This episode is brought to you by curiosity stream.
Hey.
I'm Dianna.
You're watching Physics Girl, and today's
a little bit different than my normal videos
because I wanted to do a video about my journey into physics.
So I have with me my editor, Jabril,
who also runs an awesome channel, SEFD Science.
He's going to interview me.
Because I studied physics in college,
I will not be talking about how to get into MIT.
Because I've done that question, too.
I don't remember my ACT scores.
Let's just jump right in.
I want to start--
I want to place the marker.
At what point did you realize that physics was right for you?
That sounds like an infomercial question.
I think the moment is kind of a funny thing.
It's a funny concept.
Because it was kind of like I had tried everything,
and then I was like, well, I think physics is just
a bit above the others.
So that was the moment.
Did you have a huge passion for physics in high school?
Yeah.
JABRIL: You did?
Yeah.
JABRIL: That's interesting.
And I loved math.
Oh, let me take you back just a little bit.
This is my little math story.
I begged my math teacher to teach
me pre-calc over the summer before I went into high school.
And he did.
I liked the idea of taking all this advanced math
when I was younger.
I started calculus my freshman year,
but then they didn't offer anything beyond that.
I think in some ways that was a blessing, because I was
sort of just focusing on math.
I was forced to focus on other things,
and I ended up studying abroad and going to the Dominican
Republic my junior year.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Man, I got called an overachiever
and a teacher's pet a lot.
I was an overachiever and a teacher's pet,
but I just played it down, just to be
like, no, I'm not that smart.
I wish I hadn't done that.
I wish I had known back then that being smart and being
eager is cool.
It's fine.
It's not a big deal.
What part of high school was it
that made you realize you liked physics?
So I was really good at math.
Everyone was like, you should take physics,
you should definitely try out physics.
Kathy Jones was the teacher at my school at that time.
Got to take Kathy's class.
And I don't think there was ever a moment.
People are looking, I think, a lot for this story
that it's like, oh, I was staring at the stars.
And it was never anything like that.
It was this support and this attitude toward physics
that my physics teachers had.
They were so enthusiastic about it,
and they went above and beyond.
They would tell us about quantum mechanics and about relativity.
They were so excited about it, and I
think that had a huge impact on us to be like, yeah,
physics is cool.
What helped you to find that physics
is a bit above the other?
My way of thinking matched better with physics.
The experiments they do to learn new physical theories
are so logical.
And then neuroscience is something that I liked,
but again, it was like, where do they come up
with these experiments?
It wasn't a very clean, obvious process,
and understandably so because humans are complicated.
Human brains are exceptionally complicated.
Physics was like, step one, step two, step three.
What was your reasoning for going to MIT?
Oh, that's kind of a fun question.
So I didn't want to go to MIT.
The reason I chose MIT is because I visited MIT.
Before that, I didn't want to go there.
I just had this preconceived notion
that there were a ton of really awkward, nerdy people there.
I don't know.
I guess I thought that I wasn't awkward and nerdy at the time.
I was, so I was mistaken.
So I applied to all these different schools.
I was wait listed at Stanford, wait listed at Harvard,
wait listed at Columbia.
These were the other top schools that I
guess had more liberal arts and humanities
and were more well-rounded, whereas MIT was definitely
for tech and science.
I didn't know until I got there and met everybody
that there were people doing music
and there were people with acapella groups.
There was a chocolate club.
There were people motorizing shopping carts.
There were people who were in fraternities and sororities.
There were just the gamut of people.
I wanted to study something in science or engineering,
but I wanted to be around a lot of different people
of different interests.
And I didn't know if I would find that at MIT.
Maybe it would have been different
if I'd gotten into Harvard or gotten into Stanford.
I might have chosen those.
I can't say I'm so glad that I didn't
get into one of those places, because my experience at MIT
was amazing, especially in the physics department.
The teachers were really supportive.
There was a class I took called statistical mechanics, I think.
It was kind of like a thermodynamics and statistics
class.
The very first test I got a 95 or something.
I did really, really well.
Thank you.
Hold that.
Save that.
Because the second test I got a 50.
But one of the professors of the class called me into his office
and was like, hey, I just want to check in on you
and see if everything's OK.
You did really well the first test.
We had so much hope for you.
They're like, what's going on?
Are you OK?
It wasn't like, you were disappointing us
as a physics student.
It was like, no, we just want to check in with you.
Whatever your major is, I think it's really important to think
about your mental health.
Do you think that had you not got that mental support you
might have considered physics to be too challenging,
maybe gone into something else?
This is an interesting story.
I got to MIT and I was like, oh, I loved physics in high school.
I wanted to take it again, and I wanted
to take this specific class that was meant for physics majors,
the class called 8012 that they called physics for masochists.
Got into the class and then I just bombed the first exam.
I got a D. I remember being like, ugh, I can't do this.
The first week I was crying.
I was calling my mom, being like, this is too hard.
I can't do it.
I went to Adam Burgasser, and I was like, this was my score,
did I fail, should I stay in the class, what should I do.
And he was like, you didn't fail.
You squeaked by with a D. Stick it out.
Come to my office hours.
And then that's when the support started.
So I learned to go to office hours, which
were after classes, to really go through the concepts.
And I learned that way to work with other students,
to work with professors, make sure that I really
had the concepts down.
And then the second test I did much better,
and I ended up passing the class with a B.
