ASU Research E-Magazine: The Long Haul

The road to a doctorate in physics can be long and difficult. Undaunted by the long haul ahead of them, ASU graduate students Carole Gaulard, John Adams, Kelly Craig, and Ed Six are enthusiastic about their choice of profession. Traveling throughout the country and around the world to get the work done is one “benefit” that every graduate student in experimental nuclear physics seems to agree upon.

Gaulard is closest to finishing her doctorate, but even she doesn’t quite know when that will be. “Until you have your experiment, you don’t know when you are going to finish,” she explains. Her studies may require an additional three or four semesters. But that time frame will depend on her ability to get “beam time” at an accelerator facility, and then having the experiment itself go well.

Kelly Craig agrees. She has been a part of ASU’s graduate physics program the longest of the students assembled in the room. “I know a very smart, hardworking person who stayed on track and took 10 years to complete the degree,” she says. “And I don’t think that’s unusual.”

The group poses in front of the OOPS detector.
(Front row from left) Physics graduate students Alaine Young, Kelly Craig, Nels Freed, and Cristoph Mertz, along with post-doctoral researcher Steve Dolfini (back) help assemble the OOPS detector at MIT/Bates.

Despite such a daunting prospect, “doing physics” still holds a strong attraction for Craig and her fellow graduate students.

“First of all, I really like mathematics. It’s been my favorite thing forever,” she explains. “Being able to do science and use my mathematics knowledge is what I like to do. In the future, I would love to be a research scientist and work in one of the major laboratories, and work with graduate students like us,” she adds.

John Adams is convinced that basic research is essential for the future of society.

“Basic research of the type we do leads to Pentium microchips and other applications,” he says. “Without basic research, a company like Microsoft wouldn’t have boomed. The work is the cutting edge. Without basic research, without understanding more deeply how nature works, you’ll just end up doing the same old stuff.”

Ed Six is working on an experiment called “9112” at the NIKHEF in Amsterdam. He describes his work sanguinely. “I’m basically helping out, moving this here, building that, taking data. I worked a little bit on software. But mostly, I worked on putting the detector together, changing something small, putting it back together.”

All of the graduate students know they must do whatever work needs to be done. When dissertation time comes, they will accept the experiment to which they are assigned. But they have no doubt at all that they are doing the science that is right for them. Physics is where they want to be; it’s what they want to do.

“Biologists work to understanding living things,” the students say, almost in unison. “But physicists work to understand the universe.”—John Svetlik