like reframe for educators how we think about suicide prevention. It doesn't just have to be that moment of crisis. And I think this is where the perspective of the Humana Foundation and my work really strongly overlaps is like if we build those strong emotional connections, if we facilitate trust between students and school staff members who are the adults in the primary, extra familial social context of their daily lives, they spend so many hours in their school buildings.
If we facilitate that, trust, that connection. When those tough times come, it's going to be so much easier for kids to reach out, right? Particularly if we're attentive, as Natasha said, to some of the differences. And this is for me, is why it's so critical to work with Natasha and a developmental psychologist who can really flesh out the complexities for kids and those connections to adults in their school buildings and their unique sort of barriers and facilitators for help seeking.

In my recent work, I've turned towards school staff and focusing on them. And how can I help them do this work? But then it doesn't matter if the if it's not meeting the kids where they are, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I think I think a lot about what Natasha said, as we understand death by suicide, and I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but we understand there's a little bit of impulsivity there. And so the ability to get people around kids to really understand how to identify things that that are signaling something significant, to understand those developmental stages, I think just is becomes more and more important.

And, and you kind of touched on some of the work you're doing, and I want to double down on that. Your Connect to care school study is built around emotional connectedness between school staff and students like you talked about. Like what does that actually mean? How is it working in practice and talk to me. And I think Natasha would be great if chime in this too.

Like, why are relationships so important as part of your study, but also in part of this work more generally?

Oh, that's a great question. I'm going to start with that. Why are relationships so critical?

And also why are relationships with school staff so critical. So one of the things like that, Natasha, I'm sure you would you would double down on this too, is that our teenagers are more likely to turn to each other rather than to adults when they are struggling, particularly with things that are difficult to talk about, like suicide or mental health.

But it's also true that adults are often more prepared and capable to connect those kids to the actual care that will be supportive and help them get through that difficult time. So we have to kind of counteract their natural tendencies to turn to each other by facilitating those emotional connections with school staff members. Of course, you can also facilitate emotional connections within your families, within your faith communities, with your within your neighborhoods.

Like I don't want this to and our health care institutions, right, your pediatrician or family medicine doctor. But because schools are so central and kids spend so much time in them, our school staff members are really our best eyes and ears for identifying kids who are struggling and being that trusted adult for them. We also do know that trusted adults, like when teenagers have a trusted adult, they are so much less vulnerable to suicide.

And when that trusted adult is in school with them. And in fact, there's some wonderful work that Peter Wyman and his colleagues have done that really shows that actually. Also, when a lot of kids trust the same school staff member, that trust kind of intensifies and can be really protective against suicide. So this is one of the best strategies we have for building a really robust, effective mental health safety net net to surround our kids with and their everyday lives.

So that's why working with school staff to kind of figure out how we can facilitate it, that connectedness is so important to me. The study is basically trying to understand barriers and facilitators of it. It's it's, you know, in that sense, it's real basic. We went we we spent a lot of years listening and learning from school staff in school buildings.

And then we designed a survey that captures a lot of the common experiences that they have. And now, with the support of Humana, we've now taken that to a much broader set of schools in a much broader set of rural and urban communities that are facing different local challenges, so that we can sort of build out that knowledge even further.

And we have begun to identify some pretty movable pieces that if we address we we can really see some change in our school buildings, making school staff feel safer and more prepared to take on these these questions that we need them to do as a society, just to help us help our teens.

I'll just echo and I hear that adolescence is a time where young people are primed to go seek out and form new connections, and they often do so and are most interested in forming connections with people their own age, so their peers, their friends. And that is an important context for understanding their behavior.
And at the same time, something I often tell parents and teachers is that they're interacting with and forming friendships and connections with people who are their age and have the same set of like, generally limited experiences. And so they're not as helpful for helping you navigate stressful experiences. Like they don't have that same wealth of like, life history that teachers and parents do.
And so caregivers for young people are really like the seatbelts for their brains. That's what I like to say. Like they're yeah, they're their brains are up and they're moving and they're thinking in all sorts of amazing and creative ways, but they sometimes just need someone else in their life to put like a little pause or help them sort of press the brakes a little bit.

And parents do that to such a fabulous extent for their young children. And I think despite I think like some of the media depictions, like parents and children generally report like fairly close and positive relationships, like into adolescence, past adolescence and into adulthood. But what has been so interesting and innovative and I think, frankly, like groundbreaking about Anna's work in particular, is that everyone goes to school.

It is a soft touch and a soft point where we can hit every single kid, for the most part, at multiple points of their development across multiple settings. And teachers and school staff are wonderful and caring people. So we have like a built in bolus of individuals who are already there to help kids live happy, successful, healthy lives.

And so I really see Anna's work in my contribution to that work is identifying well, well, what are the structures and systems in place that prevent you from doing your best work and helping youth? And then also conversely, like, are there things that we could do to make your jobs easier? And I think we we kind of attack that from both ends.

I would say we have a ton of staff data now, which has been, for me, especially really illuminating about how barriers enact themselves and how things can facilitate staff being really empowered and positive forces in their schools. And we've recently also started collecting some data with young people themselves. And that's been really illustrative on, well, how do they seek help?
Like who do they seek help from and when and why? And I think those are all really interesting sort of future questions that we'll be able to address in this research. So we'll be able to bring out the staff perspective and the student perspective as well.

So first of all, just as a native Hoosier and a graduate of IU College of Arts and Sciences, I just am so thrilled that we have this innovative, evidence based, solution oriented research happening at the school with two exceptional researchers. And Natasha, you started to talk about the work in the Connect to Care study.

And I know that you've been developing daily assessments that capture students help seeking behaviors in real time. What gap does that fill, and what do you hope that it tells us that we don't really know right now?

Yeah, it's a great question. There's there's quite a bit of work coming up and related to help seeking out there already in the literature. And I think there's a lot of great work that suggests that help seeking is instrumental to suicide prevention, that empowering young people to seek help, to know what signs
important, to identify them and their friends, to identify them and them selves, to give them the resources in general. I think there's a ton of research suggesting that all of that is true. And at the same time, there's also a lot of research suggesting that young people don't often use these help streaking seeking strategies.

So a little bit of our work is just descriptive. We're trying to see on a daily basis from day to day in schools who are people turning to? Are they turning to teachers? Are they turning to other school staff members? Are they turning to their friends or peers or partners? And we developed a lot of these these help seeking measures, actually in consultation with the Youth Advisory Board, with a wealth of undergraduates who have educated me on all of the new ways people are using technology in their lives.

And so I actually think we have a very comprehensive list of all of the sources that young people could turn to, everyone from their significant other to a chat bot or some sort of like large language model AI system, which seems increasingly that youth might be putting in some personal and private questions into that space. But our hope is to get a better understanding here of like on a day where you experience stress, a mental health concern, or an academic problem, who are you turning to or they helpful to you and like, how do you feel the next day?
And when we can get some of that fine grained information we might be able to like, for example, develop like brief interventions for folks far, far down the line. We're not at that point yet, but there could be sort of an outlet where we start thinking about like, what are these micro interventions or quick touches we could make for people to encourage them to seek help at the right time, in the right way?
Yeah, I love that. And I just love the concept of sort of making it bite sized for people. Because when we start to talk about these topics, it can feel overwhelming and like the solutions have to be massive. But I think, Natasha, both you and Anna talked about the relationship components of this and how important that is. And I certainly don't understand all of the forms of technology my children use or any children near me.

But humans will continue to be an extremely important part of this mental health work. And that relationship component really matters, which is why the work you're doing around understanding how we improve relationships, remove barriers to that relationships is deeply important. If we really are going to get at what is, frankly, a crisis.

So Tiffany we just kind of shared with you some of the solutions that we're thinking about and that are coming out of our work with the Connect to Care and Schools study, I wonder, based on Humana's current and prior programs and what you've learned as an organization, how is the Foundation thinking about the path from a funded study like this one to real world impact and schools and communities?
Yeah, I really appreciate the question. I think to us, one of the things that's really important is scale, right. So we seek out innovative, scalable solutions to challenges. And the reality is that there may be programs that are operating really effectively in certain places in the country, and that is wonderful. But if we don't all know about it and we don't have data that tells us what's effective, there's not a lot you can do with it, right?

And so to us, investing in research like this really allows for a proof point of solutions that work. And our hope is that if we invest in research and show people, hey, this type of activation works, remove this barrier and it works. And here's data to show you that we will see adoption all across the country. And so our real goal with our research strategy is to find people who are really thinking about how do we build these things that work anywhere, but understand that not everything works for everybody, right?

That's really hard. But there are always trends you can pull out. But if we don't share those trends and we don't have data behind them, it's really hard to adopt them. That's why we're thrilled to do this work with the two of you is because it's a way of showing people. Here are some simple solutions, and here are the actors who can really help you drive, change and reduce use to assign rates.
I really appreciate that. You know, I think one of the things that people don't always realize is that data is a huge limiting factor when it comes to suicide prevention and knowing how to intervene in ways that actually bring change. We have a lot of great data, but we also have so many profound limitations and how we collect data.

And so, you know, thank you for the support. I think it's going to lead to great things. But I also just want to reaffirm that one of I get asked so many questions when I'm out speaking to communities. And I have to say, you know, I'm really sorry. We don't know the answer to that. We should, but we don't have the data.
And that's very frustrating, particularly when we are facing rising rates of youth suicide. Right. This is an issue that researchers can take on, of course, but it's also helpful if state governments and the federal government also sort of begins to shift the way we collect data about youth suicide. And, you know, one of the most fundamental things I think we need to start doing as a country is actually collecting information about what school a student attended when they die by suicide.
We don't have to make that information public, but we can make it available for researchers to use and highly secured private spaces, which we have on campus, and so that we can begin to understand, like what kind of schools do a great job, like what kind of resources, how do we efficiently invest in the right resources and the right context?

Not every school is going to need the same things. So we have a ways to go. But I think partnerships like this give me a lot of hope for the future.
I think so, and I think that the power of us continuing to talk about this work and tell people there are solutions that are working, it's part of the power. You know, we started this off talking a lot about stigma. And I think the more we invest in solutions like the ones that the two of you are working on, the more we can do on the stigma side as well.

And so I'm really excited about removing these barriers. But then also, the more data hat we have, the more we can normalize these conversations.

Absolutely.

So I want to ask you both teachers and counselors and school staff are on the front lines every single day, but they're often not provided with mental health training. What's the most practical, useful thing your research can offer them right now?

I think one thing I want to just a brief clarification. You know, teachers are often not provided sufficient mental health training. They do often have some knowledge of mental health and adolescence. But when it comes to suicide prevention specifically, there's actually no guarantee that even our school based mental health teams have actual training in suicide prevention. That can also actually be true of our psychologists, our therapists in community settings as well.
So it is really important that school districts provide their school staff with role appropriate suicide prevention. We often call it gatekeeper training because the emphasis is often on identifying and then talking with kids at a basic level to assess how risk you know, how what degree of risk they're experiencing, and then referring them for appropriate additional follow up care, which is often outside of the school building.

Right. We do have there's a huge role for mental health care and crisis care outside of school buildings. One of the things that we're doing with our study is we're actually collecting data on what are the barriers to act, to accessing those trainings in suicide prevention in our school buildings. And then how can we help states actually begin to close those gaps and support school districts?
Because a lot of our states, like the state of Indiana, as well as the state of Colorado, the two places where we've been working with the Connect to Care and Schools study, they both have resources that schools can draw on. I'm not saying it's always easy or it's always perfect, but one of the things I want our study to do is to help close the gap between what is available for free or for a very low cost,
and just helping schools understand how to how to access it, and helping states understand what they need to do to meet schools where they are.
I think that's a really good point. I'll add on to that. Our teachers and our school staff and our administration are so busy, and they are already doing a lot of work for students, which is why I'm so glad that Anna brought up that one of the goals of the study, but also like practically, is that there are things that can happen on a larger structural level, for example, at the state level, that can help close the gap to reduce barriers and increase facilitation of staff and school efforts.

And then I would offer on an individual or person to person or teacher level. Teachers are really viewed as a trusted adults, as like a safe third person or a mentor in young people's lives. And we know that the more trusted adults young people have, the less vulnerable they are. So they should feel empowered to notice everyday patterns, to ask not just at moments of crisis, but just every day or from day to day. If they notice something off like how are you doing? Can you tell me about what's going on in your life? These are just like simple, quick check ins that do make youth feel safer and will prevent sort of larger crises.
And these are simple things that can be integrated, I think, just into a typical school day that should not feel burdensome and teachers should feel empowered to do I want us to redefine how we think about suicide prevention, Checking in with a student, if you just notice their heads down on their desk and just saying, "Hey, are you okay?"

That is suicide prevention. That is the the most critical first step. It is an invitation to share. It is an invitation to say, "Actually, I'm having a really rough day." And then, what what I want the school to train teachers to do is to say, "Well, you know what? We have someone who can actually go a little further with you.
Can I walk you down to the counselors office?"

So we are keeping our asks very real, appropriate, very, very actionable. And, you know, one of the critiques that I encounter often when I'm out speaking in community settings is that schools are doing too much. This is going to stress out school staff. This isn't wanted. Find someone else. Poor schools.

And I have so much empathy for our teachers and our educators. So much empathy, especially after shadowing them for four years and watching how hard they work. But actually our school staff are really hungry for this, and it's in part because they're encountering students who are experiencing trauma, serious psychological pain, suicidal thoughts.

They are there in their classrooms, and they want to know what to do, in part because they care.

We have we have incredible endorsement of we should be doing this work in our surveys across Indiana and Colorado. The message is clear. We also collected representative data across the state of Indiana, from adult Hoosiers and our families and our communities. They want schools to be doing this work. It was over 90% of people say schools have to play this role for us.

So we have the mandate. We just need to go there and figure out the strategies to to meet to rise to this occasion.

Well, and I think it's really exciting that the research provides opportunity for individuals who care. But then, frankly, it provides a broader perspective for people who have to implement policies and and make broader decisions. And the goal isn't to make it overwhelming. It's actually just to lean into what people already care about and give people guidance on things they're already doing to make that more effective.

And I think that's, for me, really exciting to say. Tweaks here and there can really help and not overwhelm a system that's already a little bit overwhelmed, right?
Right. Absolutely. And we also are collecting some data on staff's well-being themselves so that we can figure out which of these strategies will actually help protect their own well-being and help protect them when they are doing stressful work.

