This summer, I went to a summer school. Summer school is astronomy summer camp for grad students. For a week, I camped in the White Mountains in eastern California and spent my days with 20 other grad students from around the world learning about radio interferometry. Radio interferometry means using multiple radio dishes to make pictures of the sky at radio frequencies. Objects in outer space are radiating light that has the same frequencies as the signals we use to transmit our radio, TV, cell phones, and GPS. Fortunately for the entertainment industry, the signals from objects in outer space are very faint so we don't need to worry about Ugly Betty being interrupted by a radio-emitting galaxy passing overhead. This is not as fortunate for scientists. To detect the faint signals from outer space, we put our telescopes up in the mountains where we don't have to look through as much atmosphere. This is why CARMA (the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy), where I went to the summer school, is at an elevation of 7000 feet.
I'm including a couple pictures of the array that I took during the summer school. My fellow grad student Sirio and I have an ongoing argument about which is more beautiful: radio telescopes (like the ones in the pictures) or optical telescopes (like Keck or Palomar). I'm captivated by the beauty of radio telescopes and the way the whole array turns and sweeps across the sky in uniform. Monks hidden in the mountains, raising their arms and eyes to the sky in a slow, unending dance. They remind me of
whirling dervishes.
On my last night at the CARMA summer school, I slept out under the stars. At the campsite, no lights bled their orange glow into the horizon, no smog smothered the stars. Lying back on my sleeping bag, I saw so many stars. Here in Pasadena, it's easy to count the stars. There, I wouldn't even know where to start. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in an uninterrupted band. For a moment I knew that if I took a step forward, I would step off the edge of the world, and fall up into the stars.
That sounds so cool! Is radio interferometry specifically applicable to the research you are doing, or do grad students use these summer camps as a chance to get exposed to new subjects?
ReplyDeleteI guess what I'm trying to ask is how specific you have to become at what stage in your career. Right now, I feel like I haven't been exposed to all the topics I could possibly be interested in. Do you still feel this way, or does undergrad introduce you to all the topics, and grad school you only have time to specialize?
Thanks!
Radio interferometry is useful for the research I am doing, but I decided to go to the summer school before I figured out that was true. There is definitely a chance to explore within graduate school. Many students do one or more projects their first through second years and then settle on which professor they want to work with, and what topic they want to work on, towards the end of their second year or beginning of their third year.
ReplyDeleteGrad school is also more specialized than undergrad. In undergrad, you have the option to do anything - engineering, math, science, even theater or literature if you want (although I don't know much about majoring in humanities at Caltech). In grad school, you come in having picked a field - astronomy or physics or planetary science. But there's plenty of opportunity to choose your subfield within that. As an astronomy grad student, it would be perfectly fine if I wanted to work with a physics professor, for example on LIGO, or with a planetary science professor, or perhaps even with an aero professor on a space engineering project. If you really want to, you can even change fields in grad school, but then you might have to apply to change departments.
You will also have chances to transition between subfields throughout your career. All of astronomy is interconnected, so if you keep an eye on current research and stay curious, you may find an exciting question you want to pursue. Often people choose as postdocs and even professors to take on a project that uses some of the skills and knowledge from their previous research, but transitions into a new topic. Shri Kulkarny, one of our professors, maintains that you should change research directions every five years. Feynman said something similar, I believe.
It is a bit of a dilemma that there are so many interesting topics out there. This really plagues me. But one exciting thing is that many of our professors, even though they are often famous for accomplishments in one sub-field in particular, have an impressive breadth of knowledge of astronomy and physics. They've acquired this knowledge by being intellectually curious over the course of their lives. Even if your work is specialized, your curiosity doesn't have to be.