My Story

With me starting my last year as an undergraduate and the prospect of applying to graduate school looming in my very near future, I got pretty introspective about my journey and relationship with physics, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of my thoughts on this, so here goes nothing!

I have had this dream of doing physics since I was five. In many ways, this was really not my dream, and this is quite natural for anybody who figures out what they want to do when they are this young. It is a dream or a burning passion of whoever had the most influence on you as a child. This was my maternal grandfather’s undying enthusiasm for understanding nature that induced this dream onto me. He used to take me up onto the roof of our home and sky-gaze and tell me stories about the stars that form the most beautiful tapestry in the heavens. But in all honesty, looking back, this prospect of loving something this much that early on is quite scary – I had an answer to a question I didn’t even know that I could ask. The study of physics was just so beautiful that it has stuck with me since. As I grew up, and in the latter part of my teenage years, when I could understand what it meant to love something, that I was fortunate enough that my answer had not yet changed. It is physics through and through.

My relationship with physics was quite interesting, and the relationship has been a bit rocky at best. I was fascinated by the stars, and the universe out there. It was quite easy to explore those as an amateur. There are so many well-made and fascinating videos out there on YouTube and of course, countless Wikipedia pages filled with so much information! There were these particles out there that made up everything, the quarks, leptons, and bosons and I was enthralled by them all. I remember having clippings of all the discoveries reported in the newspapers. The discovery of the Higgs in 2012 took up pages of that scrapbook and made my imagination run wild. Unfortunately, soon after, I was stuck. As a child that young, the world only cares about interests that are tangible, and that was a major hurdle for me. I was never really much of a tinkerer. I preferred solid rules and playing about amongst them. I loved puzzles and riddles, but these are things few care about. This aspect – that there was really no one I could share this enthusiasm with – was a hurdle. I started questioning whether I really loved this subject or not – because I never really did anything tangible to show for it.

It was quite a few years before I landed back on physics, and that was when I understood that there is something called theoretical physics, and that was exactly what I had been so fascinated by. The physics that you study in middle and high school is really nothing interesting. If anything, it was absolutely mind-numbingly boring. I really hated a lot of it and did most of it quite mechanically – because I had to. It also did not help that until 10th grade, I could get amazing grades while putting in bare minimum effort, but once we got to 11th grade, that approach did not work. It was towards the end of 10th grade that things got interesting. I discovered MITOCW and found exactly what I wanted – some amazing resources to study theoretical physics! 11th grade was a tale of two extremes. I performed terribly in school, but when I put in the same amount of effort, I was able to study Quantum Mechanics from MITOCW at a really great pace. Somehow I was doing great and terrible at the same time, and that was the most confusing part. I was just much better at the quantum-y stuff. No matter how much effort I put in, I just did significantly better at anything that has to do with the microscopic world, and this is a trend that continues into college to this day – the courses in which I performed my best are the three courses on Quantum Mechanics, the two courses on Particle Physics and the one course on Quantum Field Theory. In fact, of the three research projects that I have done since coming to Illinois Tech, I most thoroughly enjoyed the one on computing scattering amplitudes in Particle Physics.

I think the other thing that quite struck me in my undergraduate degree is the kind of courses that pushed me, and I had to put in actual work for. Turns out, the undergraduate physics courses were mostly a breeze – purely because they were very superficial. These courses gave me no deep understanding of the subject, they had the shut up and calculate approach. These courses gave me the skills to do calculations, but they rarely taught me what the calculations meant, and more importantly, they didn’t help my understand how to ask questions that are relevant. This isn’t really a flaw of the system I guess, rather it is how undergraduate courses are designed. The graduate physics courses and the undergraduate mathematics courses are where I was pushed a lot more. I had to think about the calculations and problems that I did, and quite often each problem was designed to emphasize a different aspect of the theory that is important to understand. I found those a lot more to my taste and liking. I guess in that way I was very fortunate to have had the advisors that I have had – who never really questioned my passion and always encouraged me to push myself (especially when some of the academic choices that I made were quite objectively stupid).

Anyway, I digress. Coming back to some of the other thoughts that I had. There is something fundamentally unreasonable about doing research, and wanting to stay in academia. There is definitely not enough money, grants are hard to come by and the compensation is definitely not proportional to the effort you put in. It is purely love for the subject, and the puzzles that come with it, that dominates over all of these factors. This line of reasoning is truly unreasonable. When you talk to anyone in theoretical physics about this, their response is quite often just a resigned sigh about the entire lack of funding, but they all still do it anyway! I find this oddly ironic honestly – some of the smartest and most logical people that I have known all do what they do because of a reason that is fundamentally irrational and unreasonable. I guess this is quite symbolic of how you can never quite leave your emotional side in decision-making, no matter how hard you try. If there is something that you really want to do, because of a deep-rooted desire, nothing can really stop you except yourself.

I guess I want to tie it up and end by talking about what set this article off in the first place. This is the fourth year of my undergraduate degree, and I think I have come quite some way. I have learned so much about physics and mathematics, and more importantly, I have learned how to learn. I think that is one of the most important skills that I have picked up in my time here. Now with the looming graduate admissions, this is the end of the beginning. I am going to be taking my last first step as a baby physicist, on my way to being a fully-fledged physicist. There is so much to come, and I am genuinely excited for all that my future has in store for me, and I think this is a good place to end this bit of rambling. Here is to all that is to come!