So you want to be a physics major (or any other major, for that matter)

I’ve been tutoring introductory physics for two years now, and there are many questions I have been asked every single year, often repeatedly.

“What is the difference between static and kinetic friction?”

“Why do I have to include gravity as a force?”

“Are the electric potential and electric potential energy the same?”

But there has been no question I have had to answer more often than any other.

“Why did you choose to be a physics major?”

(sigh.) I wanted to be a scientist. I don’t really know why, I just did. Maybe it was because my dad was a engineer. Maybe it was because science was such a respected subject in my family. Maybe it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a scientist as it was that I stared up at the stars and wanted to walk among them. If you want the practical answer: I decided in high school I wanted to be an astronomer, and physics is possibly the single best undergraduate major to set someone up for a career in astronomy or astrophysics. So physics it was.

Until I realized I really didn’t like being in a lab. Or on a computer. Or analyzing reams and reams of data. So here I was, a year from graduation and pretty much done with my physics degree, no longer wanting to be any kind of scientist. Looking back it seems so ridiculous that it took me this long to realize that lab work is not for me. The signs were all there; I loved reading, writing, and all things creative. I almost never went to outside lectures, or had science discussions outside of class. I loved debating humanities, philosophy, and social science topics. But I was determined that I wanted to be a scientist.

In the end, I think that four years is not possibly enough time to decide what to do with your life. I spent my four years at Scripps exploring all sorts of things I thought I might be interested in. I confirmed some topics to be interests, discarded other topics, and barely scratched the surface of all I wanted to experience. And as strange as it sounds, my major was one of the things that was “discarded” as an interest. That doesn’t mean physics isn’t a great major, or that I didn’t learn a LOT about the world by taking this major, it just means that I tried it, and I won’t be trying it again.

Unfortunately, that does leave me with another whole year, including a thesis, and no way to switch now. More often than not I find myself sitting in front of my computer regretting every decision I’ve ever made. It’s at those moments that I have to remind myself of how much knowledge and experience and perspective on the world that physics gave me. Physics has shaped me with a very specific point of view which I will bring to whatever career I end up choosing. It was important for me to choose physics as a major, because if I had not, I would not be the person I am today. There would be a great deal I would never have known about myself, and I always would have wondered what would have happened.

So I have some very simple advice for anyone trying to declare a major: go with what you enjoy. Go with what you want to experience. Don’t think about money, or time, or the future, because you might change your mind completely in four years. What people do in graduate school or their jobs is often significantly different from what they did in college. Ask the people around you what they majored in as an undergraduate. You may be surprised. Many people take years to find their calling, and took many different and unusual paths to get there. So in the end what matters most is exploring anything and everything that may be of interest to you. You’ll be a well rounded student and have a broad perspective to take with you when you do discover what it is you are truly meant to do.

When It Rains… (or How My Thesis Was Saved By Networking)

Every scientist knows that sometimes experiments go wrong. Sometimes we spend time, energy, and money and receive no results. Such was the case for my first round of thesis data collection. I’m a physics major doing an observational astronomy research thesis. And like many of the sciences, the successful acquisition of data depends on many parameters within my control: preparation of supplies and equipment, preliminary calculations and observation, plenty of background research, and of course, copious amounts of planning.

But also like many of the sciences, astronomy depends on a couple of parameters completely beyond any hope of control. Most notoriously: the weather. To both mine and my professor’s credit, we did our best to plan around the worst of the season’s heavenly offerings, but there is always that 10% chance of precipitation.

The long and short of it found me six hours removed from Claremont, up a mountain miles from civilization and potable water, prepared to deal with any and every technical and scientific problem the observatory could throw at me, and with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and press the “update” button the live weather conditions on the computer every other minute.

Yeah.

So, no data from Oliver Observing Station. Time for Plan B: think of anyone and everyone I might know who has access to a telescope larger than half a meter and an interest in my thesis topic. It is times like these that I remember why the 5Cs are so fantastic: the classes, professors, and resources of five undergraduate institutions… and all the networking opportunities that come with them.

By chance I had run into my old chemistry teacher last semester who had inquired as to my academic pursuits. She had suggested meeting some of her friends, who were astronomy professors at Pomona. And as luck would have it, I had signed up to take an astronomy class with one of those professors, who had remote access to at telescope with equipment that could be adapted to gather the data I needed.

Now I am no expert at networking; I am not an outgoing person. But I must admit that networking has been the single most powerful tool I have ever used to find and gain access to the many opportunities available in the world. Recently I was having an informal conversation with my advisor when I happened to mention switching interests from astronomy to science writing. He informed me of a project he had just started, writing a physics textbook. He said he would be very interested in my help, because of my dual interest in science and communication. The chance to help write a physics text book is the kind of opportunity I would never have had access to if I had not known the people involved with the project.

