How to be the best physicist you can be

[maughanster]

Hi All!

A question that has been on my mind lately is how can a person be the best physicist that they can possibly be. Obviously 'best' is open to interpretation, so let's just say "How can a person make the largest impact on some field in physics that they are capable of". If we had to pick a target audience, let's say undergraduates and beginning graduate students who will continue on in physics research.

I have a few ideas, but I don't want to pollute the thread before I've heard from others. I am currently an undergrad myself, but I want this thread to be helpful for a larger range of people.

Thanks for the replies and I hope we get a good discussion going!

 

[Arup Biswas]

By loving it

 

[PeroK]

Hi All!

A question that has been on my mind lately is how can a person be the best physicist that they can possibly be. Obviously 'best' is open to interpretation, so let's just say "How can a person make the largest impact on some field in physics that they are capable of". If we had to pick a target audience, let's say undergraduates and beginning graduate students who will continue on in physics research.

I have a few ideas, but I don't want to pollute the thread before I've heard from others. I am currently an undergrad myself, but I want this thread to be helpful for a larger range of people.

Thanks for the replies and I hope we get a good discussion going!

Dedication!

 

[ZapperZ]

Hi All!

A question that has been on my mind lately is how can a person be the best physicist that they can possibly be. Obviously 'best' is open to interpretation, so let's just say "How can a person make the largest impact on some field in physics that they are capable of". If we had to pick a target audience, let's say undergraduates and beginning graduate students who will continue on in physics research.

I have a few ideas, but I don't want to pollute the thread before I've heard from others. I am currently an undergrad myself, but I want this thread to be helpful for a larger range of people.

Thanks for the replies and I hope we get a good discussion going!

There is a difference between being as good of a physics STUDENT, or in LEARNING physics, versus being a physicist.

The former is about the process of trying to understand a body of knowledge. The latter is about the PROFESSION or career of a physicist. Being a physicist involves many things that do not directly deal with the subject matter. It deals with administrations, management, policies, budgets, funding, psychology, human interactions, etc... etc. It also deals with being able to distinguish between what is important versus what is interesting.

As of your post, I am not sure if you're asking for one or the other, because you appear to restrict yourself in just the issue of the subject matter without realizing that the profession of being a physicist involves MORE than just that.

Zz.

 

[Gigaz]

I'm a physics PhD student.

I have seen it many times - the quality of the research is directly proportional to the physicists skills in math and programming. For most physics breakthroughs there is the guy who solved it and the ten other people who worked on the same problem but couldn't.
Learn C or Fortran, those are the fastest languages for scientific computing. Be aware how to use the fastest libraries for scientific computing, in particular linear algebra. Understand parallelization and GPU computing.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

Hi All!

A question that has been on my mind lately is how can a person be the best physicist that they can possibly be. Obviously 'best' is open to interpretation, so let's just say "How can a person make the largest impact on some field in physics that they are capable of". If we had to pick a target audience, let's say undergraduates and beginning graduate students who will continue on in physics research.

I don't think I'd be the best I could be if I took all my talents, education, and skills to the grave, regardless of my impact on a given field of physics. (And I am one of the most accomplished physicists in my field so far this century.) For me "the best I can be" has an essential component of making students and colleagues better also. I want to touch their lives and help raise them up to a level that they may not have achieved without me. Probably the greatest lesson I learned on the USAFA faculty was "their success is my success." I would not trade the success of my students and colleagues for 10 times the grant money or citations.