Tonight I attended the annual physics department banquet at
Augsburg College. I barely took any
physics in college but I had the great fortune to attend and graduate from
Augsburg and somehow I found myself, a biology education major, as an adopted
resident of some physics functions.
It all started in a physics class for education majors
taught by one of tonight’s presenters and one of my science mentors, Professor
Ben Stottrup. The class was intended to
give non-science majors some exposure to the order and reason behind describing
the physical world. In his first year in the department Professor Stottrup didn’t
exactly know that and it was fun to see adjust the course as he learned his students. I took the class because I had the
prerequisite algebra to get in and, as much as I would have liked to, in the
economy of my meandering college education I could not justify the two additional
years I would have had to invest for a calculus based itinerary.
As a science major I didn’t have too much trouble navigating
the coursework and Professor Stottrup saw in me a passion for science and a bit
of work ethic and as a result I began working in his newly forming lipid
biophysics lab.
Over the next two years I learned a lot about how science and
research works. For example sometimes in science you build a dark room out of foam
board and bookshelves and sometimes you reach into literature far beyond your
comfort level and training to pull everything you can out of it. Sometimes in
science you carry jugs of nanopure water across two campuses back to the lab
because you don’t have the equipment to make it yourself and when it comes to
science you definitely learn more about how it actually works by actually doing
it.
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