I've been thinking about what makes studying physics
at Michigan Tech special.
And I like to think of ourselves as a tight knit community
of scholars.
We love to work together to figure out
how things in the universe work, everything from the universe
itself and scale, all the way down to atoms in the nanoscale.
I chose physics, because that really always interested me.
I've always wanted to be a scientist.
And I felt that to answer the big questions
about the universe, which I always
wanted to answer, the most realistic way
to do that was to go into physics.
In physics, you can research pretty much whatever you want,
because it's all related to physics in some way, shape,
or form.
It's the science that like everything else
is built out of in the end.
Being able to look at a problem and treat it like an object
and turn it around and look at it all these different ways
to see what kind of information you can get from it.
You can't learn physics by watching.
You can only learn it by doing it,
by solving the problems, by getting
your hands dirty in the lab, by thinking about it, by making
mistakes and figuring out where you went wrong and fixing them.
You have to do physics.
And we really encourage students in this department
to be doing physics.
And the physics department up here
has a really good deal, where no matter
what if you want to get into physics,
they'll fund you for the summer.
And so that's really tempting, because you're
going to need money, but then you also
get the experience of doing research up here.
A lot of schools is really competitive to whether or not
you can even get research.
And this is more like who you're professors are.
And even people who don't have for professors,
we all know each other.
You might think oh your research is really interesting to me.
You can just talk to them and they'll invite
you to do research with them.
Talk to maybe like three or four professors.
And then ask them what their research is in,
and see which one interests you.
Then just ask them if you can do research with them.
99% of the time they'll say yes.
And if you want to spend the summer here doing research,
you can normally talk to Professor Cantrell.
And he'll help you get funded for that.
I have a student working with me this summer,
who is a first year student.
Last fall he was a first year student.
And yeah, it took him a little while to get up
and running and understand what all of the stuff and the data
means.
But now, by the end of the summer,
he's come into me with, hey, you know, this is in the data.
I think we should look at it this way.
And it doesn't always work out that that's
exactly what's going on.
But now I have a collaborator.
Now, I have somebody else who is thinking
about the data in an independent way.
In my classes, I try to keep a lot of interaction
happening between students.
I don't really lecture very much at all.
Students are working in groups on activities,
talking to each other, interacting with me,
interacting with each other.
A lot of knowledge happens and is
created in those interactions.
Knowledge isn't something just that just resides in our head
and that we can transfer from one place to another.
It gets built when people think out loud
and communicate with each other.
So we have to keep those lines of communication
open between students and between instructors.
Unlike other colleges, the class sizes up here, at least,
for physics are small.
So you get one-on-one time with the professor.
And you can really get to know the people in your class,
because you're always going to need help.
It's nice being able to go and talk to the professor
directly like right after class and be like, hey,
I missed this part or didn't really understand this part.
Is there another way you could put it that it it'll help me?
Throughout Michigan Tech, I know a lot of professors
that are very kind and helpful.
And you can just walk into their office.
And they'll let you either just talk to them about anything
or they'll help you understand what
you got wrong in the homework and things like that.
My goal is for my students to learn the most that they can.
And it has been throughout my whole teaching career.
And my job is to help them do that learning.
For undergraduate classes, they are quite intimidating
at first, definitely challenging,
but the professors, in my opinion,
do a really good job at explaining concepts.
But the workload is not easy at all.
It's definitely going to be a challenge for you.
But once you're working got a really tough problem
for a while and then you get it, you just
get the best feeling in the world.
It's like, man, I was able to figure that out.
I want to know where this formula comes from.
I want to know why it works, not just that it works.
And whenever someone says something like that to me,
I tell them physics is a good place for you.