As a PhD student, much of my day-to-day work has consisted of coding, going to class, attending meetings, rinsing then repeating. I feel like it is very easy to “lose the forest for the trees,” focus on those tasks, and lose the original wonder and curiosity that initially drew many of us towards physics.
“How do tornadoes form?”, “How do the lights in my house work?”, and “How do they make Dippin’ Dots like that?” were all questions that I had as a kid, and the answers to those questions drew me to science in the first place. In participating in the Wonders of Physics Fellowship, I was able to revisit and reinvigorate some of the original awe that I had had for the subject, while also noticing that initial spark in some of the students I was interacting with.
Much of my volunteering was with younger students who were near the end of elementary school, so that meant that we could use some demos that exemplified some of the most exciting topics. During my childhood, I was obsessed with weather, so I loved showing students how the fire tornado and tornado in a box worked—to a chorus of “ooh”s and “aah”s as the tornadoes formed.
Obviously, we conducted these events for the children, but often I found myself really excited to see how the demo would work out, and I looked forward to my colleagues presenting other demonstrations. The presentations often served a dual purpose, not only showing kids how physics interacts with quotidian things, but also reconnecting us, the presenters, with the reasons why we came to love physics in the first place.
Even though I wasn’t providing demonstrations on a complicated topic in field theory or showing grandparents how supersymmetric symmetry breaking works, I often found myself having to try to draw parallels between my research and the demos we had shown prior. Every researcher should have an “elevator pitch” that they can give to anyone to tell them what they’re doing or why they should care, and (particularly at Grandparents University) I was often asked questions like: “so what do you do in your research?” and “have you ever used something like this in your research?” Questions like these prompt you to boil years of research into about two sentences and emphasize the point of what you’re doing—what is the crux of what we do here?
Fellowship opportunities like these are an experience that every participant and presenter can grow from. It is incredibly fulfilling to show a demonstration that really resonates with the audience, but it also shows one why they enjoyed doing it in the first place—both science in general and your research as well. Instead of losing the forest for the trees, it allows you to fully enjoy both, the forest and the trees.