Week 8: Isn’t it cool how little, random, unexpected moments can have such lasting effects?

Last week we got to attend a talk at NIST by Dr. Sarah Hörst. She is one of the leading scientists on NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft for Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Titan is awesome (Dr. Hörst’swords). The moon is half the size of Earth in diameter, a little more than 1/50th the mass of it and most excitingly, it has an atmosphere, a subsurface water ocean (with evidence of liquid water on the surface in the past), and surface lakes of ethane and methane. Its atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s. And scientists have found evidence that Titan has what we would consider to be building blocks of life: amino acids, nucleotide bases, and other organic compounds.  

When I first made the switch from neuroscience to physics, I fully intended to go into astrophysics. The University of Colorado Boulder has an amazing astro program and I had always been interested in learning about the universe beyond Earth. After my second year in applied physics, I found a passion for climate change and accessibility to knowledge. I found an intersection in these two areas through science advocacy in climate resilience. I am troubled by the way that overexploited communities around the world are going to beaffected the most by climate change, and I decided that I wanted to do something tangible with my physics knowledge. I understand that I have a privilege to learn and become educated, and I believe that puts me into a position to make that knowledge accessible to others in a way that benefits society. By my third year in physics, I knew that I wanted to go into materials and energy in applied physics- and I left behind astrophysics. 

It is interesting that Dr. Hörst had a similar journey. She talked about how she was torn between planetary sciences and climate change when she approached graduate school. She described her decision to pursue planetary sciences as a head vs heart scenario, where her heart was on planetary sciences. The way that her hour-long presentation went by so quickly for me reminds me that I have a similar diverging path ahead of me, where I haven't yet fully made a decision.