In the end, networking can start subtly: building up simple friendships with people, even a teacher from freshman year who isn’t even in my department, ultimately gave me a second shot at an amazing thesis. Networking has not only allowed me to find new people and opportunities, but has proved a valuable resource for creating a Plan B when things go wrong. Even if the people I know don’t have a solution, they may know someone who does. For me, starting a conversation with a stranger feels like the single hardest thing to do, but it yields the greatest results.

The Insanity

I would have done this post last week, but I caught the insanity. I, like the typical college student, am usually more susceptible to the illness I call “the insanity” around the beginning and end of a given semester. Fortunately, both modern and ancient science along with a spoonful of good old common sense have provided the humble mortal in all of us with a cure.

As usual, I ignored the first several symptoms of the insanity: my bedtime creeping back by two hours, the rising stress levels, forgetting to eat lunch. It wasn’t until I noticed that I had no clean clothes because I had not had even a moment to consider doing laundry that it hit me. I needed to stop screaming around. Anyone who knows me who took one look at me would tell you I was in “maniac mode”.

So I took a step back. For me this is the single hardest thing to do when I am stressed. Those of us who were raised to be the overachievers become addicted to being constantly busy. Having no time for anything else is our natural state. In a way, it means we don’t have to think. We don’t reflect because we don’t have time to. But if we don’t reflect, we don’t learn, and things never improve.

After that first initial step back, I sat down and (wait for it……) made a list. Lists are my ultimate stress-reducer. They let me to visually organize my life in a way in which allows me some control over it. Onto that list went everything I had to do in a given week: classes, clubs, jobs, responsibilities, etc. I made sure to include things like eating and sleeping and taking care of myself, since those things also take time. Then to each of those things I assigned the number of hours I estimated I needed to do that activity well over the course of one week. Then I added up the hours, and compared that number to the total number of hours in a week.

I was very close, with ten hours to spare by the time the week was out. But given that I always lose time here or there in transit between classes, briefly zoning out over my quantum mechanics, and over sleeping my alarm clock, I could tell that if some unexpected event cropped up, I wouldn’t have time to deal with it.

The long and short of it was that clearly I had taken on too much. I need eight hours of sleep a night or I don’t function efficiently. I’ve tried cutting out meal times by eating on the job, and that doesn’t work either. I knew that if I continued to over work myself, “the insanity” would turn into a real illness, and it would eventually interrupt my life and my education.

I needed to cut back on something. I know first-hand how hard cutting back can be. After years upon years of being raised by and with high achieving people, the pressure to excel is overwhelming at times. The idea of dropping a class fosters the same kind of guilt and stress in my mind as betraying a friend. I feel like a failure. Simply for dropping a class! Time for a reality check. I thought I was going to be fine this semester… three classes and thesis, two part-time jobs that looked good on my resume, one substantial extracurricular that made me look well-rounded. So how had I gone wrong? My over-achiever training keeps telling me I should be able to handle this.

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I meet me in the middle… Part II

(continued from part I)

I spent a couple of days wearing holes in my bedroom carpet while I tried to decide what to do. I modeled every possible graduate school to career plan I could think of, trying to find a path that excited me. Science or writing? Science or writing? But for all the quality time spent pacing, I kept returning to the same conclusion. I didn’t want to go straight into a PhD program in a single science–that didn’t get me anywhere near my dream job. But neither did I want to give up on doing science completely, there is still too much to learn. I’ve always been a scientist in my heart; I think and make decisions like a scientist, I enjoy exploration and discovery like a scientist. But I am also a writer and a communicator, and I love reaching out and sharing with the world what the scientist in me has discovered. I would rather be writing a great piece for a science journal for kids than sitting in a room staring at a computer screen while data rolls in.

Fortunately, there is a middle ground for almost any decision. In this case, the degree that lies between no science at all and a PhD in science is a master’s degree. But I was still unsure if I wanted to postpone going into a science writing program degree, since that was the most direct path to my dream career. So I did what I always do when I don’t want to make a decision: I made a list, this time of pros and cons of going to a science program first, or jumping straight into writing.

And once again the list made it clear. Most of the science writing programs I had found tended to value applicants with significant research experience, because these students tend to be better able to connect to and communicate with the scientists whose work they are presenting. A brief afternoon spent looking up student bios at such programs showed that a large portion of accepted students came in with a master’s in a science program. These students, like me, loved science and enjoyed doing science, and had taken the time to explore that interest before moving on.

In the end it all made sense: I’m more qualified to go into a science program right now (four years of physics doesn’t leave a lot of time for non-academic writing). Taking a couple of years to do a master’s in a science would also give me the time to boost my writing resume. A part-time job working for small newspaper or student publication would give me a leg up in applying to the science writing programs. I’ll also get to be the scientist for a little while longer, without having to bind myself into a PhD track. And if I am still uncertain at the end of two years, I will be equally well set up to continue on in the PhD of my chosen science, or switch over to science writing.