So that was probably my proudest moment
was getting a B minus in 8012 at MIT.
I think that I was really lucky going to MIT that I didn't feel
any type of social anxiety or anything
about going and talking to strangers
and going and meeting new people.
So I went to professors' office hours, into their offices
and emailed them.
And I know that it is hard for some people
to put themselves out there and to ask for that help,
but a lack of that is often the cause of some people's failure
at their first or second shot or whatever at school, just not
finding a way to ask for help.
If you don't do physics now, what is the physics
that you've done in the past?
When I was in undergrad, I worked in this lab
doing dark matter research.
They were searching for dark matter,
and specifically we were making a detector to detect neutrons
and looking for a neutron background, a neutron showering
down on us from whatever source.
They come from a lot of sources.
So that first group, I was working
with Jocelyn Monroe, who was a professor at MIT at the time.
After I graduated, I did this fellowship at Harvard
working with Anna Frebel, helping her look
for low [INAUDIBLE] stars, looking
at the spectra of stars.
And we were looking for the oldest stars in the universe.
I loved both experiences, but what I learned from both
was that physics research just wasn't for me.
Because one of the things that I loved most
about doing both of those projects was the coding.
I just liked the problem-solving aspect of it.
After my second try at doing physics,
I was like, I'm going to just try software engineering.
And then I worked as a software engineer at GE for a year.
Learning physics and doing physics
is completely different.
With physics research, you have to stick
with one thing for a long time.
Physics experiments just take a long time.
And I have and I've always had an interest
in a lot of different fields, which
is why I tried out neuroscience, mechanical engineering,
electric engineering, all these different things.
And so the idea of sticking with one thing for so long
didn't appeal to me.
With science communication, you get
to learn so many different things.
I can make a video about dark matter one week,
and then I can make a video about stars the next.
I feel like this is a good time to clarify that I did a physics
degree, but I actually did it a little differently
than other majors.
MIT has this option where you can either
do physics, extreme physics, or you
could do something called physics flex or physics B.
And you could do a focus within your physics major.
So I focused on electrical engineering,
and so I ended up doing this physics
with electrical engineering major.
What inspired you to get the electrical engineering flex
program?
What inspired you to do that?
I'm not sure exactly.
I thought electricity and magnetism was really cool,
and I was like, if I do some kind of engineering, that's
more applicable for a job.
I think that's probably the only time in my education
where I thought about what would be good for a career.
It is important to think about what career you're going to do
and what jobs are available.
It's good to look at the numbers.
There are not that many jobs available
for straight-up physicists studying physics and doing
physics research.
There are more jobs for people who are working
in the industry with physics.
And so I was like, if I can specialize in something
with this electrical engineering--
and through that I took an optics lab
and I made holograms.
We did the double slit experiment
with fringes of light.
We did all those things.
So I was like, maybe I'll go into optics,
and that gave me a very specific skill
that I could be more easily hireable if I
had that specialty.
Ms. Cowern, are you ready for the Twitter lightning round?
I'm ready.
Here we go.
So is there something in physics that you consider that can only
be learned in college?
Kind of, yes.
Experiments.
So there are a lot of experiments
that it's really hard to do without the equipment
at a university.
Very cool.
What actions of your parents inspired you?
Oh, man, I love them.
They were super supportive.
And seeing them also struggle through different times.
Like, there was a time when I think our dog got hit by a car
and they couldn't afford for the surgery,
so they had to put-- that was a really sad story.
But they lived through a hurricane that
blew the roof off the cottage they had just built.
And there were hard times like that,
and then seeing them just power through it was inspirational.
Nolan Ryan asks, tips on encouraging and sparking
my young daughter's interest in science early?
Yeah.
Try lots of different things.
Try going to science museums, doing experiments at home,
doing fun puzzles, and getting interested in math.
And playing music also is a really good way
of learning, sort of patterns and thinking like that.
So Josh Peterson asked, do you remember the first science
experiment or experiments that you did as a kid that
really sparked your interest?
We did a lot of stuff in the kitchen.
I think I asked my parents what would
happen if you burned alcohol.
So we burned some alcohol on a plate in the kitchen.
And then burning different types of alcohol
and burning different things, burning different colors.
And I was like, well, that's cool.
Why does that happen?
We used to play this game called "mind trap."
It was a bunch of riddle questions,
and I loved that logical way of thinking, tests like that.
And cut.
Thank you for watching.
I hope there is something interesting in here.
And now I'm going to put Jabril in the hot seat.
We're going to switch, because we're
going to go over to Jabril's channel,
which you can check out.
The link is in the description.
We're going to talk about his experience getting
into computer science.
So check that out.
It's going to be fun.
OK, let's switch.
Let's do it.
You warmed it up for me.
I miss you guys.
Another enigma of childhood Dianna is that I hated TV.
I wouldn't watch anything besides science programming
and documentaries, which brings me
to the sponsor of this episode, Curiosity Stream.
If you are anything like little kid Dianna and adult Dianna,
then you love documentaries, and Curiosity Stream
has tons of original documentaries and nonfiction
titles.
I've just started Greek myths in preparation
for my upcoming trip to Europe.
So thank you to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring this episode.
And if you head over to curiositystream.com/physicsgirl
and enter promo code "physicsgirl"
during the signup process, then the first two months are free.
Yeah.
So she had demos like that.
Oh, no you didn't.