I am currently applying to graduate school in physics, at the late age of 30. I figured I’d write up a draft of a statement of purpose here, then probably edit it for a more sober crowd…(meaning, not just myself, to whom I can say any old crazy thing).
When I was growing up, my father would try to explain some aspect of the universe to me by drawing little diagrams on a napkin. He wasn’t a scientist by trade, so what he knew of the universe came from reading popular science books. I couldn’t tell you what was written on those napkins, I never really understood what he was saying. It is likely that he wasn’t always sure himself. The effect wasn’t so much to create a child who lived and breathed all things science and mathematics, but rather to instill in me a genuine fascination with everything about the world around me. It was a gift that would take some time for me to fully appreciate.
By the time I arrived at the University of Maryland, just ten minutes down the road from where I grew up, I had little idea of what I wanted to study. At the end of high school I had picked up some popular science books myself, several on quantum physics, but physics seemed to be a subject that really really smart people studied. Maybe I was smart, but really really smart? After having crossed off almost every single major from the university’s catalog, I found myself with two potential options: English, a subject that I had thrived at in high school and physics, a subject that intrigued me, but which intimidated me thoroughly. Then, at an evening colloquium for freshman, I went to hear Dr. James Gates talk about his work in String Theory. I was fascinated by the talk and at the end I approached him: ”How do you know if you are smart enough to do physics?” His response set me off on the path I’m on today: ”You don’t, until you try.”
For four years after he spoke those words, I didn’t look back. I dove into physics in a way I had never really done with anything else before. I found another gear in my work ethic, in my dedication and seemingly in my ability to think. I also found a community of people who loved this subject as much as I did, who were willing to work late into the night to get that last problem right. Those were some of the best four years of my life. And all the while I began preparing for the next stage, studying physics at MIT or Cornell or Columbia, schools that as a senior in high school had held no allure for me whatsoever (nor, as a solid A-B highschool student with average SAT scores would I have held any particular allure for them).
But during those four years I was also developing in other ways. I was starting to feel a pull to do something for the world around me that wasn’t quite so esoteric as studying particle physics. While I loved physics, I felt the need to expand my horizons in other ways as well. So I made the decision during the fall of my senior year to forgo graduate school for a year or two and apply to Teach-For-America, where I would (in my own mind) help lift young school children out of poverty by my sheer enthusiasm for physics and math. Unfortunately for me, and perhaps fortunately for those children, Teach-For-America did not believe I would be able to accomplish such an ideological feat. And so it was that I found myself at the end of my senior year without a plan for the coming year.
What began as a year or two hiatus from physics turned into three, then four, five…now almost ten years later I have moved around the country several times, studied tropospheric ozone, spent a month hiking in Alaska, gotten married, bought a house and written over a hundred patents. And all the while I have felt this nagging feeling that I’m not done with physics and it isn’t done with me. I have spent some of my free time teaching myself quantum mechanics and field theory. But the results have been mixed. I still have that same strong work ethic I had when I was an undergraduate (see the > 100 patents written in the last few years), but I’m missing so many other crucial ingredients: a strong community of other people who love and are devoted to physics, the structured progression of courses and the direction of professors and advisors.
I want to pursue a PhD in physics here at the University of Iowa because I realize that there are questions about the physical world around me that I am fascinated by, and they are questions that I could be a part of answering. I’m not content to read popular science books. I want to be on the front line. Whether it be in plasma physics or quantum field theory. As an undergraduate I was overwhelmed by the thought of doing research myself, I was just happy to learn anything I could about thermodynamics or electromagnetism. I felt lucky just for the chance to observe. But now I feel more confident than ever that I bring something to the table as well – that I have something to contribute to physics.
It is true that my exposure to research topics to this point has been extremely limited – mostly I know what I’ve read in popular accounts of cosmology and particle physics and the little bits I’ve picked up in my own self study of quantum mechanics, field theory and mathematics. But I’ve also come to realize that physics is much more interconnected than I’d ever realized as an undergraduate – that many of the elegant themes I’ve encountered in esoteric topics like quantum field theory have applications in condensed matter physics and vice versa. It could be that the techniques needed to solve a problem like quantum gravity will come from some seemingly unrelated field like nonlinear dynamics or quantum electronics. So while my inclination is towards particle theory, I don’t feel the need to pick a particular research area at this early stage. Instead, should I be accepted to the program at Iowa, I would spend time during my first year seriously looking for a research area with interesting problems and interesting techniques.
While my primary interest in pursing a PhD in physics is to become a researcher, I am also very interested in teaching physics. As a patent writer for the last several years, my primary responsibility has been to explain (using words and figures) complex technical inventions in a way that can be comprehended by someone without expertise in the technological field of invention. Furthermore, I have a responsibility to boil down the invention to its essence – some generalized features that can be modified in a myriad of ways without changing the original intentions of the inventor. I believe that these are two qualities that a good teacher should possess: to break down a complicated subject into more easily understandable pieces and to highlight those essential features, the motifs, that provide a backbone for more sophisticated topics down the road. I am excited about the prospect of teaching other students not just the formulas and laws, but the way of thinking about problems that is common to much of physics. I believe that one of the greatest things that I learned from my undergraduate studies at Maryland was that basic physics trick of taking limits – considering what the solutions would be at some extremes, and then deducing what the solutions might look like somewhere in the middle. As someone who routinely struggles to do basic arithmetic in his head, I have used this limits trick countless times over the last ten years of my life. It is a certain way of looking at the world that becomes part of you once you have seen in work successfully in solving problems in mechanics, E&M and quantum mechanics.
