Vicki Colvin Receives Phi Beta Kappa Prize

Vicki Colvin Receives Phi Beta Kappa Prize

BY LIA UNRAU

Rice News Staff
May 13, 1999

Sometimes Vicki Colvin walks into her classroom carrying a stuffed cow.

“This is a molecule,” she’ll proclaim. No one questions her.

When teaching an abstract subject like quantum chemistry, notorious for being a “heinous subject,” providing a visual image of highly conceptual ideas can be tough.

“She’ll go to any lengths to help us understand,” says Kim Firestone, a junior chemistry major. Colvin is successful.

An assistant professor of chemistry, Colvin is the winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize for 1998-99, which is based on student evaluations and awarded by the Rice chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, a national fraternity whose members are the top students in their graduating classes.

“I was actually very surprised to have gotten this award,” Colvin says. “I am very happy about it, but quantum is a hard class and so most of my evaluations, when I read them, focused on the difficulty of the class.”

The award is designed to recognize younger faculty members; only assistant professors are eligible to receive the prize. Colvin was selected by a faculty committee of three who reached their decision on the $2,000 prize after reading students’ teacher evaluations.

Charles Stewart, professor of biochemistry and cell biology and chair of the selection committee, said the decision was unusually difficult this year, due to a high number of outstanding candidates.

“Rice students are particularly demanding in my experience,” Colvin says. “I set a goal for myself to improve my teaching each year.”

She changed her teaching format this year, switching from blackboards and overheads to PowerPoint presentations. She includes animation to demonstrate abstract math, uses the book “Alice in Quantumland” and sprinkles her talks with as much visual imagery as possible.

Her weekly personal tutoring sessions drew rave reviews from students, as did things like a weekly “experiment day” to make the subject matter tangible, and making class notes available.

“She really cares about students and teaching,” Firestone says. “She doesn’t make busywork, everything has relevance to learning, and she has a lot of respect for students and their time.”

Colvin also has an active research group.

“I think the idea that you can have a research scientist who is also able to teach is important because those two really feed off one another,” Colvin says. “I get lots of ideas from teaching quantum mechanics and I get wonderful undergraduate students in my research labs from teaching that class.”

Colvin, who is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley, and came to Rice from AT&T/Bell Labs, is in her third year of teaching and research here.

She will be recognized at the Phi Beta Kappa Ceremony of Initiation on May 14.