The following post is by Katie Mason ’16.  Mason used part of her AMS grant to visit the American Physical Society March Meeting in Baltimore, MD in an effort to explore the different concentrations within the world of physics.  

As a senior in my final semester, I often get asked the question, “What are you doing next year?” It’s a question that is never far from my mind. I am a Physics major with two research experiences under my belt, so graduate school seemed like the obvious path. I love my field. I love being able to explore everything from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies. The problem is, since Physics is so large, I am having a lot of trouble narrowing my focus to a specific concentration. In all honesty, it is not the worst problem to have. I enjoy many of the fields and find them fascinating. However, I noticed while starting my applications that most schools want their students to have some sort of idea about what they will want to study.

I decided I had to do more research into the different concentrations within Physics. There is no better place to do this than the American Physical Society March Meeting. This yearly conference is one of the biggest Physics conferences in the country, and it was held in Baltimore this year. My goal at this conference wasn’t to present, but rather to absorb as much as I could and hopefully sort more through my options for the future.

Hubble Space Telescope

I took advantage of the conference’s location and spent the weekend before in Washington D.C to go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It was amazing to see all of the rockets and planes up close. I spent an entire day wandering through the exhibits. Some of the highlights for me were the model of the Hubble Space Telescope (complete with solar panels), one of the Wright Brothers’ planes, and a planetarium show about dark matter narrated by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Upon arriving at the actual conference, I was at first struck by just how many people attended. I was also overwhelmed by how many presentations there were. Each day was split into three hour session and each session had around 25 short talks. There were also a few longer presentations. My first day, I decided to play it safe by only attending events marked as undergraduate friendly. The first talk I went to was in the session entitled “Physics of Epidemics” given by Charles Macal from the Argonne National Laboratory. In it, the speaker discussed computer modeling techniques and how they can be used to model and predict future epidemics. I found it fascinating as I have enjoyed computer modeling I have done in my research at Colgate. I also loved the interdisciplinary nature of the work. Though the primary researcher was a physicist, he emphasized his collaboration with biologists and public health workers.

Main Exhibit Hall

Physicists are often viewed as being isolationists and are not known for their work with other fields, so it was very refreshing to see all of the interdisciplinary talks throughout the week. Some of the other sessions included physics and cancer research, the statistical mechanics of social systems, and robotics for use in archaeology. For me, these talks were the highlights of the week, as they showed many broader applications of physics that I haven’t been exposed to before.

I believe I ended my trip feeling even more passionate about physics as a whole. I also have more of a direction now, I will hopefully use the skills I am learning in physics, especially computer modeling and data analysis, and apply them to problems not often associated with physics. It was a very worthwhile experience and gave me a clearer picture of what I would like to research as I enter graduate school. I am continuing on to Tufts University in the PhD track where I will hopefully join a research group in the field of Condensed Matter Physics that also makes use of computer modeling for theoretical predictions.

SHARE

View of New Orleans. Photo by Ewa Protasiuk.

The following post was contributed by Ewa Protasiuk ’15, a Biology major and PCON minor. Ewa recently used her AMS Grant to attend the International Studies Association conference in New Orleans. Along the way, she reflected on the synergies of travel and the promise of academic inquiry.

This is a post about a trip that almost didn’t happen. (Thank you, February 2015 weather!) But luckily, it did.

After two canceled flights and a delay, I made it to New Orleans for the International Studies Association’s Annual Convention. This conference brought together scholars from the discipline of International Relations. This is not my discipline; but as a Peace and Conflict Studies minor with an interest in how (or perhaps whether?) academic scholarship can be anti-oppressive on a variety of fronts, several presentations and discussions interested me. They covered themes such as feminist takes on militarism, “Queering/Querying Global Political Economy” (as one roundtable discussion was titled), the relationship between silence and agency, and how collages (yes, as in the art form) can open up different ways of thinking about political science. (Check out Saara Särmä’s dissertation collages if this intrigues you.) I also attended talks with my advisor in Peace and Conflict Studies, Susan Thomson, and met several of her colleagues, friends, and fellow Canadians.

While the discussions formally organized by the conference were certainly thought-provoking, I also thought a lot about the conference itself–as an entity with its own culture, set of power dynamics, and materialities. I’ve also been thinking about the meaning of my travel between New York State and New Orleans, and many different dynamics I saw at play just in those few days. A few scattered anecdotes:

• While flying to the conference, delayed in Charlotte, I sat down at my gate among a number of people–apparently strangers, apparently white–who were sharing a conversation about their military experiences. The tone of the conversation was overwhelmingly positive.
• While at the conference, held predominantly in a Hilton hotel on the riverfront of New Orleans, not far from the famed French Quarter, I heard only one panelist acknowledge that we are on Native American land.
• While flying back to New York, sitting at the gate, delayed yet again, I got into conversation with a woman who used to live in New Orleans but who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, moved to Central New York. She has traveled back to New Orleans as often as she could over the past ten years with devotion.

Pieces of the what scholars talk about during academic conferences are evident in the everyday—things with big names like militarism, environmental racism, and settler colonialism. What do conferences have to do with resistance to these things? I am a big-time, largely unapologetic nerd. I love school. I love research. I say this even as a second-semester senior with a matter of weeks left at Colgate. But there is some disconnect between the world I find at the conference, and the world I find at the airport. One I want to explore further.

SHARE

A political science major and religion minor, Ashley is interested in the intersection of ecology and religion. She attended the Summer Symposium on Religion and Environmental Stewardship at the Yale Divinity School June 5-7, 2012. Workshops focused on greening religious spaces, preaching environmentalism, the study of eco-theology, climate change and environmental justice. By taking notes on presentations and engaging in conversation with presenters and attendees, Ashley gained experience with qualitative research and had the opportunity to network with religious leaders and environmental scholars.

Ashley at her presentation during the 2012 AMS Symposium.

SHARE