I mean, it is hard when one of our students is is thinking about suicide. I think it's important for us to acknowledge that, to hold space for that and think about, okay, how do we help the caregivers, right? And not just the child. I want to help the child, obviously, but we also need to find ways to support school staff and protect their mental health, protect their own burnout or vulnerability to secondary trauma.
So that's also things that we're looking at with our with our policy work and our data collection that I think is really crucial.

Well, I want to thank Anna and Natasha for joining me today for this really important conversation. As a graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at IU. A native Hoosier and a person who cares deeply about this work. Not just because my mom was a social worker and because I have teenagers, but because I am living in this world and I know how important our youth is to our future.
I'm just deeply honored to support the work that you're doing to elevate helping kids and helping the people around kids and talking about mental health with young people. So I want to thank you both for this work. I want to say I'm really excited about the impact it will have in communities in Colorado and Indiana, but frankly, across the country.

And I really look forward to us all continuing the conversation around youth, mental health and suicide prevention.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Tiffany, for having us. This has been fantastic. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been really great to have this conversation and to continue to have these conversations, especially as we work to support youth and their families.

Thank you to everyone watching and listening. And thanks so much to Anna, Tiffany and Natasha. This is exactly the kind of conversation that can make a real difference.

And again, if you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis or is having thoughts of suicide, please call or text 988.
To reach the Suicide and Crisis lifeline and speak with a trained crisis specialist 24 over seven here at IU Bloomington. The crisis hotline is available to students 24 over seven by calling 812-855-5711 for additional resources for educators as well as members of the public, please visit Connect to Care net.

That's all. One word with the number two, please subscribe to the IU College Insider, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. See you next time.

What do students and families really need to know about the college admissions process in today’s competitive landscape? From choosing the right school for you, to understanding academic pathways, ROI, affordability, and career outcomes, hear from IU admissions and recruiting experts as they share practical advice to help you make confident, informed decisions about your college journey.

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider Podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. We'll be sharing the voices and experiences of guests who shed light on what college is really like and how higher education is impacting our workforce, community's economy, our state and society.

Today, we're breaking down what students and families need to know when applying to college and how to make smarter, more informed choices along the way.

I'm Rich Hardy, associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences. We're delighted to have two experts joining us today for this conversation.

First, we have Sacha Thieme.

She's the assistant vice chancellor and executive director of the Office of Admissions here at IU Bloomington. And she is also a proud IU and, very importantly, college alumnus. Right.

Next, we have Jakob Breunig. He is the director of recruiting here in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

Thanks so much for joining us. We'll get into the questions. So Sasha, this, first question is for you. Great. As we're recording this. It's that time of year. We're in the midst of undergraduate admissions here at IU and around the country. Applications are in. Students are looking at making decisions. But for those students who are in high school and their parents who are just beginning this college admissions journey.

What can you, as the head of admissions at IU Bloomington, what can you tell us about what students should be thinking and looking for when it comes to making decisions and identifying where they're going to apply to schools? Rich, it's such a great question. We are in this interesting time of the season where we have students who have been admitted who now need to decide where they're attending, and then students who are maybe juniors in high school, or maybe they're, you know, attending college somewhere else, and they need to think about if they want to apply to college next year.

And we really in some ways, for both groups, we really want students to think about places where they can genuinely thrive. And I know that can sound kind of broad, but there's a lot of ways that students can go about it. So for our students who are juniors in high school who are thinking about the college search, thinking less about how to get in and really identifying the places where they can find an academic, a social, a personal fit and I think there's a lot of ways that they can go about that.

So it starts with focusing on themselves. I once had a really brilliant colleague who said, the best tool in this college search, as a junior and as a high school is a mirror. The more you can learn about yourself, what makes you tick, what gets you excited, what brings you joy that can be from what you like to study to the environment that you study in that helps you feel successful.

And so those are all things that students can do now. We also think about when evaluating schools more closely. Pay attention to whether they have programs that you're interested in at IU. We tell students think about places that offer academic flexibility. So it's really hard to imagine. I think we're going to get into this maybe a little bit later.

I'm sure today we'll talk about this, but it's really hard to imagine exactly what you're going to do years from now. I mean, for many of us as adults, we may be still thinking about what we're what we're going to be doing and how we're going to craft that career. So a place that offers you the flexibility in academics, the flexibility and experiences, whether those are things like study abroad or research, we can talk about all of those things.

And a place that makes learning enjoyable and exciting. So those are some things that we tell students to think about. You can explore that through, online, through visits, through materials. So those are just some places to start, I think.
Jacob, you're one of the first folks that prospective students get to see and speak with when they come on to campus. What are some of the things that you're hearing from them? What kind of questions? Both important and and also maybe not quite as important. Are they asking

Absolutely. Well, I'm really fortunate because I get to work here at IU Bloomington. The first thing I hear from most parents and students is, oh my goodness, this campus is gorgeous. Or how is this place so amazing, hidden in such a small town? So that's a point of pride that we have. And it is important, right?
The the learning environment, like we were talking about, what kind of campus is right for a student is key there. Are there students who really want to be in a big urban setting? They want to be in a city where they're college or university is not a big part of it. And there's others who want the experience we have that you where really is, you know, the town is built around the institution.

That's what we're all here for.

The biggest thing that I'm hearing from students and families is simultaneous excitement and trepidation. They're thrilled throughout this new stage of their life. They're so excited. The students are ready to leave home.

The students are ready to sort of go on this next chapter. Parents are excited. The students have made it, but obviously also concerned about them leaving the nest. But the trepidation from both is really, you know, what comes next. Are we making the right decision? And that comes from both parents and students. There's a lot of decision anxiety.

You know, is this the right place? What's the right major? There are so many students who we get who their first question is. I'm thinking of this major. Is it the right one? And it's, you know, maybe, they can change their major. They may. Well, at a second, one at a minor, and there's a good chance there's a major for them they have never heard of.

You know, again, at most large schools, there are a lot of majors. At IU, there's well over a hundred, from things within media things and design things in the natural sciences, economics, business, you name that, we do it. And I think
Getting students to be comfortable exploring is one of the biggest jobs that my team in recruiting really does.

Like we talked about A successful student is a student who's thriving and a thriving student as a student who's taking this opportunity to explore and do things and try things out. And so one of the biggest jobs that we have as recruiters and admissions personnel is really to get students to feel comfortable doing that and to feel secure doing that, to give them a sort of permission that, you know, it's going to be okay.

You will do well when you leave here. You will do better if that's what you do. Yeah.
And just basically trying to get them beyond this idea that any decision I make now is kind of that terminal decision that there's no going back. I've got to get it right. And that's just not the way our students work. It's not the way university works. No, it's not built that way again, sort of all of our degrees have plenty of general education credits. And I know that, sometimes these are viewed as frustrating things to be gotten out of the way or, you know, the the, the boring things you do before you get to the good stuff.

But no, this is where the exploration happens. This is where students discover what's impactful to them, discover what they have passion for, discover what's going to drive them to be successful. Because frankly, what happens after those classes is things get harder. That's the biggest change, is things get much more challenging. And so it's important for students to take those early steps, as they're exploring universities to find the places where they're going to have the sort of drive and excitement to get through the tough stuff because, you know, a large university, a prestigious university like IU, is a challenging and rigorous place to attend.

It's why employers want our graduates. They know that they have done something incredible by going here. One of the things that we do offer for students in a visit is we have our student ambassadors, our tour guides that are up there, and
they rattle off, you know, I mentioned academic flexibility. IU definitely has that. We encourage students to mix and match.

And so, these amazing students rattle off, you know, two majors, three minors, throw in a language, a certificate, and we are careful to tell families and students that that didn't start that way.

If you ask any one of those students when they were in your seat, they may be had ideas, but it is this, having this space to have those take shape with the support of advisors and faculty and it makes me think of two.

This idea of linear pathways and career advisement is starting so early for students. I mean, in seventh grade here in Indiana, they're starting some of these, this career ideation. And in some ways, I really love it. I mean, it's the idea of getting students thinking about a future, goal orientation is is beyond UNT. Your undergraduate degree is a great predictor of success.

So I think it's it's wonderful in some ways. But in order to do that, to meet a student where they are often that happens, by introducing you can guess business and medicine and law and engineering. Right. These very like very specific pathways. And then not only thinking how you could get to the point where you're mixing and matching different programs, but even those programs are not linear.
The the combinations you can put together to get to any one of those are can be beautifully complex and equally successful. So I, I love I hear that to a lot from students. They want the right answer but really it's the right answer for you. And then how you blend that to make that the perfect outcome for you.
And one piece that we really talk about in our campus visits, is our life design curriculum. So now in the college, we have these these two course career sequences. And the first one is the course students take their first year here and often we'll get parents and students say like a career course I just got there. Why would I take that my first my first year.

And it's you know, we're not doing resumes. We're not doing interviews. Those are important skills that they'll need, but we're not there yet. It really is about taking these design thinking principles, this whole system from Stanford, that encourages the student to really view their degree and their career and their future through a design thinking process. So rather than linearly think A, B and C, we think, well, let's say we're going to design a brand new way of getting from here to your home.
And it's not a car and it's not a boat. You have to design something new. Well, you wouldn't start with the perfect outline. That's not possible. You have to research. You have to try things out. You have to prototype. You have to fail. You have to fail multiple times. But through that, the end result is so much more powerful.
And that's really what we're kind of pushing students towards, towards finding is just that piece, it's just so it's so important when we see sort of all this anxiety from new students, for prospective students to really center that and let them know that it's okay, it's happening, it's real, and it's all going to be fine.

The institution exists to support you through this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Sasha, with that, with that in mind, what do admissions teams look for in applicants and applications? What stands out? What impresses an admissions officer? And you know, what's what's the way that a student can an applicant can really put the best foot forward. And in this process, so what we're I mean, what we're ultimately looking for are a couple of themes.

We are looking for a student who is academically prepared and ready to be successful in the environment that we provide. right. We're looking for a student who would fit socially and personally in the experience that is offered here, who would take advantage of it, who would be engaged in it, and then a student who is going to be a member of our community for as long as they are here,
right. So what we the way we pull that from the application can look very different depending on what the student is provided.

But from that, from the academic component, we see their academic preparation as evidence of their transcript. We can start to get an idea of their intellectual curiosity from the courses that they choose to take, maybe the activities that they're connected in. I talked to students about this idea of experience with and engagement in. So the more that you are learning about the courses that you like or don't like or the activities that you are pursuing, not the laundry list of activities, I mean, kind of anyone can show up for 51 hour meeting, but it's what you where you choose to spend your time and what you're gaining from that.
And then how they how they tell us about that experience. And so that gives us this idea of their maybe their early academic interest. The engagement tells us, will they take advantage of the research and the study abroad internship experience, working with faculty? And then the the other pieces of engagement and community. What is their application?

Tell us about their service to others or their how they contribute to their school community, to their larger community, how they value that experience. That gives us some insight into whether they would be a good fit for the environment that we have, both academically and socially. But also, are they going to be a contributing and engaged community member?

And that's everything from going to class, raising your hand, to, you know, cheering on their fellow Hoosiers who are their peers. And, you know, in our 24 sports, in one Hoosier team or in IU production that has produced, directed or act, you know, acted by one of their peers in themselves. So, so all of those things come through and we get a lot of hints to that, to the application process.
And then we talk about that for every school in this state and every state in this country. On the domestic side as well as then we have our international recruitment. There is someone assigned to you as your representative, and we encourage you to engage with them. Don't call them 80 times. That's not necessary. But if if we can provide any information that is helpful for you to understand how this could be a good fit, that is an important way to stand out.
And that's an important way to, inform your research of whether this could be a good fit for you. So. And that's our that's our primary goal. So it's if we are not able to admit a student, we don't want the student to feel that's a reflection of their worth or their ability. It could be that our goal shift, we have so many enrollment spaces, so many program spaces in one.

Maybe the major you're interested in only has so many spaces. We like to give students opportunities to pick other majors, so that's an option too. So there could be a number of different reasons that we're not able to offer admission, but we will always help you find a pathway. And so we we want to we work really hard to try and keep students lifted.

And encouraged in this process. And I'm so glad it's actually that you mentioned that idea of sort of being part of a broader college community. I think
know, a place like IU, we have the largest living alumni base in the country. And we take that very seriously. We want to find people who will be involved as a student and be successful as a student, but also who will be involved moving forward.

Our students benefit so immensely from interaction and time that is given to them by so many of our alumni as it stands. And again, it's the idea is that you're not just coming to this place to earn a credential. That's an important part of it. But you're coming to this place to become part of a broader community.

And again, it's a lot of that is matching, like, you might be an applicant who's really academically rigorous, but that doesn't mean this is the right community for you. And that's okay. It doesn't make you a poor applicant that so I really again, that the community aspect, I think is so key and so missing a lot in our conversations about college admissions, is really viewing it as you're not just investing.

And if you're the student yourself or if you're the parent in your child's future, those are happening. But you're investing in something larger than yourself and becoming part of something larger than yourself. And it's it's a really transformative and incredible opportunity if you take it seriously. I might be remiss if I didn't reference the big Red wave for the national championship.

I know that commentators talked about, you know, that is being part of larger, something larger than yourself. When alumni showed up in in force to support each other. So I love that imagery that you just gave, something else that you said earlier that I wanted to tie to when it comes to the application, and that is the fear of not presenting everything perfect, that we have never made a mistake.
We have never had, a bad paper about assignment or grade or lost, you know, and we got fired from our first job or you know, who, whatever that is, that everything in that application has to be flawless. And actually, you mentioned this, like, failing fast can be power, a powerful learning experience. And we want students to my goodness, if we can if we can learn what you learned from that, that could tell us a lot about your readiness, because you may have, matured in ways or grown in ways that other students who have not had that experience just have not been presented with the opportunity to do so.

And so students shouldn't shy away from that. There's certainly, you know, maybe a way that you can describe that, that really reflects that maturity and learning, but they shouldn't just think that everything has to be perfect. Yeah, I think the, the sort of the understanding of how powerful vulnerability can be in these types of situations. You know, I, I didn't do it perfectly, but I recovered, I moved on, I got help, and this is helping me through.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we, you know, I mean, research is another predictor is the evidence of a support person. We know that. We know it's the best students who ask for help in class. We know it's the best students who actually reach out to their faculty members. And so students who have already learned that that's a great predictor that they're going to take advantage of that when they get here.
And that's helpful to us. Yeah, it's it's sort of I've I've told families before that, you know, if you're a perfect student, we can't help you. Like we have nothing to teach you. You should go somewhere else. And that that is, that's so important to be remembering. Another piece really sort of to echo Sasha, too, is we want to see the interest in taking risks and and trying things new.

