I returned to full-time study beginning in Spring 2025. In many ways, it’s been a culture shock. Closed campuses are the rule rather than the exception, and students and teachers alike tread carefully underneath the elusive promise of free expression; an umbrella that’s been punctured by those in power.

Things have changed, and yet the spirit of inquiry can never completely be squelched. School, at its best and brightest, unites seemingly different people underneath a single flag and cause: the aspiration to change the world.

My long-standing dream has been to take a place at the frontier of human understanding. I believe it is one of the highest callings to put word and number to the world in which we find ourselves. I have returned to school to continue a journey I began many years ago. Tempered by the wisdom of experience, I aim to see this one to completion.

Ascending to Opportunity

At the conclusion of my first semester of physics, I was invited to apply to NSF REU. I was accepted and began work on X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAFS). Engaging with my first taste of research since my return to academia intensified my conviction: I could do this, and I wanted to do it. Probing the interaction between light and quantum structure piqued my curiosity, and yet I yearned to turn my eyes back to the cosmos.

In Fall 2025, I was accepted to become a CRSP Scholar. I have begun work on studying a particular cosmological simulation called Sandra, one of the DC Justice League set of simulations. My particular project involves comparing two versions of Sandra in order to draw conclusions about how black holes may influence star formation rates in dwarf galaxies. In December, I presented my preliminary research at the 10th Annual Undergraduate Research & Creative Works Day. While I was quite nervous at the beginning, as I narrated through my work, I grew in confidence, refining my summary into a clear and logical progression intelligible to a diverse audience.

Beginning next semester, I will be participating in the AstroCom NYC program, a fellowship to which I was ecstatic to gain entrance. I am eager to apply myself toward the worthy goal of increasing understanding of the universe, a system of unimaginable complexity and beauty. My days (and nights) will be busy, but I am confident that I will continue to make progress. There is much to do, and more data than we can possibly hope to analyze, and I hope to help make sense of it all.

State of the Onion

We cannot exist in a vacuum. The romantic ideal of a lone scientist waiting for a Eureka! moment is little more than fantasy and fever dream. Modern science makes progress with study and experiment, facilitated by collaboration, aided by technology. Cracking a textbook is essential, but so too is understanding the tools available to the researcher.

Computers have continued to alter the landscape of knowledge acquisition. Paper and pencil are increasingly scarce, and I observe that many students bring only a tablet to class. AI is rapidly rendering the once foundational problem sets obsolete as students copy & paste into their favorite chatbot and let the ghost in the machine do the thinking instead.

None of this is new. Spark Notes was immensely popular when I completed my first undergrad, and Cliff’s Notes has existed since the fifties. Students with extra cash in their pockets have been paying others to complete their assignments since time immemorial.

Education will have to adapt if it is to survive. I’ve seen a number of articles noting the return of the blue books (in my innocence, I wasn’t aware they had ever left), and this will be the way of things. Earning a degree is more than just a rite of passage, it is supposed to represent the honing of a mind through knowledge acquisition and applied critical thought.

When the exams are passed out and phones are put away, sweat begins to leak from the pores. Without the support of the LLM, holes in our understanding are laid plain, exposed in a manner that may obviously contradict perfect homework scores.

The way things are going, most may never need to take off the training wheels. Gemini keeps insisting it can help proofread my e-mails, Copilot wants to polish my text messages, and Claude reminds me daily the virtues of integrating it into my codebase. It is up to humans to stop saying they don’t have time to try, to learn, to fail, and be honest about what is important for them to do with their limited time on Earth.

The Wisdom of When

Change is frightening. Watching our skills become obsolete with the passage of time increases our feelings of alienation from a world we don’t recognize. It takes strength and humility to adapt. This striving, difficult and sometimes draining, keeps us human.

Detractors of the calculator lamented that people should know how to work figures. Many feared the advent of the squiggly red line would contribute to poor spelling and the death of the dictionary. Plato wrote that Socrates derided those who relied on writing to structure their thoughts, stating that such a dependence weakened their true understanding.

Any medicine can become a poison with overuse. An AI chatbot can remedy holes in understanding, or it can be used to cheat. But as I look toward enormous datasets and a world in which simple formulae are becoming ever more elusive, we may no longer find trendlines as elegant as F=ma or E=mc2. To get at the truth, we must expand our minds, broaden our skills, and develop the discerning eye to know the right tool for the job at hand.