From Spacetime to Space and From Plasma to Planets: The Journey to a Master’s Degree

This week, we have an innaugural post from a new student here at the PVL. Solomon Segal joins us from Queen's University and shares his journey with you below.

By Solomon Segal

The path to finding work one enjoys is never an easy one, however this should never deter people from trying! As an undergraduate student I knew I wanted to do a Master’s degree, but I also knew I could only do one if the research was captivating. This posed a dilemma seeing as my undergraduate research experiences left me with varying views in their respective fields and made me wonder what research I would truly enjoy?

If you yourself are an undergraduate student reading this and commiserate with these sentiments, then you might be interested to hearing how a student like myself ended up working in the Planetary Volatiles Lab.

As a high school student applying to various universities for physics, I wish someone had pulled me aside and told me that some physics faculties concentrate more funding to certain areas and thus many professors focus on specific fields. Granted, with my high school physics knowledge I barely knew how to solve F=ma let alone comprehend what these fields were, but it would have been nice to be aware of this fact.

I had the experience of attending two different universities during my undergrad; I studied at the University of Waterloo for two years and transferred to Queen’s University for the remainder of my degree. Now I didn’t know when starting at Waterloo that their physics department focused heavily on quantum computing and astrophysics, but nevertheless I secured a research assistantship looking at near-infrared galaxies. I thought this would be a perfect fit for me as I was enjoying my astrophysics classes, but over the term I realized that this type of research was not for me. Studying such distant and faint objects did not allow me really visualize them or what they would mean in a bigger picture. So I knew then that whatever my next research opportunity would be, it would be in a different field.

That opportunity came in the form of my undergraduate thesis two years later. At Queen’s, every astrophysics and honors physics student must complete a thesis, so I had been looking forward to ‘research round 2’. Now if Queen’s physics is known for one thing, it’s neutrinos. They won a Nobel Prize relating to it back in 2015 and many of the professors work hand-in-hand with SNOLAB, the underground neutrino detector in Sudbury. So when the potential research projects for our theses were shown to us, it was no surprise most of them were neutrino-detection-related. Now I don’t know if you, the reader, have any experience with germanium detectors, but I didn't find it to be the most riveting research. I mean no disrespect to the hardcore germanium-heads out there, but it’s not for me.

For my thesis I instead looked into doing research in a field as far away as possible from germanium detectors, which was plasma physics. I found the one professor who dabbled in it and took up a research project with him – and the project was awesome. I had to model the trajectories of compact toroids as they were shot into and an ITER Tokamak.  If that made no sense, which I’m sure it didn’t (plasma physics tends not to), I modeled the motion of a donut made of ionized gas as it was being shot into a much bigger donut of ionized gas. Trust me, it’s extremely interesting. Part of what made the research so enjoyable was the fact that these donuts were tangible items I could picture in my head, and not something like distant galaxies being redshifted out of existence. By the end of the year I was pretty certain I would go to graduate school for plasma physics. But there was a problem: there aren’t many research opportunities.

This left me at a crossroads, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school but I had to find a research area I was interested in. One night I was looking through all the courses I had taken in undergrad and saw my ‘Planets’ course I had taken at Waterloo. I thought to myself ‘wow if only I could do planetary research for my master’s’ and at that moment it hit me. Up until that point I had been wearing preverbal ‘physics blinders’, having gone through two physics faculties where planetary physics research was either nonexistent or not advertised, I had no idea what was actually out there. That moment led me to the Planetary Volatiles Lab here at York. Imagine astronomy research that doesn’t take place millions of light years away but instead in Earth’s backyard? Sounds like fun to me!