IU has so many options. And so to schools like us, like, you know, big schools like this, I will often tell families when students come that, you know, if you're a student here and you go to every class and you attend every lecture and you get all A's, but you do nothing else, you have fundamentally wasted your time here.
You know, you're in class. Academics are important. But what makes a school like a Big Ten school, like IU especially, stand out is all of the things that go around and complement your coursework, whether it's research, internships, study abroad, there's just there's so much to do. And if when you're applying, you seem like someone who won't do it well.

And that's not a good use of our time and resources. We want students who are going to come here and take the dare. Yeah, I think it is so important to recognize how much learning and development occurs, most of it really occurring outside of the classroom and the co-curricular, the extracurricular, the social activities all all play into that.

And really, That's you know, the college experience. right? So, yeah.
Okay. So, for both of you, we'll talk a little bit about affordability. Obviously college is a significant investment. It's an investment of both time and money. So what is it about I what is are you doing? What what resources do we have? To make undergraduate education very cost effective for both the students and the parents.
So one of the things that we talk about, in the Office of Enrollment Management is, is that affordability, we recognize, is a relative term, right? Only a family can determine if something is affordable. So what we can do is try to put resources, real programs, real opportunities, real preparation in place to to help a family both understand if that is the case and support that being the case.

So this has been a central priority for the university. And that comes through in a lot of different ways. One, holding resident tuition, flat rate, another brand, two brand new grants for Indiana residents, the, you know, the Hoosier Crossroads and Crimson commitment that are going to help directly support families and then looking for other ways, I think, to mitigate costs, tax initiative to make course materials more affordable. Resources like money smarts to help students understand what, how to manage finances. And then one of the things that the access to resources. So here at IU we are unique in that we have an entire office dedicated to scholarships. It's actually called the Office of Scholarships. Like I think this is what it is.

And so that is that right there tells students and families hopefully that we are committed to this. It doesn't exist in that way. In other places. And one of the things I'm really proud of is the effort to centralize the scholarship search process. So like many universities, we have scholarships that we offer students at the time of admission based on their academic performance.

That's a merit based scholarship. But we have this, you know, Jacob, reference is beautiful, alumni base and tremendous number of supporters of the university that are pouring money into our students through scholarships. Well, that can be pretty overwhelming to know how will I know if I match for something. And so we have centralized that process where through one application, a student can have access to every scholarship for which they be eligible to apply. And we do a lot of that. Then matching for them. And what I also love is that at IU, it's not just one and done. Every year that you are here, we are gathering more of those scholarships. Right. And every year that you are here, you're gathering more experience. And so students go back into that process and new matches can be made.

And so I think it students and families don't always let well families do. Students don't. When I say the search for scholarships never stops, it's an ongoing thing, but it's really true. Like you are always trying to source whatever you're trying to achieve. And that is that is the case here. But we're trying to make those pathways possible.

And then efforts to make give students tools like degree mapping and advising and faculty support to get them here and out in the time to degree that they are seeking, the accelerated master's programs that allow students to begin their graduate work before the traditional four year undergraduate term is up, and walk out of here in five years with a graduate degree.

That I think that also goes with the mix and matching, of opportunities to see ways that they can be really efficient and focused on their return on the investment. And I think that ROI conversation is so important because, yes, the affordability things that Sasha discussed are really key. And, financial aid is key, scholarships are key.
And these are important pieces. But another piece is really thinking about the narrative around the cost of college and thinking about the ROI on college in a different way. You know, there's lots of coverage about like, the student loan crisis and things like that. And what's lost in there often is the nuance that comes out in the data, which is that for people who successfully graduate, there isn't one.
By and large, those who successfully graduate from a four year school are able to make their loan payments to pay them off fairly quickly and to prosper. Most of that really comes from folks who are unable to complete a degree, which is a tragic thing that we do. A lot of work here at IU through our advising and academic supports to ensure it doesn't happen, but it's an important thing to know going into it.

Another piece of the ROI piece is just, you know, there's a lot of conversation about what is it really important you really need it for a job. Is it really? And the universal answer from the employment sector is yes, you do. So the American Association of Colleges and Universities every few years does this, large employer survey and this most recent one, they interviewed over a thousand executives and hiring professionals and found that, you know, 85% of these people said that colleges were doing a great job of preparing the workforce. 73% believed that the degree was worth the financial investment and that they wanted graduates with a degree to prosper. So again, it's this idea of it is worth it. Now, if we're focusing on ROI and we're thinking and where you want to go, a really important thing to be thinking about is what does a university offer to help that end goal?

Academics are key. Talent and faculty are key, but they don't by themselves make a career. And this is where, again, a large school like IQ has a lot of options for things like, you know, studying abroad for things like internships, things like project based learning, experiential learning. Again, that same AQ survey found that employers really value students who have done those kinds of things.
They want students who haven't just succeeded in traditional classrooms, but they want students to have done things where they've produced deliverables, where they've gotten new experiences. All of those pieces really go together to make students appealing when they're done. I finally learned this is I have no students. You know, we get really caught up in the degree, but when you're done and you're going for your job interview, everyone else being interviewed has your degree.
It's no longer like, that's that got you in the door. What gets you the career is what did you do while you were earning it? What did you do to stand out? What did you do again to to develop yourself as a person? Like we were talking about? This college experience gives you so many opportunities, but lots of students don't take it.

And so that is just so key. A final piece on those experiences too, is a lot of people will hear that and say, well, that's great, but studying abroad costs a lot of money, or internships are unpaid. And one thing I'm really proud of here at IU in the college is that we have this really robust, experiential learning funding and sort of like Sasha mentioned, we always work to centralize our scholarships to make it easier for students to find money that's there for them.

So so here now, if you're doing any kind of experience, whether it's study abroad or an internship or an artist residency or something like that, you can apply through one portal and immediately, if you qualify, get funding to help that happen. And to help support that, because we know the transformative power of these experiences, our alumni and donors know these, too.

And they've done a lot of work to ensure that every student has a chance to experience these things, because, again, the cost is what it is. We do what we can to defer it, but it's there and it's real. And what's most important for a family is to focus on that ROI and to focus on, well, what are we getting back for our money, and what is the life changing experience, not just for personal development, but for long term career success for our student?

So, I mean, we referenced return on investment. In answers to the the last question, I think many students feel as though you know again we, we spoke to this earlier as well. I have to pick the right major in order to get the right career in order to earn the right amount of money.

So to wrap, wrap this conversation up, how how do we go about speaking with students who have a definitive path that they they've already decided, I don't go into med school or, and also those students who come in a little less decided about where they want to be.

So I think whether a student is determined that they have found the right path or whether they are so overwhelmed with uncertainty and think that they're, you know, that they're never going to find anything. I think in some ways it's similar because for the student who has and you kind of alluded to this, when you get to the employer, you get to the graduate school or you get to the med school panel, you could have been on that, that very specific path.

But what else did you add? Where did you add the color to your, you know, the nuance to your personal experience. And that's where the mixing and matching that we see students do. I mean, gosh, vast majority, I think 60% or something are changing their major. Still, that's been a stat forever, but we have the majority of our students coming out of Indiana University with more than one program.
And that's just the reality, right? Because you are what do you want to tell those employers about the combination of things that you were studying? And so when I think about the students who do maybe are looking at medicine or they're looking at law, there's a lot of ways that you can get there. But what I would encourage students to explore from a university is one that offers me support to get there.
I mean, here we have the Health Professions and Pre-Law advising group. That's a dedicated group of professionals that know all the requirements for all the different pathways, which gives you the freedom to pick a combination of majors to get you there and still know you're going to get the requirements met. So that's for the student, maybe, who has very specific follow that, follow that opportunity for as long as it serves you.

It could change. But then consider what else you can add to it. And because of the number of students who are bringing in external credit, our advisors are very adept at helping students align that credit with their their academic interests. And then for the students who are uncertain, you mentioned career exploration services. We don't just stop there. So you use those services to help you identify maybe your first program.

But what I love is that as your interests become more specific, so does that career advising. We add in more career centers that are within the specific schools that help you, helps your career advisor become more sophisticated. So I think that it's less about picking the right major on the way in as it is finding the right path while you're here and and making sure that you're supported in that.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Sort of, you know, speaking to that pre-professional pathway, the health professions pre-law advisors are incredible. They have great data. And I recently met with them. They let me know that, last year, a student from our unit got into Johns Hopkins Medical School, and his major was history. And that was a real draw for him.

Actually, he took the required science curriculum to do well on the mCAT. He was a talented student. But what made him stand out among the other applicants to that was that he had done something different. He had done something, that he was rigorously passionate about. And sort of, again, to to hearken back to something I mentioned earlier, you know, if you were over the in one of these pre-professional pathways, there's a lot of work ahead of you.

And so what's really important is finding something that you can put your heart into and put all of your time into and enjoy. You know, if you want to be a doctor and you hate chemistry, you might want to explore other pre-med pathways. And that's okay. You will still have to take a lot of chemistry, but it's an important thing to be balancing.

And then to echo the exploration thing to, you know, here at IU, you can be undecided on a major for two years and still graduate on time. Yeah, there's all kinds of support for students in that situation. We want students to find the right piece. Because again, to tie it back to the career piece, a lot of our students and even some of our parents really mistakenly think that, okay, my major will definitely equal my career, that I have to get this exact major to get this exact career, whereas we know from our alumni that that is not true at all.

You know, we had a recent event, we had the, CEO of a major philanthropic organization, and her bachelor's degree is in journalism. Last year we had the former CEO of Clorox. His bachelor's degree was in history. It's not about the exact right degree. It's about the degree that gets you fired up, that gets you to do the exceptional things that make you stand out, that will help you for the rest of your life.

And I'd like to just step back to something you referenced earlier as well. Jacob, be the key to 95. The, design thinking approach to your college career and what might what might come next. I mean, I think very important component of that class is a lot of self-reflection for students freed from maybe some external pressures that might have been, okay, this is the career path.

We want you to go on. Is this your passion? Is this what you want to do? Is this what you're good at? Where do your talents actually lie? And allowing students the space to think about that with some guidance and being told it's okay to change your mind? It's right you mentioned something to and this goes up what Richard, that self-reflection because we know that students are graduating into a work landscape that is ever evolving.

And so as we tell families, just like it's really unlikely you're only going to study one thing at IU, it is also really unlikely you're only going to do one thing in this lifetime. And so this is the chance to really understand kind of where those interests are in those combinations, because it can set you up for a beautifully diverse career landscape when you graduate,

So thank you so much, both of you, for joining us.

This conversation was genuinely useful for anyone who's embarking on this process. And for everyone watching and listening. Thank you for joining us. Please subscribe to the IU College Insider, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. See you next time.

This episode explores how AI is changing higher education, and transforming how people, businesses, and organizations work.

Description of the video:

Hello, and welcome to the IU College Insider Podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media.

Today, we're asking the question, how is AI changing higher education and how is it changing everything else in our economy, workforce and society?

I'm Vivian Halloran, associate dean for arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, and we are filming on Ash Wednesday, thus my ashes. Joining me today are Justin Hodgson, an associate professor of English in the college.

He's also the strategic director of generative AI faculty initiatives here at IU. We also have Karna Desai joining us remotely in Washington, DC.

He's a generative AI strategist with Booz Allen Hamilton, where he works on generative AI in the national security sector and space domain awareness.
He's also a graduate of the college and IU Bloomington, where he earned a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics and a PhD minor in scientific computing.

Welcome to you both.

We're going to get started then with some questions. Justin, let's start with you. When people think of AI in higher education, they don't inherently tend to assume that the experts we would be talking to would be an English professor. So, do you want to describe for us how you use AI in your work, for example, your teaching, your research or service?

Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, I think, English departments in general are somewhat resistant to the AI. So it does seem odd, I but I always joke and say I'm about as far away from English as one gets while still being in the English department. Right? Because I specialize in digital writing technologies and how they shift the way we think and the way we communicate.

And so my work as a digital rhetoric scholar, which is just a fancy way of saying, I study the way technologies impact our words, you know, I it allows me to spend time in that space of, human technology relationships. And so in my own work, if I'm thinking about research practices, one of my, sort of go to things is I'll have the, you know, general AI tool of the day that I'm using.

So let's say today I did ChatGPT and I'm thinking, what are some gaps in my field? I mean, I kind of know, but it might be helpful to lean into the tool to help me sort of surface some things that maybe I'm not seeing. And so I'll ask it to say, you know, here's what of my work is on digital rhetoric.

Can you identify some common gaps or missing areas or underexplored areas in the last 3 to 4 years? And then, you know, give me a table that represents the thinking, the kind of topics we might explore, and also recommend some journals that I might want to look at. And funny enough, I so I did this the other day.
And so like the rhetoric of prompt engineering was concept, which I've been thinking about writing anyways. And it gave me a brief abstract and it showed me, you know, kind of timeline for where where am I look at some recent work tied to it, and then it recommended the standard journals and rhetoric, which I expected, but a couple that were outside of my field.

So like a media studies journal and I'm one in like communication and technology that I hadn't heard of before. So, you know, it's a simple tool. It's sort of like a career coach and a little bit of a way. And that's just, you know, sort of one example for how we might leverage these things in our research. I'm obviously not using that to do the writing of my work.

That would be, sort of, well, a little crazy because it's not an expert in the way that I'm an expert. But the idea that I can aid in the workflow and be part of a like a collaborative thought partner is, I think, essential to what we might do with AI as scholars. And I always, you know, you know this, that you've heard me say this before, but what experts in their field can do with these tools is astronomically larger than what novices can do.

And so the fact that I always find comical is that experts in our department are often hesitant to adopt these tools, even though it's going to open up so much more for them because of their expertise and the way they can recognize if the information is cracked or missing content, and sort of take those practices and leverage them in new ways.

So that's just one example for the way that I take up with these tools. But there's I mean, there's so many different ways we can use it in our work. And but you're also in an English department, so I'm not the only one over here hiding in, you know, sort of masquerading as an AI specialist. How do you how do you take it up in your work?

Well, I would say that the two areas in which I use AI tools most have, are in my teaching and then in my administrative work. In my teaching, I think it's important to highlight for students how to use AI tools as tools, rather than outsourcing their thinking to it, and to demystify the process, and also make it a little bit of fun.
I know that students sometimes have concerns, about their intellectual property, being used by the tools, but that's why it's so wonderful that I don't you we have the contracts that we currently have that allow us to use these tools through the one I use, edu, interface. And then the data is not stored. So that's one of the, benefits that allow, students not to think that they're giving all of their information to train future.

