PHY 311 Final Reflection

Context: I composed this reflection as one of the final assignments required for the Laboratory Physics course I took at Agnes Scott College during the spring 2019 semester. In writing this reflection, I focused on developing the skill of drawing connections between different life experiences in order to synthesize a common understanding to be gained. By discussing successes and setbacks experienced by my lab partner Abigail Harden and I in Laboratory Physics, as well as previous observations I recalled from my summer 2017 job as a Summer Instructor at World of Speed Motorsports Museum, I ultimately came to several significant conclusions, chief of which being that I thrive in work environments where I am able to do hands-on building and engineering projects. Isolating this element of self-discovery will aid me in the future, as I begin the process of seeking out post-graduate employment. I have included my reflection below.

Right before I sat down to write this reflection, I signed and faxed back all the paperwork confirming that I will be spending this upcoming summer working at World of Speed motorsports museum again, this time as their Summer Education Intern! So, needless to say, my job and the responsibilities it entails have been on my mind as of late, and it’s gotten me thinking about connections that can be made between the things I’ve learned this semester in lab and the ways in which I can apply them to my summer instructor position. As I’m writing this, my lab partner and I are in the middle of our self-guided final lab experiment, which is an expansion on/reworking of the Coulomb’s law torsion balance experiment that Abigail and I conducted earlier this semester. Our goal is to redo the experiment using a new set of conductive spheres we manufactured in lab out of ping pong balls and a graphite paint conductive coating, to see if improving the conductivity of the charged spheres will result in data that lends itself to a Coloumbic force vs distance graph better fitting the theoretical model.

When Abigail and I first proposed this idea for our final lab, I knew it would involve some degree of hands-on building/creating/engineering in regards to manufacturing the new conductive spheres, but I hadn’t realized quite how extensive this process would be! We spent our first day in lab just making the spheres. It made me realize that I haven’t really built or created anything by hand all semester, which is something that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. Working on this lab has allowed me to remember exactly how much I thrive in hands-on learning environments, and how instinctive the process of building something often is for me. Lab always involves a degree of hands-on involvement, but this lab in particular, between the manufacturing of the spheres and helping Dr. Ackerman reassemble the broken torsion wire assembly in the torsion balance, has more specifically involved a lot of taking things apart and putting them together, which I am beginning to suspect may be my true wheelhouse.

This skill is one that’s directly relevant to my job this summer as well as my future career goals, as my summer camp instructor position consists in large part of helping my students build hands-on engineering projects such as hydraulic powered cranes out of plastic medical syringes, wooden skewers, and cardboard, as well as helping them take apart and then reassemble things like lawnmower engines, RC cars, and simple circuits. Additionally, in the future I hope to continue working in the automotive education department at World of Speed, perhaps helping teach auto mechanic skills to high school autoshop classes hosted by the museum, a job where the hands on practical skills of assembly and disassembly are critical.

In some capacity, I’ve always known that building things with my hands is something that I have a knack for, but prior to this class, I had never really thought to connect that to a directly scientific application, especially laboratory science. It’s interesting and validating to see that those two skill sets can intersect in this way! It’s helped me realize that I can bring my aptitude for practical engineering to my job this summer in a way which also incorporates the more cerebral and academic elements of my physics education, and attempts to integrate the two. For example, lab this semester has taught/reminded me of the importance of lab safety, for instance always washing our hands before leaving lab especially during the Nuclear Spectroscopy experiment, handling liquid nitrogen very carefully and wearing long pants and close toed shoes, practicing good electrical safety with the high voltage power supply used in the Coulomb’s law experiment, painting the conductive spheres outside due to the paint’s carcinogenic fume hazard, etc. Safety in lab/technical settings is crucially important, and it’s a huge responsibility of mine when I am working with my students at summer camp to keep them safe and ensure they are following safety protocol. I feel that practicing lab safety all semester in this course has been an excellent refresher course and gotten me firmly into the habit of paying attention to safety protocol.

This semester of lab work has also made me far more comfortable with the reality of equipment breaking or not working as anticipated, and has given me experience in thinking on my feet to either fix it or come up with a workaround or an alternative solution. For example, the torsion wire snapped in lab yesterday while Abigail and I were attempting to measure its torsion constant, and I then had to help Dr. Ackerman replace the wire, which was a bit of a daunting prospect, but in the end was totally doable. Abigail and I have had experiments not go as planned other times as well, such as when the ceramic superconductor broke in our superconductivity lab. We ended up designing an alternate experiment where we measured properties of a resistor as a function of changing temperature, which proved to be educational and interesting as well. This flexibility and willingness to change course and pursue a different plan is a skill I’ve intentionally been trying to cultivate this semester in lab, as I recognize that in the past I have had a tendency to get swamped in stress and anxiety when my academic work doesn’t go the way I had originally planned. Paralysis of indecision helps no one, and I’ve come to realize that an ability to think on my feet, restrategize, and regroup will not only make me more academically flexible and confident, but also more able to anticipate and react to situations like these happening at work this summer. If there’s a shortage in supplies or a last minute change of schedule and I am not able to lead my students through a planned activity, as happened several times last summer, I now feel more confident in my ability to swiftly come up with a plan B, or troubleshoot a way to make the original plan work.

I think earlier in this semester, I often felt anxious that I wasn’t learning as much in lab as I felt that I should, or maybe that I wasn’t understanding the physics as much as I was supposed to. I’ve since come to realize that maybe the point of lab is less about understanding the precise ins and outs and minutiae of every single physics concept we study, and more about learning practical skills such as teamwork, flexibility, time management, resilience, patience, focus, and safety precautions- or at least that’s my takeaway. Lab has, more than anything, ultimately taught me a lot about the ways in which I learn, such as which techniques help me feel confident in the material (writing everything down as I go, explaining things to my lab partner, working hands on, remembering that I can still get worthwhile learning out of an experience even if I don’t get every detail of the academic work perfect) and which don’t (stressing about time or details, not writing things down in lab, relying on the process of writing the lab report to teach me the physics instead of learning it myself during the prelab phase). I’m of the firm belief that you cannot be an effective teacher without a healthy degree of self awareness as to the ways in which you yourself learn, so as someone with a learning disability who plans to go into education, often of children who also have learning disabilities, the reflection component of this course has been of great value to me. Between the reflections in this course helping me externally process the revelations I have had about my own learning style, and the multiple talks on education and specifically physics education and accessible physics education that we have had in my physics colloquium class this semester, I feel like my strengths as both a teacher and a student have been further developed, and I have lots of new ideas as to ways I can include and accommodate students with different learning styles, better help all of my students overcome their own learning anxiety, and engage more fully with the material.