Phase 1

It is somewhat amazing how intricate and meticulous the process of science and becoming a scientist can be. I think this process is horribly unappreciated by the population at large.

Two years ago I received my BS in Applied Physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I remember feeling confused: after five years of intensive education (and two internships at NASA), I still felt like I was no closer to being a 'scientist' than ever before. I had no idea what it meant to have an undergraduate degree: what could I do with it? why did I still feel like I knew nothing?

Partially, these feelings owe to my personality: to this day, having taken all the core grad physics courses and a few intense mathematical courses like differentiable manifolds and abstract algebra, I still don't feel justified in pretending I know much about anything. I am simply now more aware of how many questions remain seemingly impenetrable.

Partially, though, these feelings also take root in what, inherently, an undergraduate degree in physics is: just barely a first step. A student is liable to know some electromagnetism, bits and pieces of quantum theory, some SR, maybe some GR, and to have developed a mathematical background decent enough to get by... But one isn't likely to be an expert in any of it.

I realized this emphatically during my master's studies. In graduate work, you begin by going over the core areas of physics again, but much more rigorously, and this time around you are forced to realize a few things:

1) all the hard work as an undergrad is merely to be able to approach some of the "realer" stuff that graduate studies covers,

2) the "realer" stuff too is just the tip of another iceberg---an iceberg which a few researchers (but not everyone) have explored or are currently exploring,

3) all the hard work as a grad is merely to be able to approach some of this nittier, grittier stuff

4) one life might not be long enough to ever explore all the interesting depths hiding below the iceberg tips you've hopped across along your journey...

Point is, grad school is a humbling experience. One individual doesn't know everything and, seriously, one never will. That's an important lesson to extract from grad school.

If I've learned anything along the way, it's to question everything, to break big ideas down into their component parts, to dispel mumbo-jumbo, and to keep asking: how the fuck does any of this connect to the real world?