Prior to college, I was never exceptionally good at physics or math and was always more interested in the liberal arts, primarily philosophy. I even planned to attend college as a philosophy major during my junior year of high school as I read up on the subject in my free time. At that time, however, I had not yet identified the specific questions that I found most interesting and would want to pursue in such a degree. With the onset of the pandemic and its lockdowns, though, I was allowed more time to read on my own and eventually became interested in questions that dealt with the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the nature of consciousness. As I continued to read and think about these questions, I realized that they are now questions better suited for physicists to more rigorously deal with. At this point, I recognized that if I was serious about pursuing these sorts of questions, attending college for a degree in physics would be a prerequisite. When I applied to colleges, I primarily considered liberal arts schools with strong physics departments, which led me to Carthage College.
During the summer before my freshman year of college, I set out to complete a very demanding hike with my best friend from high school, his dad, and his cousin. We planned to hike Minnesota's Superior Hiking Trail, which follows the shore of Lake Superior and is 310 miles in length, in just a week. Given the time constraint, we planned to be hiking around forty miles every day. I ended up only being able to handle three days of this, having to rest on the fourth day and reduce my mileage in the remaining days, which slowed the group down and prevented us from reaching the goal of finishing in a week. During this hike, I learned for the first time my reactions to long periods of exertion. I came out of this experience knowing that this ability to endure extended periods of hard work would be at least somewhat helpful for pursuing a degree in physics. I thought about this during the long miles but struggled to enjoy the experience of the hike, even given the beautiful landscape of northern Minnesota.
I still didn't feel completely solid in my foundation in physics and math upon entering college, so took Fundamental Physics and Calc 1 in the fall and General Physics 1 and Calc 2 in the spring of my freshman year. During my freshman year, I was also taking liberal arts classes and continued to read philosophy on my own time. I additionally joined Dr. Crosby's space science lab and Dr. Quashnock's gravitational waves group during this year, which was my first exposure to research and provided opportunities that laid my foundation in technical skills that I continue to use regularly.
In my sophomore year, I was beginning to take a higher volume of physics and math classes, which left less room to take classes from the liberal arts and reduced my free time. The sophomore-level physics and math classes began allowing more opportunities to develop my ability in technical writing and in giving oral presentations, and my job in the school's writing center kept me up to date with the content of Intellectual Foundations, which made up for the fact that I was beginning to take fewer liberal arts classes. As I was moving further from the pure liberal arts while developing some of the general communication and presentation skills in my technical classes, I experienced the first immediate connection between physics and philosophy in the deliverance of Modern Physics. This class was my first experience with a physics class where philosophical issues were immediately apparent and where the history of the field was given some attention, which made my experience of Modern Physics the first physics course I thoroughly enjoyed since this connection of fields is what initially brought me to physics.
Following my experience at LSU's REU program during the summer between my sophomore and junior year, it became clear to me that I would enjoy theoretical research given my philosophical leanings. Because I was interested in gravity, I knew that building a foundation in general relativity would be crucial to my future success. I ended the summer by gathering resources that would allow me to teach myself general relativity. In the fall of my junior year, I was registered for a heavy course load and knew I would need to manage a significant workload to make time for this project. I'll never forget the night before I drove to Carthage for the fall semester of my junior year. For the first time in my life, I laid awake in bed due to the nerves I had thinking about the intense load of classes I was going to be taking.
The fall semester of my junior year was no joke, and I was justified to have experienced those nerves before it began. I learned a great deal of physics and math during this time and continued to develop the skill of technical writing, especially in Dr. Anderson's Thermal Physics class. I was surprisingly able to make a large amount of progress on my goal of teaching myself general relativity during this semester. I spent countless hours at the whiteboards in the math lab working on course homework and moving on to general relativity when I was done. Looking back on this semester, I dealt with the sort of extended periods of intense work that I first dealt with during that hike before entering college, and even began to find myself enjoying this process knowing that it was symptomatic of rapid growth. I was moving into the sections on general relativity as applied to the study of black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmology as the J-Term of my junior year began. The large final written report assigned in Dr. Anderson's Experimental Physics class during this J-Term allowed me the perfect opportunity to make use of the content I had learned over the last semester and the more interesting applications I was just beginning to learn about at the time. This work became a review paper on general relativity and cosmology for undergrads, and is the longest writing project I have undertaken, excluding my theses.
The intense work of my junior fall semester followed by a considerable project undertaken during that year's J-Term and the large number of REU applications I wrote during this time left me burnt out for a couple of weeks at the beginning of my junior spring semester, which was a state I had not dealt with before. I was thankfully able to overcome this and keep up with my challenging spring semester, and I even began working on a problem in theoretical physics for the first time with Dr. Anderson.
In the summer following my junior year, I was accepted to Penn State's REU program, where I worked on a theoretical project in quantum information and open quantum systems. Not having taken quantum mechanics before this experience, I again made use of my developing ability to work intensely for extended periods of time (while also breaking to get out with the REU group). I spent the first few weeks of this experience quickly learning the Dirac formalism of quantum mechanics, the relevant quantum information theory, and moved on to the theory content that was more directly relevant to my work in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Before my senior year began, I attempted another physically demanding challenge with the same crazy high school friend. We planned to summit ten of the western Colorado fourteeners in the span of a week. During the trip, we experienced some problems finding the correct mountains (which was largely my own fault), so we were only able to summit five of the seven mountains we attempted in the week. I don't believe that this trip was any less demanding than the hike we took up in the summer before my freshman year and I didn't feel any more physically fit than I was on our hike, but I felt much more mentally prepared to deal with the prolonged summits. I don't believe the mental endurance developed in an academic context is completely removed from that of a physical context, such as our climbs, and I believe that a part of my mental and physical resilience can be attributed to the endurance developed as a physics major at Carthage.
In my senior fall, I'm not being continuously crushed by classes as I was the previous fall, so I have been able to dedicate lots of time to working on graduate applications. At this point in my life, I have a pretty reasonable idea of the sort of physics I would like to work on, am sure that I would like to pursue a graduate degree, and feel that my technical preparation in combination with soft skills and my ability to work hard for prolonged periods of time all developed during my time as a physics major at Carthage will support me in this goal.
I initially turned to physics for its ability to rigorously address fundamental philosophical questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries, and my path through the field over the last four years has been influenced by this motivation. I have found the unexpected historical and philosophical context provided in my physics classes, especially in Modern Physics, to be a unique aspect of my time as a physics major at Carthage. This integration of the liberal arts with physics is a perspective I had hoped to develop at Carthage College and plan to continue developing further. I'm very grateful to have developed a solid foundation in technical writing and to have made such large improvements in my public speaking while at Carthage. These have unexpectedly been skills that I have primarily developed in my physics and math classes, but have also been developed in my liberal arts classes, especially during my freshman year. I believe my physics education has also allowed me to develop an endurance towards difficult tasks in life and through it, I have come to some level of appreciation for the process involved in such exertions, whether they be intellectual or physical. I believe this aspect of my personal development is well-captured by the two physical challenges before I began college and as I was close to finishing. Looking back on my motivations for becoming a physics major, I realize that even before college, I was aware that pursuing physics would be challenging, but didn't distinctly identify this as being a motivation for pursuing such a degree. However, it was during college that I came to understand that this intellectual challenge was part of what motivated me, even though I hadn't explicitly recognized it at the time. I also believe that this perspective on difficult work will serve me well in graduate school and in whatever work I'm able to do after I earn my PhD, preferably a professorship.