Right. But but the other, way in which I use it is to assist me when I'm having to do the kind of administrative searches that don't yield results using standard research techniques. Sometimes I need to find a person who has a position. I know they're employed, but it's not immediately visible where within an organization they are.
And so I asked, in my case, Gemini, to act as a headhunter for academic, positions. And then I give them the as many details as I have about who it is I'm trying to find and say, I would like to, contact them for an interview. And so then it produces usually several, stages in that person's career, and it might yield things that I have not unearth.

And traditional, searches. But before we go to our guest, Karina, I do want to ask one other thing, which is I'm a professor, you're a professor, but you also train other faculty in these tools. Do you want to speak about that? Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure it'll come up multiple times. So, you know, my full time job, it seems like these days is in specializing in faculty development, and helping other faculty from across all the IU schools and, the various disciplines and ranks that we have to leverage digital creativity, digital literacy, and now generative AI literacy in their work.

And so it's fascinating to me to see once you can sort of help on boards and faculty left to develop a bit of creative confidence and critical confidence with these tools, and teach them how I can be leveraged and really intentional. The administrative one is absolutely, a game changer for a lot of folks, whether you're reviewing gov docs or whether you're, sorting through like, large scale documents for compliance, and you need to find a specific quote or specific thing like those moments really open up the possibilities.

And we've seen sort of more and more faculty realize that I generative AI specifically isn't as horrible as they make it out to be. There are some legitimate concerns, don't get me wrong, but on the on the end of like the service side of things, the operations of these technologies are really an easy way in for folks.
Especially if you have to do like, you know, any sort of large scale language analytics. You're like looking for inconsistencies in documents or you're trying to to create, you know, meaningful workflows, within your day to day operations. It's not just about efficiency. It's about doing better work. And so I think as a development specialist, it's funny to me and every time, because I would say is faculty are the best and worst students because they're really smart and they're also hesitant to make mistakes.

And our whole programs are built around letting people play with the devices and the technologies and learn through play and discover what works for them and what they're comfortable with in terms of ethics and approach and all those kind of things, which is a good point at which to bring in Karna Desai, because you are an IU grad with a PhD in astronomy and a PhD minor in scientific computing. Could you talk to us about you are out as an IU grad, but in the workforce.
how did your training at IU prepare you to do the kind of things that you are doing now as a generative AI strategist for national security, which is kind of an abstract term that people might not know what it means.

Awesome. So, I'll focus on first, the domain and then I. But thanks so much. My question. So when I was a student at IU, I also taught courses and I and, associate instructor.

Right. So I always taught students that in astronomy, the night sky is a lab that is open for everybody. Satellites, moon, and the universe is very vast.
Satellites move very fast. In the low Earth orbit at five miles per second, at 17,000mph.

And now the field is getting very crowded because we have more and more countries launching satellites into orbit.

So we need to be able to track. And where I work, that is the space domain awareness field. So if you want to have a good understanding of what assets are and they are secured, that requires a lot of math and physics.

So I you definitely prepped me, technically to, execute that mission. I'll talk about I in my role in universities, AI is more used for learning and has just been mentioned. It can help administratively. And I think that, awesome point. We can translate the same use case for us. It is enterprise use case reviewing large set of documents, making sense of it, trying to identify specific, anomalies. But I do want to take a moment to talk about the definition of AI when you have anybody AI five years ago or even earlier, most people meant machine learning, which is narrow AI. which is identifying pattern, predicting. Technology has moved so fast, what we now call AI today, or the most of the world, that is generative AI.

So these are large language models which are trained on the entire internet.
so they can actually produce text, code, videos, audio, all kind of objects.
So in our daily use cases it's a software engineer can literally use AI is an assistant who write a lot of code. And I want to echo Justin again, that if someone is really expert at what they are doing, then they can really amplify their output by using AI
well earlier you reference enterprise versions of of of software etc.

Could you define what enterprise means in that context?

So enterprise in a literal sense means a business or a company. So when we have a tool that is custom designed, bespoke for a company that is, the enterprise version of, you know, of, generative pre-trained transformer, TBD. So U.S. government has its own, enterprise version of, go. GPT.

That's great. So, Justin, back to you. Back here on campus, you and I are both involved in I use Gen AI initiative. So can you describe a little bit more about what that is building on Carney's explanation of what Jenny means and then, explain your role in it? Yeah. I mean, I think, well, at first I think Carney had something really important is this distinction in AI, in generative AI.

And we had a point where we're conflating everything. Everything's a GPT, it seems like. And so it's like Band-Aid is the name for all bandages, right. So we've gotten to that point. And so part of the generative AI initiatives that we we're taking up here at IU include a certain level of education between the fact that we have been using AI for a long time, and the machine learning approach, and then how software is taking that up.

And now thinking more along the lines of this just sort of generative explosion, which is causing all the the panic, right. And the fear. And then now hopefully the, the transition. But so we have a couple of different initiatives that are part of the AI purview, including, you know, we have the Genie AI one on one course, which is, Brian Williams built, which has a very practical use to generative AI. You know, I'm part of the UTS technologies group leading the generative AI Faculty Fellows program, which again, is how we think about training and upskilling faculty and developing sort of, you know, AI fluency, if you will. But where there's larger initiatives across the university, we're thinking about what is the future of AI look like? What does education look like in 2030 when you're in AI era?

And how can we you imagine IU as being a, a leader in this conversation. So luckily, I'm co co stream leader thinks the technical term right, which means I get to do more work. There's a number of these work streams, part of a planning grant to imagine the future of IU to really support our expansion of IU, I at iu at scale. I know you're on. You're on my work stream. So you can do you get to do the work with me. But there's four of these different streams to try and imagine, you know, what does it look like in terms of change management, in terms of student success and workforce readiness?

I mean, this is a big one for me. I think recent studies have shown that the Microsoft for support last year, I think said, the workforce report said something like 75% of employers were hiring people with AI skills over people with actual experience in the job. Right. So it's sort of this kind of astronomical thing. And so
It's this really destabilizing sort of moment in our, in our sort of landscape.
And, the the reality is that initiatives like the generative AI stuff we're doing here are in reaction to the fact that what we're dealing with is not another Wikipedia moment, but rather the advent of electricity. We're having an entire economy shift. And so we have to figure out a way to help everybody get to this point. Students, faculty, staff alike.

And I always joke and say, it's the one moment in history of higher education where everybody needs some form of professional development, because nobody's really an expert in how to use these tools. Well, we're getting closer. But we're not there yet. So those are some of the initiatives we're doing. There's lots of other sort of small pockets that are tied to that larger initiative or effort by the university.

But that's sort of the hopefully that helps frame a little bit of the conversation. So the next thing to come out of here can do what Khan is doing, and be ahead of the curve a little bit. Right? Yes.

And in the college, I am the point person trying to identify where expertise, lies in. Jen.

I use in in faculty's research and in their teaching and in their service so that we can take up. Jen I202201 which is the second version of, of that training that's more specialized towards the skills that students in the natural and mathematical sciences, for example, in the social sciences and then the arts and humanities need to have to be able to apply their strengths that they're developing in their courses of study, to then use AI tools successfully to get better outcomes, to be more precise, and then to synthesize themselves what they're learning and what skills they are developing, which is, I think, part of what we hope students achieve in college.

Now, Karen, that you work at the intersection of AI, systems engineering and business strategy, where do you see the biggest gap right now between what I can do technically and what organizations are actually prepared to learn to do and adapt?

That's an excellent question. Thank you. Area. The pace of innovation is so much that organizations are not ready to adopt. We need to have right structure, right governance processes in place securely. And those should be trustworthy so that we get the AI can make use of data. We need to make data ready for the AI consumption. So only if we have all of those ready.

Good data, well structured with good processes where you are evaluating it, you can authenticate the source of generation. Only. Then I will give you what you need. So it's like garbage in, garbage out. In this case, if you have good input, then great output, great decisions. But if your input is not great, then your decisions are not going to be optimal and that is going to increase the risk.

So the challenge here is to how do we shape our business processes and rethink how we have been doing to utilize AI at the maximum advantage. So I think I can say that again, we need to make our data ready for the AI consumption.
So since you were talking about the, the integrity of the data that goes in determines how well data comes out, could you talk a little bit more about the work you do? It's not using the same tools that we are training our students to use at IU. Is that correct? I mean, how do you keep the work that you do safe?

Yeah. So, that is a pretty straightforward answer in the sense that our use government has a separate network in which all the sensitive work is done. So it's we are we operate in an aggregate environment. So it's entirely different from the normal network. So it keeps us very secure. However, if we want to use any tools which are, available to the general public for our purpose, then we have to have extreme, you know, very critical processes that scrutinizes that.

There is no prompt injection or there is no adversarial machine learning being acted by adversaries on us. So you need a very a robust cyber infrastructure and, platform to ensure that we can benefit from, these tools which are being built in the, in the public domain.

Yeah. You know, so can I ask well, add to this a little bit of the so there's some that I talk about with the faculty a lot.

A lot of, major companies have their own in-house LMS, right? They disclose network security. They have their they've they've built their own stuff. I know, like AT&T has their own version a Cisco has their own version. Right. And so, so when I say I'm training students for the future, I'm not trained to use ChatGPT for their work forever.

I'm training them another way of thinking about these tools and leveraging them in the skill set. I'm assuming, you know, you guys are gonna close network you. Also, you have your own in-house gen AI stuff, correct?

Yeah. So the most, the way I can answer is the most common practice that, companies and organizations are coming up with is called a technique called retrieval, augmented generation, where you have you you ingest all your enterprise data or documents and convert that into mathematical representation called, vectors and vector embeddings. And then when you ask a question, the AI will have relevant context from those embeddings or those from relevant context data.

And then it will use that so that it doesn't hallucinate. There is no confabulation okay. It will use authentic grounded sources to generate an answer. And that is the most common practice right now.

Yeah. So for us that would be notebook LM right. So that's a you tool we're allowed to use. I mean not a lot of folks can use notebook. It's not unique. It's a Google tool, but that, registry will augment the generation of platform as a notebook, which I know a lot of faculty like, because of the same reason.
It's like they're giving it the data. They want to work on, minimizes hallucinations. And it's got a really a closed, safe kind of engagement for students. And then bringing that back to, to students. What I think one of the things they need to become aware of is that the way that they use gen AI tools for their own, enjoyment or ease of life has to be different than how they use them for work purposes, even though the same types of skill sets could be applied either way.

Kiana, did you want to join in?

Yeah. Just wanted to add that every time to in real in organizations and companies. When we are working in a team, it is very important. The answers are consistent and traceable. So if two people are asking the same questions, if you experiment this with an open source ChatGPT, the answer may be different depending on how they ask.

But we want consistent, authentic answers and we want to trace it back. Where is this coming from? So often time we are able to pinpoint, oh, this is coming from the sounds paragraph on 122nd page from this document. Now that is very is helpful right? Because if Justin and I both ask the same tool, say Gemini for a pasta recipe, each Gemini recipe is going to be influenced by our own search history and whatever search engine we are using.

And so we won't get inherently the same top pasta recipe. Probably not, especially if it's listening to my house.

Okay, so Justin, let's turn to teaching then. Everyone's talking about AI in the classroom, whether it's good, whether it's bad, based on your work with you, I use gen AI, initiative and your own classroom experience how are you integrating AI in your teaching of undergraduates and graduate students when you do that?
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of different approaches to thinking about the way I can fit into, pedagogy. Right? And practice in all kinds of meaningful ways. So on the one end, one of my go to activities is, as I'm a big fan of active learning in the classroom, you know, and leveraging active learning. But I have been to often use the same one over and over again because I like it.

So, I have a little bit of an agent built in in chat where I can say, today I'm teaching this and teaching that give me three different active learning strategies that I haven't used in the last week. And so it'll, it'll like randomly generate the things that I might try this week given what I'm trying to cover.

So as a, as a teacher it's like, oh, it's increasing my variety. It's built on solid active learning principles. It's not making things up. I've given it all the stuff. It's, you know, sort of pulling from, so that's an easy like, oh, okay, maybe my class will be better today or now can you pause for a second and describe you just reference using an agent.

Can you talk about identity AI and how that so what you're talking about. Yeah. So I mean we in in the variety of the tools that we have, we have the option of creating a genetic elements or a genetic AI practices. And they're they're not autonomous agents and that they go and do things for you on their own and not that level of agent yet.

But it's basically a a chat or an engagement with the, the AI that you have predetermined a set of either data that's pulling from, you've uploaded the context and content and you've given it, a direction and often given some questions and practices that you want to execute. So in my case, it's built around I'm a teacher of this kind of subject matter.

These are the ways that I like to teach. Here's, what active learning looks like, you know, so I feed it all this information so it has a knowledge base to work from. And then essentially, it's just, I open up the agent and it gives me a prompt. What are you teaching today and what would you like to do?

So that's and going back to first principles. Why is that called an agent.
Why is it going to called an agent. Because it sort of has its own level sense of agency, even though it's not acting without the human in the loop. Right. So
it's more like an advanced chat. So kind of you you can break this down further. You you're an expert in this area.

So an agent essentially how we would define is it has a specific goal, a specific process, and a specific task. It is very rule based. So to Justin's example of booking a travel. So if a prompt has a travel request then the agent exactly knows what websites to go to, what information to collect and what actions to take in a sequential order.

So we can really so the benefit of AI is the really leveraging this kind of automation and, finding information in real time and providing you and assisting you in your daily life. Right. Fancy way to say that enterprise use cases.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of like your teaching assistant. Yeah. Well, I mean, you think about it in a normal chat with, let's say Gemini, right? You're in there. If I wanted to do this for my class and I use this, I'd have to put in the information every time in a new chat. So the agent eliminates that repetitive action.
So the agents that we have the gems in Gemini. Right. Eliminates that to a certain extent. So that's one use case. Right. But I'm also writing teacher. And so I mean, I may be going against the entire field at this point. And I say I teach students how to write with AI and how to leverage AI, but also how to use them as part of like digital creative workflows.

So they're making multimedia essays there. You know, we do a project where they we partner with the IU archives, so they can't actually use the AI to do the research. They have to go and physically get a box of stuff and sift through it. But then we turn that into sort of, a richer media kind of engagement.

And so I, as part of their ability to think through and craft a script or develop a narrative, but ultimately they're performing that work across media. And so it's, it's part of the workflow that they're going through, I would say. And if you're familiar with, Edward Devono Six Hats of Thinking. So he's a philosopher and a psychologist.

