The first day’s events were very casual. The SPS groups from colleges in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and some of Tennessee arrived around 4 p.m. We socialized, and a few hours later, dinner was ready. We ate some delicious hamburgers and veggie burgers as well as a variety of chips and sodas while continuing to get to know each other.
Although many of my meetings were cancelled due to snow, one of my favorite parts of the trip was being proactive and running from senate office to senate office, making impromptu pitches for renewable energy and diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math. I was fortunate to speak with the chiefs of staff for senators Heinrich and Udall of New Mexico (my home state). From them, I learned more about the different policies of New Mexico’s senators and found myself leaving with more faith in the future as New Mexico makes strides in solar and wind energy.
There have only been a few years in my life when there have been no humans in space. Sending and bringing home astronauts no longer awes the public as it once did—often major news outlets don’t even cover it. But exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our sun, and prospects of finding life outside of our own system—that’s newsworthy. Recently, NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and SpaceX joined forces to launch the next planet-hunting mission, TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
We had the pleasure of attending the April American Physical Society (APS) Meeting and learning about cutting-edge research in particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and gravitation. We got to meet lots of professional scientists, professors, postdocs, and students, and talk to them about their research and what it’s like to have a career in physics. Here are some highlights from the sessions we attended and the people that we met along the way.
I’m currently a senior physics student at Coe College, and recently I had the opportunity to travel internationally to a conference in Toronto. I am Coe’s current SPS chapter president, and in the past few years I have planned many of our outreach events and conference travels, including a trek to the 2016 PhysCon. I’ve found that conferences are pressure cookers for collaboration and professional growth, and I encourage all undergraduates to attend at least one conference.
Held at the beautiful Carnegie Institution for Science in the heart of Washington, DC, the 2018 Fundamental Physics of Ferroelectrics and Related Materials, or Ferro2018, was a gathering of the world’s leading researchers in ferroelectric materials. Between the banquet dinners and croissant-laden coffee breaks, I experienced a sharing and developing of knowledge in which few, if any, undergraduate students usually get the chance to participate. My goal was to learn as much as possible.
