Jelle Hartong
Haaziquah Tahir and Kinga Bagyo worked together to produce this article as part of our series of Academic Interviews; featuring Jelle Hartong!
Jelle Hartong discusses his background as an academic and talks about his experience with online teaching
Early life in the Netherlands
Jelle, coming from the town of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, grew up within a traditional Dutch family. As a child he had a strong fascination with astronomy, something which would influence his future desires and aspirations.
The School system in the Netherlands is different to the one in Britain: in place of a single comprehensive approach, students are instead placed into one of three levels – low, intermediate or high. Typically, only students in the highest level go on to University. Jelle confesses that he was in the lowest one at first, and he struggled with most subjects, except for mathematics. It wasn’t until the age of 15 that things turned around for him. Within two years, he went from being one of the lower students in the School to one of the top; he was therefore able to transition into the highest level and go on to University.
Jelle has ideas of where his initial struggles came from, “I think I had some kind of a learning disability that wasn't discovered” he admits. Due to this, he went to different schools to try different teaching styles, but none of them made any difference. “I had trouble focusing, trouble concentrating,” he recalls. While he was diagnosed with dyslexia for both reading and hearing, he isn’t certain what caused his problems with paying attention. He suspects that the issues may have been related, but the latter has never been diagnosed. However, his determination urged him to find workarounds to his problems and led to him making remarkable academic progress.
Once at University, Jelle recalls that he had a bit of imposter syndrome. “I didn't feel like I belonged in that environment because only a few years before I was heading for a completely different type of life” he says. He managed this transition, however, as by the end of school he had found workarounds so that he could absorb the information, process it more effectively, and perform better. “I remember there was a moment around the age of 15 when it became clear to me what would happen unless something changed drastically,” Jelle adds, as he could never go to University with the course he was on at the time. With hindsight, he comments “I wasn't really one of the prototypical students who always did well and was on the highway to University, I took a bit of a detour.” However, Jelle is not the only counterexample to the common misconception that people who have any learning difficulties cannot become academics. He says he knows quite a few very successful scientists who have a similar background to his.
Life at University
At the University of Groningen, where he did both his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, he spent a lot of time in the beginning socializing. Having moved to a new city, he had to build up a new life, so he joined some student unions and took up amateur acting at a theatrical company. Jelle explains that in the Netherlands, student unions have hundreds of students doing different degrees who form ‘year groups’; thus he was part of a group of about 12 people. It was only in his third year that he became more focused on his studies and became more serious about doing theoretical physics, as he wanted to do a PhD.
Working on his PhD
After completing his master's thesis in the String Theory Group on topics like black hole thermodynamics, he made it clear to his supervisor that he wanted to do a PhD and go abroad. At that time, however, they had two openings in the group where he was doing his thesis; one of the professors convinced him that he should stay as he would have to go abroad later for postdocs anyways. Jelle explains that in the UK, people can go to different Universities, and then get a permanent job and make a career. “If you are in the Netherlands, the system essentially pushes you out. Once you've done your PhD, you need to go abroad.” Therefore he decided to postpone leaving and applied for the positions in his group. He obtained one of them, so he stayed in Groningen. After his PhD, his postdoc periods involved going to quite a few places. He first went to Switzerland, before going on to Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam and finally Edinburgh.
First year at Edinburgh
For Jelle, 2020/21 was the first year that he was teaching a course in Edinburgh. He organizes one for year five undergraduates titled ‘Variational Calculus’, which is “a beautiful subject” in his opinion, as it is very close to his research. “But now everything is online, so I really miss standing in front of a group of students in a class and teaching on a board – that's the way I prefer doing it,” he claims. Live zoom classes are less spontaneous and it is tough to build up a relationship with the students. Despite this, he tries to keep his classes as close to an actual lecture as possible; he also extended his office hours – “but almost nobody comes,” he adds while laughing.