I think he developed term lateral thinking. Oh, yes. And so he has these six hats of thinking like the white hat is for information and and analysis and the red hat for motion. And the green green hat is so creativity. So it goes on. And I always use them as a way of helping, since I understand that when you're using AI, you basically want it to be wearing one of these hats with you.

And you can try out multiple different hats. It's a thought partner on the way to the end goal part of the workflow. It's not the end goal on its own. And so we in my class, we leverage it in those sort of ways, meaning across multiple stages of the writing process. But it's I think it's a way of a healthier way of talking about AI and engaging the ethical conversations and responsibilities, rather than just saying, no, you can't use it or yes, you can, and tell me why.

I mean, it's just there's got to be a better ground for us to offer guidelines and guardrails so they're ready and successful when they leave here to have these conversations with their employers or their in their own work whenever they get there. So I actually have an example from the college, professor Tom Bussey in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences teaches a class in which among the things he wants students to practice is flirting because it teaches people about human interactions.

You can imagine the awkwardness involved in having real students flirt with one another. So instead, he's built an agent and the students are, assigned to flirt with the the agent.

it's the kind of thing where you can use it in a focused way to have students
practice certain kinds of skills without the the possible negative, downsides of of having students flirt with one another or as, as the case may be.
I also know that there are, language instructors who use, chat bots to practice with students who are learning the target language. But the benefit of having that, instead of having only newbie students talking with one another, is that they can have a consistent, accent, a native speaker accent, as opposed to reinforcing the Midwestern, approaches to speaking.

Whatever. So, yeah. And so any any examples from graduate classes that you're aware of? You know, we've seen I mean, graduate class is a little bit different because there's a really interesting split between, at the graduate level, those who are like, we, we don't want to use them or we can't use them because we're trying to become an expert in our field.

We really need to do this work. I think they they intuitively understand the, the importance of of going through the, the effort to become an expert in the field, versus others who leverage them at scale to say, no, this is, speed up. My research helped me identify better resources. You know, they're using tools like perplexity or licit to drive, accurate information to them, to, source materials they wouldn't find otherwise.

Normally, when I was doing it, it would be like I would went to the library and asked a librarian for help because they're the smartest people on there. But so we're seeing this kind of tension between, dead set resistance against it, particularly a lot of them are built on like, go to an environmental how they want to do, and they're doing it for purposes that are not related to their work.

But, there are also others who just absolutely are leveraging these tools as part of their workflow, and they're doing incredible work and bringing a just a much greater depth of information to themselves to start with. That's just a small use case, and that not only my department, but I've seen it across graduate programs, across other IU system.

Yes. And so in in the college, there are faculty who have built their own alums and incorporated them into their classrooms.

I personally, trying to teach graduate students to use this to help them with their job search to better understand what an academic job search, looks like to engage with, the Gen I tool and ask it to act as a headhunter for an academic job search.
Again and elucidate the steps. How would you prepare your materials
just to kind of check what they're hearing from their advisors with what they are, able to suss out by looking at job ads and then to have them? How would you translate my CV into a rÃ©sumÃ© and just understand the various different sets of, of expectations that are built in to job searches and job markets that may not be incredibly intuitive for someone trying to look for a job outside of academia.
Now, that's a harder ask, I think, for students in the humanities than it may have been for you. Kind of. So, as a new grad, how was that transition for you doing your PhD and then also having that that minor in scientific computing? And then how did you get from that to where you are. Was that a straight line or did you not,
I would like to talk a bit about, are you here because, my time at IU, if I have to summarize, the word comes to my mind is gratitude. Not only my advisors, like, you know, doctor Tom, Cameron and Doctor do this, and they prepare me, like, solidly in technical.

What do you and, Professor Chomsky and Eileen free all. They really helped me out. And a range of other astronomy professors with, guiding me in a career in science policy. So it would be accurate to say that after spending foundational years at IU, they literally propelled my career into and right orbit and where I'm staying afloat currently.

So my first job out of, IU was at National Science Foundation. I was a fellowship for a year, and then I went to State Department and transitioned into national security. What I do, I do also want to mention that I use a gem of a place where even beyond your department, the College of Arts and Sciences and the university Graduate school, they have a range of programs, which I was able to contribute to in foundations in science and math.

It's a summer program for high schoolers. And then there is, and that is for graduate student diversity. And then we have, like science blog. So these different opportunities, really prepared and, you know, facilitated my transition into a proper career. And with I now imagine how effective one could, make their career if they are using AI in the right way to ensure that they get custom advice, they find the right information can really, you know, optimize, their strengths and focus on their strengths.

Great.

And so staying with, you know, how do you think I will reshape the workforce in sectors like national security, aerospace or advanced industry? I mean you're in that now. It has reshaped it. How is it going to keep reshaping it? And then what should today's students or early career professionals be preparing for to in anticipation of those changes?

So going back to my time at NSF in 2020, like 50, 2018, we used to discuss that everyone should have data science literacy is just like how everyone should have communication literacy, right? So coming in to IU, I would say from day one, students should be trained in how to use AI. So they should have AI literacy, how to use it for your advantage.

It should help you rather than consume you. So I just you know earlier mentioned right, the expertise. So whatever domain you have, whether it is humanities or arts or engineering, social sciences, you need to be expert in what you are doing. So you need to have that as a foundation. Only then I can amplify your output. Thanks. So we in the workforce are really looking for people who would really understand their subject deeply and have good human skills.

We want nice human beings, who have great communication skills. So the basics I think the basics that a university like, are you prepared as you with that cannot change. And then AI is simply an assistant or your teammate who is, helping you along.

Okay. Because that's one of the four pillars that we're trying to stress in terms of our liberal arts education, experiential learning as well.

And then in the subcommittee sub stream that you're leading at, Justin, can you talk about how the assumption is that AI literacy will spread across the areas of, of learning that, liberal arts college or university really emphasizes? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when we're talking about being AI ready, right? This idea that students need to have a kind of AI literacy, the initial response from most faculty or educators is, well, let's build a course, right?

Like a course solves everything, and there's nothing wrong with having a course that's tied to that. But I think this, this moment when we're thinking about how it works at the university level is much more like writing across the curriculum and the like 1980s and 1990s where, you know, we realized that while there are disciplines that are experts in teaching, writing and capitalizing writing to, to for students to become really sort of competent and advanced levels with writing skills, it needs to be sort of saturated in multiple areas and taken up with sort of disciplinary inflections.

And so, well, I can teach it a prompt engineer. That's not the same thing as you doing that. Ta ta. It's a process you can learn, but then how you apply that in a class on coding versus a class on historical research or just different kind of applications. And so in our work stream, but also part of the larger initiative, it's trying to find a way to how are we going to have this be part of the very fabric of the IU sort of space in culture, and not just be these one offs or this, these, these catchall spots for, well, that's where you go to become a literate.

No. And literacy should be part of the larger spectrum. And then that's where you go to develop expertise with AI literacy in specific ways so, yeah. But yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, and so when we talk about it, these are all great points that, literacy is so important because if you don't have literacy and you are using these tools, it's actually going to hurt the student because then you are not able to judge. And I'm sure professors are so well aware, and they are probably thinking about this all the time, that if students are generally content and citing that in their official work, and if they don't really understand it, then it's going to pose risks to them. And then the if you are doing that for an organization, for an employer, it's a big risk. And
just so you know, it cannot happen essentially, so as we're, you know, getting ready to, to end our thinking about this topic, what are you most excited about when it comes to AI? And then the flip side of that, what's keeping you up at night about AI or how people use it or how people don't use it?

I guess I'll talk about the flip side first. It is that I worry that people will skip learning, but it very simply, you cannot skip learning, because that will be very unfortunate, because I feel like we live in a time where all the resources we have, if you look at all the knowledge that we have at our fingertips, most prior US presidents did not have that we, you know, access to so much knowledge.
So it would be really unfortunate if you don't meet, you know, build the foundations. And what is so exciting about AI is that so there is something called Turing test in computer science. How do you know? So Alan Turing, the famous computer scientist, he came up with this test, that if you are talking to us, you want in a chat bot, and if you cannot figure out which one is a chat bot, that means the chat bot has achieved artificial intelligence.

And we always joke that Alan Turing was alive today. He would have said that, you know, when the Turing test has been passed, but we know that we are not in the artificial general intelligence, realm yet that AI is not sentient. However, the opportunities that it presents for creativity are simply enormous. So that is what I'm most excited about, that people can the creative people can really exercise, create novel work and, get exposure to so much knowledge and use it.

So I think that's really exciting.

Okay. Thank you. Justin. Oh, yeah. These are big ones. So I think, you know, my concerns are that we're going to continue to see, sort of battles against AI and or resistance to using AI. And people sort of not acknowledging that it's an AI. It's not a crisis of education.

It's a, it's a it's a catalyst for evolution in education. Because to me, the, the what it's doing is it's exposing some fundamental problems that we've had in education for decades, right? Where we think we're content experts and disciplines are not just about content. They're about ways of knowing, doing and making in that framework. And so the tool is undermining those who only focus on content knowledge.

Right. It's sort of just cutting that out from their feet. So I'm concerned that we're going to continue to see this long term resistance or you know, sort of not get sort of a significant investment, from not only faculty with students as well now, because I think everything should be AI, but because I think once we see the brilliant colleagues we have sort of figure out how this improves the work, how we can create deeper learning structures, how we can maximize the kind of engagement or critical thinking.

They always say it's going to, you know, we're going to get rid of critical thinking. No. What do you mean? A critical thinking? Because these tools can absolutely help you engage in the skills that we've tied to critical thinking, not replace it, but help you learn those skills. And so to me, the concern is the longer we resist this sort of moment, the further behind we fall a little bit.

Right? And people are like, well, I'm not going to use. And I'm like, well, then you can't use Google search because it does the AI summary and synthesis now and everything you search. So that's my concern, is that a hesitancy is going to keep us behind. But on the on the flip side, you know, I'm really excited to see what happens when we get to the the brilliant folks that we work with.

And they buy and they see the opportunity and they start to figure out new and unique ways of doing work in the field of thinking about reshaping, learning, of creating opportunities for students, particularly as you think about those folks who do like community learning or service learning engagements. And can you talk about applied AI in a meaningful context with with measurable outcomes and measurable impact?

So that, to me is where we're going to see lots of fun stuff really open for us. So, I mean, there's so many things I'm excited about and the education space specifically, those are the tensions. How long are we going to see this large scale resistance if we still have that? I think we're moving a little bit beyond that.

But but more broadly, what's it open up when we see, folks sort of find a new way through? Tana, you had your hand.

Yeah. So Justin, talked about the AI being catalyst for education. And I think this is a golden opportunity for all the educators to think about precision medicine. What is that essentially mean that every patient has a unique need and you satisfy that. Similarly, with AI we can now do precision education. Each student has unique strengths. There are areas in which they can uniquely improve by using the AI tool.
And I think if you give your grade a test to the AI to tell you that you, you need to work on these things, or you know, this topics more than the other, and it can iteratively ensure that you build that competency. So it's like your, you know, the resources at your fingertips are simply awesome.

So thanks very much to both of you for this conversation and for your insights. I've really enjoyed myself and the discussion and for everyone watching or listening. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you'll check out our next episode. Please subscribe to the IU College Insider, which is a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences and Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media.

See you next time.

This episode explores, what is quantum computing, how does it work, and how will it change everything?

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider Podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. Today's conversation explores a technology that could change our worldâ€”quantum computing. What is quantum computing and how might it change everything?

I'm Caroline Jarrold associate dean for natural and mathematical sciences and research. Joining me today are Srini Iyengar, who's a professor of chemistry in the college. We also have IU alumnus Jim Clarke, who is the director of quantum hardware at Intel Corporation.

Welcome to you both.

Okay, so let's put the first question to you, Jim, and thank you so much for joining us from your lab at Intel in Oregon. How would you explain quantum mechanics to a nonscientific audience?

First of all, there's a famous physicist, Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and he once said that if you can't explain quantum mechanics to a six year old, you don't understand quantum mechanics. And so that's probably the goal here. I like to describe quantum, mechanics and quantum computing using a coin. I have a, commemorative souvenir Indiana coin here.
And when that coin is in my home, it's heads or tails. It's one or the other. This was a classical computer. It would be a bit of information of 0 or 1. But when I flip the coin or when it's spinning on a table and I say, what state is that coin in? You might say, well, it's heads and tails at the same time.

This is the quantum principle of superposition. And if I had two coins spinning on a table or in the air, it would represent both states. Both heads or tails? Tails and heads. Heads and tails. If I had three coin spinning eight states, it's exponential. If I had 300 coins spinning on a table, I could represent more possible combinations than there are atoms in the universe.

Now, if we can operate on these coins or control these coins and some sort of coherent manner, we can make use of all those states and, computational power, using quantum mechanics would be enormous.

Right. And, and Sweeney, when we think of regular or classical computers, we think of bits and bytes, ones and zeros. So can you explain to us the difference between a regular computer and bits and bytes and qubits in a quantum computer? So very nice. Let's go back and look at the analogy that Jim just talked about.

And, we have a heads and a tails and a coin. I'm going to arbitrarily call the heads as a zero and the tails as a one. So now let's translate what Jim just said to two coins. Then in four states that he mentioned now becomes 000110 and one one. So when you toss two coins up in the air, okay, you actually have four things happening simultaneously at one time.

A classical computer can only do one of those four things. So imagine now we have 300 such coins. These are not coins really. Now, because they're more abstract objects. They're actually quantum information. So they're quantum bits, right? They're not zero. They're not one, they're zero and one at the same time. So they are called qubits, the quantum bits, that's what they are.

So now we have 300 coins or 300 qubits flipping around in space. At the same time, a classical analog will be one of those two to the power of 300. It's an exponential number of states. Okay. One of those okay, occurring in a classical computer. So a classical computer will be one over two to the power of 300 times slower.

So the quantum computer can simultaneously do two to the power of 300 tasks at the same time, presumably. Okay. Presumably because there's still a lot of debate in this particular idea. So so this is the this is what a qubit is. Now, you have, a lot of, these qubits are now be able to talk to each other.

And that's the beauty of quantum mechanics. And that's this is a concept called entanglement. As qubits are now together, flipping together, so to say. So Jim, in
your quantum computers, you don't have coins tossing around. What what is actually the qubit? What does the qubit look like? So there are many ways to make a qubit. You could have entangled photons. You could, optical photons. You could have entangled microwave photons, which are used in superconducting qubits. At Intel, we're studying what's known as a spin qubit in silicon. And essentially we're making use of the spin of a single electron, to encode the zero or the one of the quantum bit of information.