The point of this plan is that it keeps my options open. Over and over I have found that the more I write my fate in stone, the less happy I am. I am continually reminded by many wiser people in my life that there are many paths to a goal, and just because there is an infrastructure in place does not mean that it must be followed or that following it will make you happier. Every experience in life is a learning process, and everything you learn makes your life richer. So I’m not going off to be a science writer the day after graduation… I’ll be a science writer once I’ve experienced being a scientist and being a writer.

Playing the Game: GRE

Ahh, the GREs… and we were all so relieved when the SATs were done. The SATs were just one piece of the long high school game; learn the rules, play as best you can, move on. Fortunately, I could see almost immediately that the GREs are pretty much the same creature with a different face. Two writing sections, a verbal reasoning section, and an analytical reasoning section;  I’ve seen that before. But four years after playing the SAT game, I took the opportunity to look at this type of test in a new light.

It turns out that at its core, the GRE is not about reading or writing or math; it’s about logic. The GRE states this in its preparatory material, though not in so many words. This is not a test that’s interested in how fast you can read or do algebra; those are just two ways of going about assessing a student’s ability to solve a problem. What I think scares most students about the GRE is that they perceive they are weak in one of its subject areas, and therefore worry that they will do poorly on that portion of the test. However, at its most fundamental level, the GRE is a test of the many different ways in which logic and reasoning can be implemented in academic and real-life settings. It’s a test of what we’ve already been doing for three years.

The use of logic and reasoning is most obvious in the two writing sections. In the first task, you must read a statement and take a position on it, then support that position with logical arguments. Similarly in the second task, you must read someone else’s argument and critique it. Both of these tasks are logic-based exercises; the type students have been doing every time they write a paper or hold a class discussion on an assigned reading. It’s not about the subject matter; it’s not even about writing skill to a certain extent. It’s about the creation of a logical argument.

Though the GRE website provided good example statements and responses and the grades they received, I found another way to prepare for the writing section of the test. I happened to be sitting pool-side on a Friday afternoon with a former roommate while I was preparing for this section. We struck up a conversation on the sample argument that had been presented, and spent about fifteen minutes dissecting its accuracy. I made a strong argument, but my friend responded with some counter-arguments that had not occurred to me. Having fifteen minute informal debates may not be quite as entertaining to others as it is to my friend and I, but it is a great way to practice putting together an augment quickly and supporting your position well without depending on background research.

Everyone seems to have a weak spot when it comes to standardized testing; for me it’s the verbal section. It wasn’t the reading, or understanding the reading, or even understanding the questions that got me in the end. Logic and reasoning serve well for those purposes. It was the vocabulary did me in. This is, in my opinion, the one hiccup in the otherwise well planned test. I’ve got a fairly large vocabulary, and it’s been years since I’ve run across a word in a reading that I didn’t understand, so it did not even occur to me to review vocabulary. But after one practice GRE and now having taken the real thing, my need to prepare in this area becomes clear.

I, as well as many students, have been trained to deduce the meanings of words through context, a logical response. But about a half of the questions in the verbal section of the GRE are analogies and antonyms, and have little to no context from which to decipher even a good guess, let alone a definition. Many of the words are also tricky; one word can have a meaning when it is an adverb and a completely different meaning when used as a noun. When context fails me, I turn to the etymology of the word, also a logical and reasoned response, which of course only works when you can recognize that some portion of the word is related to another word you know. This was, for me, the single most challenging aspect of the entire GRE. The easiest way to overcome this would have been to review ten advanced vocabulary words every week for three or four months. With a broader base of knowledge, my logical reasoning should have been able to take over quite successfully, as the creators of the test clearly intended.

And then there is the analytical reasoning section, more commonly known as the math section. I’ll honestly admit that this section of the test didn’t even scare me a little bit; I’m a science major who loves math. Doing algebra calms me down. But being pretty good at math wasn’t what comforted me on this part of the test; what made me sure I would be fine is that I could see immediately that this was just another facet of logic and reasoning. None of the “math” part of the test was more complicated than algebra and geometry; the only tricky bit was understanding what the questions were asking, and applying good reasoning. It’s the same way in which you don’t have to be good at math to do sudoku puzzles. Sudoku and the GRE aren’t testing math, they’re just testing a kind of logic that manifests itself quite often as mathematical skill: if a number is even it is divisible by two. If you divide a number by two and the result is even, the number was divisible by four. If a number is even and divisible by three it is also divisible by six. I think that it wasn’t the years of math and science classes that best prepared me for this portion of the test; it was years of doing puzzles and studying patterns.

So it turns out in the end that the GRE is testing things we’ve been doing all along; the test just presents the challenge in a less than obvious way. There are challenging aspects; interpreting questions and learning logical shortcuts to the correct answers. The obscure words that appear in the antonyms section certainly don’t help. But recognizing what the GRE was really testing made it possible for me to not only play the college game, play it well.