I went to HACC for four years not only because I had so much to catch up on, but because it was nearly free, as this was where my mom had found a job. In a way this was my 'high school' time. Many of the classes were relatively easy, but I found I enjoyed a large range of them, taking art history, literature, and creative writing, as well as every History course I could, alongside a slow climb up the Math ladder, and some Comp Sci courses. I also quickly became heavily involved in student government and activities.

I was student government Secretary and Treasurer in different years. As far as clubs, I was a founding member of the Linux Club and the Art Club, a member and contributor to Voices, the student poetry and creative writing publication, and was particularly involved in the History Club, aka the Herodotus Society, where I was a founder, and served various positions, including President.

In my time at F&M, I focused more on my studies, though I still found time to participate in Math and Physics organizations, the Anime Club, and to apply my prior experiences contributing to a faculty and student budgetary committee.

While I started at F&M unsure of my exact major, I quickly settled on Physics with a Math minor. Though my minor is classified as Applied Mathematics, I greatly enjoyed the higher/theoretical math courses I took (Intro, Rings and Fields, and Topology).

I spent the Spring of 2006 in Ireland, attending the University in Maynooth. I am a quarter Irish, and very much enjoyed experiencing the culture and countryside of Ireland, as well as having a taste of a different sort of university culture.

I participated in two Hackman summer research internships at F&M to explore two different types of Physics research. The first was with Dr. Elizabeth Praton, in the Summer of 2005. The project involved attempting to characterize maps of the large-scale structure of the universe which are created via measurements of redshift, a process which introduces some amount of distortion. We began the creation of a system which uses simulated annealing to draw optimized paths around the structures in such maps.

My second research internship was with Dr. Ken Krebs, in the Summer of 2006. This project made use of thin films of alumina (Al2O3) applied to sapphire substrates via a sol-gel process. This research was continued through the 2006-2007 academic year, culminating in my undergraduate honors thesis. The thin films were oven and laser heated to create specific configurations of alumina phases (i.e. different crystalline structures). This allowed for formation of higher-density 'channels', which were examined spectrographically to determine their chemical and optical properties. While the results of this year of work were confounded by a large number of input parameters (mixture, oven heat, laser dwell time, etc.), an optimized thin-film configuration could theoretically act as a waveguide, i.e. a 2D version of a fiber optic cable.

While WVU had experimental research that was very interesting, I was drawn to Dartmouth by the setting, the latitude, and the lower student:faculty ratio. Upon moving to the Hanover area (my first move from home), I was determined to get a dog, and I happened to find a perfect friend for the next nine years, Belle von Woo—frankly, she alone validated my choice of schools.

I started grad school with the usual hurricane of difficult courses, and planning to work in theoretical lab plasma physics. By my first Summer term, I instead found myself signed on to work in experimental space plasma with Dr. Jim LaBelle.

Alongside research, I made many friends (and so did Belle). My classmates and I formed a sort of Wine & Cheese appreciation club, where we would meet once a week, many weeks, and chat over the products of fermentation. In the classroom, I found that I have a knack for the material in Electricity and Magnetism courses, and that I very much enjoy Quantum Field Theory, though I am not great at it.

My primary work for Jim focused on sounding rockets launched into the auroral ionosphere. These rockets reach altitudes of up to 1,200 kilometers, flying a mostly parabolic path that ends with them crashing into the ocean after 15-20 minutes. I worked directly on the NASA ACES and CHARM-II missions, redesigning and implementing the high-speed data acquisition hardware required to record some of the rocket telemetry, doing hardware calibrations, and helping with rocket integration. This involved several trips to the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, and two launch trips to the Poker Flat Research Range, near Fairbanks, Alaska. I also worked with data from the TRICE and CASCADES-II missions.

I additionally supported the more down-to-Earth side of Jim's work, which involves sensing of auroral radio emissions via a network of ground-based antennas. These are deployed in a variety of polar or near-polar regions, including Alaska, Greenland, and South Pole Station. Data return rates ranged from kilobytes per minute to TB/hour, with various automated analysis and reduction systems required.

The work on the rocket data acquisition systems proved useful for the ground work as well. This was also true of my work on an autonomous digital receiver and signal processor, the Dartmouth Rx-DSP, which was deployed on CHARM-II, and which I have since helped work on adapting for use in ground stations.

My final project involved analysis of wave-particle correlation data from CHARM-II. While Jim's instruments observe radio waves, the Correlator hardware created by our University of Iowa collaborators can take the waves we detect, and see how their phases relate to incoming charged particles. We also built a flexible numerical simulation system in order to test some theories regarding the Correlator results, and ran a large simulation on the Dartmouth Discovery Cluster.

So, all in all, I wanted to avoid IT and Comp Sci, but then I ended up spending most of my time doing hardware stuff, writing data acquisition and analysis codes, and dealing with numerical simulations³.