So our devices look a lot like, the humble transistor that we've been using now for, for decades. But we're controlling it at a single electron level and is there an easy way to explain entanglement.

Actually, you know, Albert Einstein called it, spooky action at a distance. I think he was somewhat skeptical, of of entanglement. But the best way to say it is if I have two electrons that are entangled close together, and then I separate them by some distance, and I operate on the first electron, the second electron will sense it.
It's a very hard, concept to think about in a classical sense. But it's basically that the, I'll call it the wave function. To be precise, if the electron is sensed by the other electron, and that doesn't go to zero, it approaches zero. And you can basically with one electron or one photon, separate it from the other qubit.

They can sense each other, even, at us at a small amount.

And for our listeners, a, a photon is a quantum of light. It's the smallest amount of light you can possibly have.

Thank you.

Okay. And, Jim, when we think of quantum computing, first, how do classical computers and supercomputers work and at what point do they reach their limits?
Srini highlighted, using points as an analogy. If you're spinning points, you would have the two to the 50 different combinations. And that is more different states than even the largest supercomputer process. So even a modest size, quantum computer would outpace a supercomputer in terms of processing power. But these quantum computers require not only the quantum chip or the quantum processor, but usually control processors to control the actual bits.

And then, computers to, process information. These computers are going to be huge. They're going to be supercomputers. So a quantum computer is going to have a fleet of classical computers and probably multiple supercomputers, in order to process the information. So quantum computers will never replace classical computing, though they'll work in tandem.

Jim, can you tell us what a quantum computer looks like?

Other can take many forms. Perhaps the most common form is, built inside a dilution refrigerator. These little bits of information are very fragile. Imagine a spinning coin on a table. That coin eventually falls over. And relatively short time. That's a loss of information. And the same thing happens with quantum information. And so we have to keep it very old.

You see a bit of an example behind me. Where that is part of a dilution refrigerator. These are the size of a of a, 55 gallon drum, or for Indiana students, the size of a keg of beer. And, inside of them, they have, basically what looks like a chandelier of different layers. They're just like a conventional refrigerator in terms of cooling, but they use, a mixture of two isotopes of helium.

And with that, they can get down to ten millikelvin, which is a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Or 250 times colder than deep space. And so then you, put your device at, inside this fridge and connected to the outside world through wires. And it's usually a freestanding system. And, companies all around the world have these.

So, Srini, Jim said that quantum computers and supercomputers are conventional. Computers will always be working in tandem. Can you give us a few real world examples of how coupling the quantum computer with supercomputers or conventional computers will really expand the capabilities in a meaningful way?
So it's a very interesting question. There are many, ideas involved here, so let's just break it apart.

So one, the, the first level, we want to talk about, a classical computer that's observing a quantum phenomenon, a quantum phenomenon that's occurring in a quantum computer. So again, I really like this, spinning coin analogy. So let's let's take that. I've got now two spinning coins. All right. And there are both mid-air. They're both rotating.

Now while I'm, they're rotating I'm able to say, okay, this spinning coin on the left, please don't turn right. Please turn left. And as is as it is turning left, I tell the right spinning coin to turn the other way. All right. So now my processing of this coins is telling these two things to do different things, but then they are connected.
All right. So that's where the idea of entanglement comes in. Now the two spinning coins are now going to do something in a way that is connected to each other. Who is doing that? Me. I'm a classical person, so a classical observer is trying to control the quantum system. That's one way in which these classical supercomputers come in.

Obviously you need a supercomputer because it needs to be able to do many, many different things at the same time to control the quantum, system. The second way is that we also believe that When problems become very, very complex, it might be required that we might have a stream of classical computers and a stream of quantum computers working together in parallel to solve a very hard problem, such as protein folding or some other or or weather predictions.
Okay, so these are really hard problems that are encryption. All right. Breaking RSA so to say. Yeah, These are all really hard problems which are dreams right. You don't know if they will happen, but it's a potential problem. But they will all come about. and classical and quantum computing will have to play an integral role together to make this happen.

So many different forms in which classical and quantum computers can talk to each other.

So, Jim, you mentioned that your quantum computer platform requires ultra low temperatures. Can you tell us about some of the other obstacles to quantum computing, and what is the holy grail of the industry? What would be seen as a breakthrough?

The first big grail of the industry would be, something called quantum supremacy or quantum advantage, where a quantum computer can do something that no supercomputer can do. But one step further than that would be a quantum computer can do something useful that would serve you or I, that I have been a supercomputer can't do.

We'll start to see quantum advantage in a more academic or theoretical sense over the next couple of years. But we're probably a few years away from doing something meaningful to society. With, quantum computer, there are challenges in the entire system, both in making the chips, wiring the the qubits, controlling the qubits, and then developing the software.

When I think of what keeps me awake at night, it's probably not quantum chip. There's a lot of chemistry in that quantum chip. And I learned a heck of a lot of chemistry at Indiana, so I actually feel reasonably confident about that. What worries me the most is all the wiring. You have these all these qubits, which are, very unique.

All the qubits have personalities, and you essentially have to connect the wiring, from these thousands, millions of qubits all the way outside. So it becomes a bit of a wiring problem. To me, and that's the biggest challenge that that keeps me awake at night. Just how to control and connect many, many qubits, each with their own personality.

You mentioned your time in chemistry here at IU. Can you tell us a little bit about how your your education at IU prepared you to meet these challenges?

Yeah. The, you break things down to the to the physical level. Quantum mechanics is often thought to be more physics than chemistry, but understanding how molecules react. That's that's chemistry. Understanding how you make wires. That's electrochemistry. Understanding how bonds break in the form, when, when they're reacting. That can also be organic chemistry.

And the undergraduate curriculum at Indiana, was really fantastic. This was, of course, 30 years ago, and gave me the fundamentals. But more than that, gives you the fundamentals. But Indiana helped give me the curiosity to go and say, here's a problem that I don't understand. How can I apply my fundamentals so that when I walk into a problem, I'm not completely in the dark, and, and make significant progress?

And that's the way I approach most of the chemistry problems here.
Srini, a lot of your work involves quantum simulations. Can you tell us about quantum simulation and chemistry and why it's so important and why it's so challenging? Yes. So before we go there, there's something that is pretty useful to emphasize.

Chemistry is the biggest proof of quantum mechanics so this is the 101st year of quantum mechanics. 2025 was the 100 year of quantum mechanics.
The last 101 years, we have discovered that molecules are in fact quantum objects as molecules with electrons, which are similarly present in multiple places at the same time. They also have nuclei, and nuclei are also more quantum mechanical. So hydrogen nuclei are quantum mechanical, more so than other nuclei. So the molecules are basically quantum boxes.

And so they actually simulate quantum mechanics for you by themselves. Right. You don't have to do anything a molecule is living standing in front of you. We are breeding some of them.

Right. They're all quantum objects okay. So now what is quantum simulation. The problem is that we still cannot understand a lot of complex processes in chemistry.
Many reactions that Jim mentioned are so quite hard to understand. Can we simulate one quantum system that is a molecule using another controllable quantum system? Okay. So now, an example from, from my own work with collaborators here at Indiana is Phil Rash. In the physics department and Ahmad Sabry in computer science. And Phil's lab.

We have, a set of terbium ions, which now act as qubits. Now we are able to make the turbine mines an array of them. Okay. Now, behave like a hydrogen bond that is occurring in some large system. So your molecules with bonds in them. And we are able to make these turbines behave like those more complex chemical systems.

And that's an example of quantum simulation. We're now also in collaboration with many other entities, the Sandia National Lab and Iron Cube, where we also simulate these things. So quantum simulation essentially allows you to simulate, as the world suggest, okay, a quantum system, which now is a molecule and molecule is a quantum system using another key is controllable.

And that is where the wiring that Jim is talking about comes into question. How do you control it? With with extreme care and very complex wiring is involved in, in the set of hardware that they develop at Intel and in the set of hardware that's developed by you, there are photons involved that interconnect these qubits. And so you terbium is a a lanthanide metal.

And so you have these several atoms in some setting. You can't just have 5 or 6 terbium ions sitting on your countertop. Yes. So what has to happen in order to use these single atoms, atomic ions as as qubits? Yes. This is an extremely good question. So now let's, understand you. Terbium is an is a lanthanide. And the specific kind of yttrium mines we are interested in using is it should be plus e terbium plus is a one electron system.

And that one electron system, that one across extremely far away from all the electrons and the nuclei. If you get to scale, you can think about that one electron as being in Pluto and all the other electrons being on Earth. So they're pretty far away. And if Earth, if sun has a nucleus. So now that one electron which is in Pluto behaves on its own, and it turns out that in a terbium mine, that electron can be used as a storage of information.

So it's a qubit. So you don't have a set of 7 or 8 electrons or qubits that are lying on a table. Instead, what we do is we take these YouTube ions and put them in magnetic fields, and then we try to bring this as close to each other as possible, as close as of the order of micrometers.

Okay. So you got to determine mines which are micrometers apart. And then you try to address all of them together. And this addressing is like the flipping coin. So the ones now now imagine the strawberry mines are each so there's an up and a down state let's call it like like the head the heads in a tails and an up nickel down state here.

So you've got up up down down up down down up. So two turbines now. Now as they're flipping they're actually all flipping right. As they're flipping you try to interrogate them and you try to make them flip one way or the other. And this is called algebra. And this is how you do computation on a quantum computer by using these magnetic fields and pulses to make them flip one way or the other.
Yeah, yeah. And we keep hearing about flipping coins and flipping you terbium ions. That sounds very uncertain. And fundamentally we want computing to be certain. So how does the uncertainty map on to the certainty that we want in order to compute something? Jim.

Yeah. Well, the notion is that, classical computing is certain, and quantum chemistry or the simulation that she talks about. Those calculations are so complex that many times you have to make a lot of approximations to your problem before you solve them. You have to simplify a problem, before it becomes, tractable from a classical, classical computer.

Simplifying the problem means you might be, causing uncertainty. You might be causing error. But the end result of that, simplified simulation will be a difference between that and the actual, result or the accurate result. And so, in many ways, classical computing is, not certain in that sense.

For quantum mechanics, there is kind of an intrinsic uncertainty, for each simulation. And what you can do is to work around that is to run the simulation. And many times and that's what we do today. That's what others do in the field. And then so you can get sort of an expectation value or average, answer.
And the hope would be that using a quantum computer, that answer would be more accurate than the answers. From a classical computer. Done with, many, approximations or simplifications.

Okay. And, Jim, your company and many others are investing an enormous amount in developing quantum computers. I think what everyone really wants to know is the exciting bit. And what what could quantum computing achieve in the coming decade. In the coming decade, that's, you know, one, one comment is if you look through history, it took 42 years, from the first transistor to the first million transistor microprocessor, which came out, I think, in 1989 or 1990. And that was using Moore's Law, following Moore's Law. So we have to temper expectations that we're not going to go from a few qubits to a million qubits overnight.

That's going to take time. And so we do have to be patient. We're in the middle of an AI boom now, but AI has been around for a long time. It's just finally finding its footing. The quantum will be the same. So there probably isn't going to be one. Moment where one day there is a quantum computer in one day, there is, to me, the, the applications that Srini talked about protein folding as an example,
Protein has something like ten to the eighty different configurations, and only a couple of them are useful.

And imagine if a quantum computer, you could understand what's happening. biologically and come up with better treatments, better vaccines, better, cancer solutions. That would be what would be really exciting to me.

And, Srini, how is are you preparing for a future where quantum mechanics may be world changing? In terms of human health outcomes, understanding the weather, preventing disaster. So there are many different ways in which I use doing this.

Now, one of the fundamental challenges that we're going to have is preparation of individuals, who will be able to take on this, this new area on the one hand, we are preparing, young minds, for a future in quantum, by painting these analogies, which we hope, will not require physics will require logic, and that would be one way to develop a future quantum workforce. That's one idea. The other idea is in AI, you we have, as you can also imagine, that this kind of an thought process cannot be from chemistry or physics or computer science.

It's got to be all of the about. So I would say I use very unique, apart from the fact that of course we are national champions, right. In football. Okay, that's not to not to downplay that in any, it's in a small way. But apart from that, we are also pretty unique in the sense that, we are one of the few universities where essentially there's a fantastic collaboration going on between chemistry, physics, and computer science.

And mathematics and so on and so forth, where, these ideas are discussed on a daily basis. In fact, I have a meeting with a computer scientist immediately after this particular, discussion. So so we are also coming up with methods that are, asking questions like when a molecule is undergoing some dynamics and it's got some spectrum in it.

Carolyn Gross, area of research. Spectroscopy. All right. When a molecule is undergoing some, dynamics, is it also possible that it might be doing a computation which might be related to number theory? Does it have information in it that gets you the prime factors of some large numbers? So we think about molecules. Of course, the quantum objects.

So why not. Right. Are they mapping complex arithmetic in them. Can you solve really hard problems. So of course this is coming up with collaborations with mathematicians and computer scientists and chemists and physicists. All right. And then we are talking about new ways of thinking about chemistry to be modeling problems in other areas. And so essentially in r u, our, thought process is very broad and, it encompasses many different areas.

Additionally, IU is probably one of the few. Indiana is one of the probably few places where you have this industry university collaborative consortium. So are you Purdue, Notre Dame together, are part of this National Science Foundation center, along with 14 different companies, right, that are asking difficult questions in quantum right and trying to ask questions that might become interesting for industry.

I can you tell me a little bit more about what it looks like to have this relationship with these, with these various industries that the NSF funded? Consortium? Yeah. So, I'm actually finding this to be very interesting. So, our own collaborations, are with people in industry who are mathematicians and computer scientists and, my own research is, related to looking at molecules and quantum computers as graphs.

So then I do computations and methods on these graphs and, a graph for, people who are, uninitiated about it in think about Google Maps. Right. Google Map is a graph. So now imagine that, you want to go from here to Florida, right? Google Maps, gives you a very good route to go from here to, Florida and, you have a set of vertices.

So maybe Bloomington is a vertex and that is, vertex at, Louisville and Nashville and so on and so forth. And there are edges in this graph that the line that's connecting between Bloomington and, Louisville and so on, so forth. But then, of course, there are many different ways you could go from here to Florida or what's the best way.

