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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

An Opportunity of a Lifetime


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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