Now, Google Maps is doing an on the fly computation to determine the fastest way to go from here to Florida. And it's it actually now is able to see traffic problems, blockages in the road and stuff like that. But really, you can think about many different ways that it, that one can go from, Bloomington to Florida. So molecule is exactly like that. You have a molecular dynamics, a chemical reaction that Jim was talking about. You go from point A to point B, the many different things that can happen at the same time. And the result is superposition. So you will think about analogies to graphs. And then we now try to, once we've gone through the analogies of graphs we can also become mathematical.

We can now connect many different ideas, into one. So our language is at the so-called metal level, where we connect many problems towards that abstraction.
So, Jim, tell us a little bit about what's really exciting you about the research that you're doing at Intel.

Now, spin qubits again are just like transistors. You, when you turn on a transistor, electricity or electrons flow through the device. And, what we do is we design something that looks like a transistor. We operate at a very low temperature instead of a current or many electrons, a river of electrons stirring at the device.
We have a single electron. And from a chemical sense, this is a single electron added into, about 50,000 silicon atoms. So we are putting, a single electron into that sea of silicon atoms, and we are controlling it. And it's very rewarding when there's something abstract like that, where you can control the, spin, the position of a single electron in a sea of that many silicon apps.

And when we are able to design our next quantum device to have multiple qubits and multiple qubits, and it comes out of our large fabrication facility here in Oregon, it's very rewarding to it. You know, like, the work is deterministic and in some sort of way.

And let's, let's think a little bit more about what are the potential blue sky or stormy sky, potentials for quantum computing. We're thinking material science design, artificial intelligence, encryption. What what sorts of areas, could quantum computing make a major impact?

And foremost, with the Shor's algorithm, which, Peter Shor and, I believe the, the, the 90s, came up with the way of using a quantum computer of a certain size to size to factor, codes. Currently, all of our, email credit card information is all protected by something known as an RSA key. And, this is very hard to on encrypt or decrypt with a classical computer.

It would take, many supercomputers operating for hundreds of years to, to decrypt the information on a quantum computer of a certain size. Would, would be able to get that, the information contained within very quickly. Now, depending on whether you play offense or defense. And Indiana was good at both this year. You either see this as an opportunity, to know what your adversaries are working on or as a risk to know that your information may not be protected.

That's perhaps the the the first, the first big application. And that's why every government in the world, has some program on, on quantum computing.
And, Srini, your thoughts. Yes. So, that's a very important application. And, we all have to be very careful about it because, of course, security and, finances completely depend on that. There are other aspects that are extremely challenging. For example, when you talk about designing new drugs, for cure of diseases. Now, from a more fundamental standpoint, if you look at biochemistry and the idea of protein structure, okay, so you have a protein is a sequence of, little objects called amino acids.

And each amino acid can be in a certain form. And so when you have, if you assume that one amino acid can have two forms, right. And if you have n amino acids, then the number of forms these are called conformations is two to the power of n looks very much like the coin problem. Somehow nature knows how to choose one or a few out of those two to the power of n calculations very quickly.
Okay. And it does it in basically microscopic time. We still don't know how to do this. And of course, you can think about this. You can see it's a quantum problem because again, you have an exponential scaling, set of possibilities, and nature knows the correct answer. If we can find the correct answer reasonably quickly, perhaps we could make some impact towards, diseases.
Right. So that's one, area that quantum mechanics can, quantum computing can have a role. Now that is weather prediction, right? So we just had a major storm in Indiana with like about a lot of snow that we had to shovel outside. And I don't know about Jim, I hope I hope you didn't have much snow, but then.
Well, nothing. Nothing. This whole winter, it would've been pretty bad at the beginning. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, the way in which this Tom snow. And it's a very hard fluid mechanics problem, and, one has to solve a very complex differential equation for getting these answers. The reason we cannot do that is because if you imagine the entire Earth made up of a grid of points, those grids are probably about a kilometer away from each other.

A kilometer is a long distance. If you want to go from a kilometer to meter. And now the number of grid points increases exponentially. It's a very, very difficult problem to solve. So these differential equations become hot. So lots of very difficult problems in engineering, chemistry, physics that all become now available for us to solve that will have impact in the future.

More immediate impact of course. Shor's algorithm. Would they alleviate the need for data centers. So, this is a very interesting question. So, Jim talked about how we're constantly going to be in an environment where a quantum computer has got to be the presence of a supercomputer, because of course, the supercomputer will have to now record, interrogate, look at the quantum system that's performing that computation.

Right. So the data centers will now take on that role where they are closely related to the quantum systems. But now you may also have quantum data centers, which now can store information in quantum states. Hopefully if that happens then we may have a huge compression of data requiring fewer data centers. But that's still a very open question because you could go the other way.

If you ask that a quantum computer can do a lot of things. At the same time, it can also store exponential information. And then that that's becomes an interesting question. So these are very hard, interesting research problems that people are working on.

Okay, so that's all the time we have today. Thanks very much to both of you for this conversation and your insights. I've really enjoyed this discussion. Thank you.
Thank you. It was an honor to be here.

And thank you to our audience for listening. We hope you subscribe to the IU College Insider Podcast. That's all for now.

The IU College Insider podcast shares stories of learning, discovery, and innovation in higher education. Through engaging conversations with faculty, students, and outside experts, episodes explore how research, teaching, and hands-on learning are making a real-world impact in communities and beyond. This episode explores the question: Why Go to College? Why Now?

Description of the video:

Hello and welcome to the IU College Insider Podcast, a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana Public Media. We'll be sharing the voices and experience of guests who will shed light on what college was really like and how our education is impacting our workforce, communities, economy, and our state and society. Today, we're asking a big question why go to college and why take that path now?

Joining me today are Tanner Terrell, who's our senior director of academic and student experience here at the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. We also have Ashley Gilmer, who's a senior who'll be graduating in May, who's majoring in organizational psychology in the college and also a minor in human resources at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
So welcome, both of you. So, Tanner, let's throw this first question to you in your role at the Walter Center for Career Achievement. You meet with lots and lots of prospective students in your day to day work. What are they looking for in a college degree? Yeah, it's a question that we in the Walter Center for Career Achievement are recruiting team.

We get it every single day and there are all sorts of sort of things I think, that parents and families are looking for. As far as an answer there. I think the first thing that they're wanting to hear is that some confidence that there's going to be a very clear and early return on investment for the for the investment that they're making in education.

And so they very specifically want to know about earnings potential. They want to know about quality of life things. They want to know that their student or the student themselves. They want to know that they can end up where they want to end up, whatever their sort of imagining of that is at their high school career, which is where a lot of those students are.

And so that's really the most obvious thing, but that's kind of a checkbox thing. So like once we kind of give some reassurance about that, they really want to know more about the how of it all. So okay. So return on investment. Great. How are you going to get me there though? How are you going to put me on a a glide path to actually get to that place where I want to be?

And so they're looking for that step by step guidance, those things that are sort of baked into their experience. And so, you know, we live in this world right now where you can go on YouTube or you can type a prompt into AI and it can spit out very specific step by step guidance on how to do something very detailed and sometimes very complex.

And that wasn't the case even a few years ago. And I think that, like our own human expectations are that we'll get some sort of instruction sheet for something like that. So so to that end, they want to really understand, okay, great. You have all these internship opportunities. You have all these study abroad opportunities. How are you going to ensure that I leave this place, that I have gained an internship that I have done in a study abroad experience, that I have those employer connections.

They really want that specific sort of clearly spelled out instructions on how to get those specific experiences. So actually, let's turn to two to you for this one. From your perspective, what does a college degree actually do for someone trying to build a career out there? Yeah. So I think with the time of college we have at least four years.

It's really a good time for you to explore, to really discover who you are and kind of flourish in the best way that you can. I mean, personally, for me, I thought I would come into college sticking to one straight path, but then I realized that college itself doesn't have to be linear, which is great. And so I think by coming to the college, even if you're going to change your major, there is so, so, so many resources offered.

It's just taking the initiative and being able to use those resources and use them to your benefit. You know, when I came into college, I think something that I was really surprised by in a good way was the amount of diversity that's at Indiana University. A little background story about me is I was originally adopted from China, and my my parents had moved me back here, and I've lived in Indiana ever since.

But growing up in that small town, I didn't necessarily find other girls who were like me or others who had a similar adoptee background, and I didn't think it was possible to really find that community. That wasn't, though, until I came to IU, where I learned that there was an adopted awareness club with plethora amount of girls and boys who were internationally adopted.

And it's a niche story, a niche background, but to be able to bond with other students with that similar story is really special and also just really hone in on that community, especially with IU, what that offers. And so that's one area that I've gotten involved, and I certainly want to get more involved next semester with. But outside of that club, I think throughout my four years I've integrated within academic clubs, whether through a business organization, consulting clubs, through the Kelley School of Business, there's been an HR case competition through O'Neill that have been a part of for two years.

We just competed this past fall. We got second place at Purdue University, so that was a really cool accomplishment. But I think it's also important to find what you're passionate about. So I love Ted talks. And so that's why I joined Ted at IU here. I mean, my sophomore year, we were I was able to work with a Disney animator, Amy Sneed.

Shout out to you. But it was really cool to be able to bring someone from LA and to IU and really have her advocate for a story, share what it's like to be a Disney animated Moana and Frozen two, but to say that students can bring those type of people into the campus is really when we're marketing, and that speaks volume, I think.

And so there's been Ted, there's oh, gosh. Well, and I would say another fun was I was always athletic growing up. But so that's why I joined an Indian volleyball or basketball club here with my friend. Something silly but so fun to do. So I highly recommend joining intramural sport. You also don't even have to be able to play it.
I mean, in high school I never played volleyball. First time was college. Did Greg had fun? I'm here. Excellent. Are you talking about a knee, Cheri? But I think you. Bloomington has something like 700 clubs. Yeah, definitely. Every knee is covered. And I think something we always advocate in the College of Arts and Sciences for our tours is if you don't find it here, you can make it.

You can easily find advisor to sponsor your club and really advocate for what you're passionate about. That's a good point. Nationally. Yeah, absolutely. So back to you tenure. Yeah. We've seen real shifting confidence in society about their confidence in higher education. What's your reaction to that and what's at play here. And what do you think people should know about higher education.

Yeah. So I'm going to put on my higher education historian hat here for a second if that's okay. That's kind of where my background and expertise is in. And you know, you can jump into a Wayback machine and you can jump out in any decade, and you can start pulling articles about public sentiment in higher education. And all of the headlines are going to read the same regardless of decade, which it's going to say, oh, there's a shift in public sentiment in higher education.

We're always in the middle of a shift. And that shift really just reflects the fact that American higher education has always reflected and influenced larger changes in American society. So it's very natural for there to be shifts in the public sentiment on higher education, as higher education is impacted by larger America and world society and things like that.

So so that's one thing I would say is just that it's the narrative is it's always been shifting, and that will continue to be the narrative moving forward. Now, right now, in the moment that we are in, I will say that we've seen a retreat in public sentiment the last decade or so, but in the last year or so, we've actually seen that pendulum begin to swing back in the other direction.

And so there's actually right now a positive swing in public sentiment in higher education, which is which is exciting. But also, again, just kind of part of those naturals ebbs and flows, those waxes and wanes. So that's public sentiment. But if I'm a student or a prospective student or I'm a prospective family member of a, of a prospective student and I'm thinking about, is college worth it?

In 2025, you could look at public sentiment, but I don't think that's actually a helpful barometer as far as making the decision. I would actually encourage that student to look at employer sentiment on the value of higher education. Is it worth it right now? And there's recent data, I think in the last week or two from the Arc, Anu, that said that 85% of employers feel that higher education is adequately preparing students for this job market.

And so if I'm a person who's weighing the decision about whether or not college is worth it, that's the sort of sentiment that I would be looking at is that employer sentiment and helping to guide my decision, I think. And what about the value of a college degree right now? Yeah, I mean, I think the value of a college degree is very stable.

Like, I think if you were to read the headlines, I think you would feel like maybe it's on a foundation that is shakier. But, you know, the most recent data on, I mean, as far as valid and I guess it depends on what you mean by value, right? And that's maybe a conversation sometimes, like students will often think like, what is my median earnings exactly.

Graduated from college. And that's a lot of what we hear from perspective. You know families and students. And so that's that's a very like open and sort of case because bachelor's degree graduates make a median of about 32 to $33,000 more than high school graduates alone. And so there's not really a debate to be had there. I think that that's kind of open and shut.
And that's been that's a very stable sort of number. So so value of degree is is unequivocal. Yeah. But I know there are other ways that we talk about the value of you will probably get the conversation you really love doing. Yes. Yeah. So Ashley, how can you how can a student get the most out of college and what was your experience?

I know you were involved in a lot of things, but if you can give us a brief description of that, I think the biggest way to get the most out of your college experience is to find what you're passionate about and figure out a way to integrate that throughout your college experience, whether that's through clubs, internships, or some type, of course, because once you do, you realize that there are so many ways that you can achieve that or the resources that are out there, but it's up to you to figure out how to use them to your advantage.

And for me, I was able to witness that firsthand. I mean, the college, right? When I came in, I was able to witness the four pillars that you guys talk about so heavily about with research, intensive learning, career readiness. You know, my first year, the reason why I chose to come to IU was because I was able to get involved in research right away, which was very rare, and not a lot of the other schools I was looking at had that opportunity.

And so my freshman year, I was able to enroll in the arts and Sciences undergraduate research experience under Professor Benjamin Ramsden and his lab. We got to use EEG equipment, and as a freshman, I got to perform brain scans and other students, which is pretty cool to say. I mean, it was pretty cool as a freshman to say that I could use medical equipment and understand what your brain waves mean.

Yeah. Do you have your own brain scan? I don't anymore, but I remember that when we did our research presentation at the end and a poster, my brainwave patterns were on our poster. So that was pretty cool. It's like, oh yeah, that was mine. It makes a great phone background. I know. It's like, but outside of research, I think my time here in college has really helped me become a well-rounded person because yes, I was able to take courses through the liberal arts program, but I was also able to take courses through Kelly and O'Neill and join clubs to them, whether it was huge or consulting network or Ted or I get to help bring
a Ted talk conference to life here at IU. There's so many opportunities I've helped me grow here at IU, and I think just by making the most of my college experience, I've really been able to flourish and to really tie the bow off here. I feel like because of all that career readiness from that, it's how I've been able to achieve two different internships because of the connections that IU has with different employers.

You know, my first one was at the MJ companies, a private insurance firm, and Carmel, Indiana. And then my second one was at Eli Lilly, the global pharmaceutical company, right. Downtown, a big company that people aspired to work for because of their passion and what they're doing today for their cause. And so I think all these opportunities really just were the way that I shaved my own experience here at IU.

And I hope it gives a glimpse to future students wanting to come here. Yeah. And the one thing actually didn't mention that, I think I hope has been formative is just also being like a student employee on campus. That is true. Yeah. Yeah. So my role here on campus, ever since my sophomore year, I became a college ambassador.

And that's where I not only lead tours and give info sessions, but I'm really that firsthand connection from a student perspective that prospective students and families come and visit and they interact with and they figure out, okay, is I use the right school for my kid? Am I going to find my place here? And so by really being able to tell what their interests are, I tailor my own communication style to really adapt to what values most of them, because I know that's what happened when I was on my tour.

So this is just my way to reciprocate and return that favor. Yeah, yeah. And the college ambassadors are huge for us. When alumni come to visit, they sort of like the Chaperons, and then they can speak very intelligently about the college. What, like it is right now instead of decades ago. So, Tanner, career readiness is a huge buzzword.

What does that mean to you, to IU and the college? Yeah, well, it certainly is a buzzword right now. It has been for the past few years. And, you know, to your point, I think it can mean a lot of different things depending on the institution that you're looking at. But pretty much everyone is using it for the College of Arts and Sciences.

It means something very specific. And Rick will probably talk about this, this more. But, you know, it means the pillars undergraduate experience, which is this massive new initiative that we've we've launched in the College of Arts and Sciences here in the last couple of years. And what it's a name, but what it guarantees is it guarantees that every single College of Arts and Sciences student, regardless of their interests, regardless of their major, whatever, brought them to the College of Arts and Sciences that they're going to experience not one, but two career courses that help them learn about themselves, that help them learn how to articulate the value of their degree to employers, to graduate schools
during interviews, things like that. It guarantees a very early undergraduate research experience, actually, like you had with assure right, or some sort of creative inquiry project where you have a faculty mentor early in your undergraduate career. In addition to that, it also guarantees that you're going to have an additional internship or study abroad, experience some other experience in addition to that undergrad research experience itself.

And then again, it's going to make sure that you are able to you leave here able to articulate the career competencies that you have gained inside and outside of the classroom. We have over 400 faculty at this point that have gone through the Career Connections Fellows program, and that program is all about helping our faculty articulate the specific career skills that students are gaining in the classroom.

So right now, whether you're a history major or a human biology major, your faculty members are talking about and they're elevating the career skills that you're gaining in the classroom. So, you know, career readiness can mean a lot of different things. What's cool about the College of Arts and Sciences right now is that we've made it such that all of that preparation is now unavoidable.
It's not something that you opt into, right? Because we found that only a little bit more than 50% of students actually went to the Walter Center of her career achievement and was participating in these things that were helping them from their career. But actually, these are now required courses in our curriculum. And I think that's, that's that's great.

That's great for us. It's great for the students. And I love this thing where the students can learn how to tell their own story when they're being interviewed. That's when the authenticity comes through, is when they're telling their own story, instead of just sort of stammering like, what is an English major make you, you know, eminently employable? That's exactly right.

You know? And the other thing I'll say is like from, you know, you brought up our own sort of local data, and we were hitting a place where just over 50% of undergraduates were kind of interacting with the Walter Center in a meaningful way for the first, like five years of the Walter Center is existence. And, you know, one of the things that we also measured in trying to understand what predicts post-graduation success is that those career courses are really important.

Baking that into the curriculum is really important. And that's why that change, to have those two career readiness courses in the College of Arts and Sciences, was such a seismic change, and something that we're only beginning to be able to measure the impact of. Right. That's something that's going to take years to realize as students move through their undergraduate career with that requirement in place.

But the other thing that we measured is that there is a strong correlation between completing multiple internships in your undergraduate experience and experiencing post-graduation success, and by post-graduation success. I mean, landing in a successful destination, but also feeling like you landed in a successful destination, right? So we ask a lot of questions about, though, where where did you end up and how much of your earning.

But we also ask questions that hint to how you feel about that. Right? So employment satisfaction is huge thing, huge thing. How do you feel like your job relates to your major? How does it relate to your like long term career goals? And those metrics are also really positively impacted by completing multiple experiential learning opportunities internships, study abroad, undergrad research, those sorts of things.

So that's something that the pillars again, promises to students, right. What's what's that measurement right now in terms of like the success rate of people in their first position. Yeah. So for students that are students that don't report completing an internship, your your your post-graduation outcome rates going to be in like the mid 80s. And if you have like multiple internships it jumps to effectively 100%.

So if you do like a couple of internships and you pair it with those career courses, it basically statistically guarantees that you end up in a first destination that you are happy with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pillars program is fantastic because we can make this promise to both students and their parents because those are, you know, they're always in the conversation with the students.

So actually coming back, you described a little bit about this, Ashley, but can you describe a little bit more about your career readiness and how you use the Walter Center and the players program for getting to where you are now? Yeah, certainly. So excuse me. When I figured out about the Walter Center, at first I had no idea what it was until I was introduced through the College Ambassador program.
And then once I knew what it was, I was like, this is such a great tool. It was not a free cost. I mean, sophomore year I was I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know how to articulate or convey all my experiences. And so what I did with them a lot is resume prep. But then I also did a lot of mock interviews to prepare me for those two internships.

And then once I after those internships, I just went to the career coach, really for career guidance on how to navigate the job market, because as of right now, 2026, it's a little scary to be entering into the job market, but being able to have the right people to advocate for you, give you advice and lead you in the right direction really give me more encouragement and a sense of like confidence in myself that, okay, I'm capable of this.

I have the resources, and now it's on me to figure out what I want to do. But outside of the Walter Career Center, I through my psychology major, we took three career. Career courses that were very, very beneficial. The first was learning about yourself, your strengths, what you want to do for your career. The second, what are those resume interviews?

And then the third one was learning how to apply for those graduate programs, research or post job applications. And so I think just by having those courses, you know, like we say, required, but they're truly beneficial, that I don't think I would have been able to be where I am today without discovering myself through them. So I'd say that's more on the academic side, but what you learn for career readiness inside the inside the classroom is just as important outside the classroom.

And what I mean by that is I was able to go study abroad for three weeks in Germany and Italy, and through that I'm able to articulate not just what I learned, but the skills that I gained from that. There was confidence navigating across culture dynamics, or really just being able to think critically on my feet and that fast, dynamic environment.

All of that has helped me prepare for my career, and I've been able to enhance my own portfolio to future employers. And those study abroad experiences are often enhanced by the fact that the college has all these language and culture program degree programs, or courses that you can take to prepare you for those study abroad experiences. And what do you plan to do when you graduate in May?
Yeah. So after May. So originally I'm from Indianapolis, but in August I'll be moving to Charlotte, North Carolina to work for Wells Fargo. I'll be working as an HR analyst and their HR development program. So I'm very, very excited to have it all in, Inc. very satisfying to know that post-grad, I have a job and it's something that I'm very passionate about.

And psychology is not HR. But that was my passion that I studied and I love that. So I'm able to use my passion my day to day and my work life, which was very awarding for me. Okay. And psychology is HR. I think that is actually I mean, yes, it's absolutely you are. There's so much crossover in those skills that you've gained inside the classroom and your major and organizational psychology.
That is also a lot of it correlates a lot of course a lot with HR because I remember my original direction with that major was to go the industrial organizational psychologist route. But that requires a PhD. But realizing how heavily HR correlates with it, it brought me a lot more passion going that direction versus the first one. Before again, I kind of changed my career path.

Right. And you can always decide to do a graduate program later. Right, right, right. Yeah. And again, in the college, there's a lot of students that are preparing for post-graduate work, whether they're pre-med or pre health or pre-law. But then the other the other category is that they're finding their way here. We have a lot of discovery departments that they didn't even know.

That sort of field existed, that they could take a major in that field. And they find find that and find their passion, and that allows them to have a meaningful life afterwards. 100% good, actually. What did you want to what did you want to study when you entered IU? Oh my gosh, when I entered, I stayed in the psychology room, but it was originally clinical psychology.

On the research route. I had aspirations become a neuropsychologist. And then quickly, as we can tell, I pivoted away from that. What was yours? Yeah, I was going to ask. I was it was it's interesting. Right. Because I think, you know, it's a well over half of students change their undergraduate major while they're here. And so I was absolutely one of those that changed mine as well.

I started as a chemistry major. I was I was thinking I was prefer I graduated by the end of it with Earth and atmospheric Sciences concentration in secondary education. And I'm working in higher education. I'm not not teaching high school chemistry or geology right now. Yeah, I think we were just talking about how probably about 60% of students change their major, but that just is completely normal.

And I think that's not advocated enough for. No. Absolutely not. No. We've got to give students a permission structure to do that discovery that you get to do in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. I mean, it's so true. I mean, I will say that if I had gone back, I would probably choose different majors, like I would probably choose.

I'd probably like, I don't know, double major like history and political science or something, or history and philosophy or something like that. And yet there's the agility to the degree such that you can also just find what you want to do and find the skills harness. There's so much crossover in the skills that you can actually still end up where you went into up and end up happy and fulfilled.

You know, there's not really a wrong decision, I guess, is what I'm trying to say in a lot of ways. Like you can there's there's an underpinning of so many competencies in a College of Arts and Sciences education that you do have that elasticity in the job market. You can pivot, you can bop, and we've you can try different things out.
You can move into different job functions or industries. Okay. Maybe just a quick lightning round. If you had a student standing in front of you and there are skeptical or concern that you know that the worth of a of a college degree, what would one thing you'd want them to know? I'd say the one that I want them to know about going into college is you don't have to have it all figured out on day one.

College is such a big time for you to figure out who you are away from your hometown, and you wouldn't have been able to get that experience unless you had came to college. I mean, personally, for me, that I've changed in so many ways, only for the better, whether it's in my study abroad internship or even like my intramural volleyball club.

Something so silly, small, but also really impactful throughout my college time here. I know that once I graduate from IU, I'm not just leaving here with memories for four years. I'm leaving here of experiences and connections that are going to last me a lifetime, right? It's not just the degree programs, it's things, the extracurricular experiences that you actually have to study abroad.

Like a very good example as well. Yes. And yourself, it would be the same answer. It would, it would be a complication of the question itself. Right. It would, it would be a it's a college degree worth it. Well, we've already talked about the fact that from an earnings perspective, there's no there's no debate to be had. From an earnings perspective, bachelor's degree graduates make 32 $33,000 more per year than high school graduates.

So no decision there. Now is a college degree worth it. I would actually that's what I would do to complicate it. I would say, well, you're not you're not investing in a college degree. You're investing in a college experience. So yeah, when people think about college degree, they're often thinking about like earning a degree, right? They're thinking about a credential that they're earning and you are getting so much more.

If that's what you're thinking about when you're weighing the decision, then you're missing out on so much of the pie, right? I mean, there's that is that is a sliver of it, and it is an important one. But it is there is so much that wraps around the sort of like, you know, 9 to 5 Monday through Friday in the classroom.

That adds value, right? Whether you're becoming that network of like 150,000 living alumni, right. And all the connections that you make to those alumni throughout your undergraduate career, all of the experiences that are that we've talked about, that are baked into that, right, that are outside the classroom, studying abroad, getting these really meaningful internships, these are harder things to do without, like the structure of a of a university, a major, you know, research intensive university behind you.

And so those are the things, I think, that you also have to factor into that equation, that a lot of times you kind of folks overlook if you're just trying to like, go it alone and trying to figure out what you're going to do meaningfully for the rest of your life away from college. Right, right, right. And then you're saying that employer is 85%, you know, right.

Do recognize the power of a of a college degree. But there's also the liberal arts and sciences. Those are the and you said you wanted that for that skill set. The foundational skills that comes with they want people that are curious people. They want people that critical thinking skills. Those are above and beyond the title of your degree.

Yeah. The college, you know, they have those five core values that they really embody. And I think my biggest return investment is being able to walk away saying that, yes, that is true. I was able to achieve all those five core values. And it was really either whether it was a study abroad. I think another big thing to advocate for is that because I was able to go, I had scholarship money that helped fund that trip, and because of that, it's how I was able to gain all those skills.

And I think what's not advocated for enough is you can go study abroad and have scholarships that are funding your trip that can want to benefit you. So I don't think that money should be necessarily a scare at first without reaching out and finding those resources. So I think definitely the study abroad, those those five college values. And then just my whole experience, that was my return on investment of coming to IU, especially being from Indiana.

I chose to stay here. And so ultimately it was a great choice. Yeah, I was a first generation college student, actually. Ashley and I were both talking about we're both Hoosiers for both and being from like, rural southern Indiana and from Washington County, Indiana. You know, it was a great place to grow up. It was perfect, you know, sort of place to get launched into, you know, Indiana University as a first generation college student.

But I think about I think back on, like we were talking about our undergraduate majors, and I've thought about this afterward. The two majors that I considered were pharmacy and high school teacher, and those were really the two recognizable people in the community that had college degrees. And so there's something really important about attending university that just allows you to discover, to learn about things that you didn't know you could learn about.

And so when I got here, that opened up my world to different things that I could, you know, be good at different things, that I could make a professional career, things that I didn't know that were out there in the world until I actually experienced the world. And so that's something else intangible that I think when you're weighing the decision of, is college worth it?

Is something really important to consider. So, Tanner, can you say a little bit more about the. So we have scholarship programs specifically for internships. Just say a little bit more about that. Yeah. The Walter Center curates and you know, thanks so much to if there are any alumni out there listening. This is all you know, this is alumni funded, right.

And so this is the support of of our college alums that make us possible. But but the Walter Center for Career Achievement has hundreds of thousands of dollars in internship scholarships that we have the ability to sort of take applications for and to, to give out each year. And so we're funding, you know, sick figures, amount of internship, scholarships for College of Arts and Sciences students to do things that would otherwise go unfunded.

Right. There are a lot of opportunities that College of Arts and Sciences students are interested in that are underfunded, right. Things like this. Media. Media is a very expensive place to try to do internships. Right. And so, you know, through that, those generous donations, we're able to, you know, curate that sort of giving. And it's it's it's life changing for these students.

And, you know, we get these letter letters back right from these students. And they talk about it. And there's just nothing. If you're a if you're a practitioner of higher education, there's nothing more fulfilling than reading those letters and realizing just the life changing impact of that semester long experience and the fact that that student didn't have to go into debt in order to experience that.

Right. Yeah. So thanks very much to both of you for this discussion and conversation. It's been really insightful to me, and I hope our our audience and for everyone watching and listening. Thank you so much for joining us on this very first episode of the IU College Insider Podcast, and we hope that you subscribe to this podcast.

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