Hey.

I'm Dianna.

You're watching Physics Girl, and today's a little bit different than my normal videos because I wanted to do a video about my journey into physics.

So I have with me my editor, Jabril, who also runs an awesome channel, SEFD Science.

He's going to interview me.

Because I studied physics in college, I will not be talking about how to get into MIT.

Because I've done that question, too.

I don't remember my SAT scores.

Let's just jump right in.

I want to start-- I want to place the marker.

At what point did you realize that physics was right for you?

That sounds like an infomercial question.

I think the moment is kind of a funny thing.

It's a funny concept.

Because it was kind of like I had tried everything, and then I was like, well, I think physics is just a bit above the others.

So that was the moment.

Did you have a huge passion for physics in high school?

Yeah.

JABRIL: You did?

Yeah.

JABRIL: That's interesting.

And I loved math.

Oh, let me take you back just a little bit.

This is my little math story.

I begged my math teacher to teach me pre-calc over the summer before I went into high school.

And he did.

I liked the idea of taking all this advanced math when I was younger.

I started calculus my freshman year, but then they didn't offer anything beyond that.

I think in some ways that was a blessing, because I was sort of just focusing on math.

I was forced to focus on other things, and I ended up studying abroad and going to the Dominican Republic my junior year.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Man, I got called an overachiever Man, I got called an overachiever and a teacher's pet a lot.

and a teacher's pet a lot.

I was an overachiever and a teacher's pet, but I just played it down, just to be like, no, I'm not that smart.

I wish I hadn't done that.

I wish I had known back then that being smart and being eager is cool.

It's fine.

It's not a big deal.

What part of high school was it that made you realize you liked physics?

So I was really good at math.

Everyone was like, you should take physics, you should definitely try out physics.

Kathy Jones was the teacher at my school at that time.

Got to take Kathy's class.

And I don't think there was ever a moment.

People are looking, I think, a lot for this story that it's like, oh, I was staring at the stars.

And it was never anything like that.

It was this support and this attitude toward physics that my physics teachers had.

They were so enthusiastic about it, and they went above and beyond.

They would tell us about quantum mechanics and about relativity.

They were so excited about it, and I think that had a huge impact on us to be like, yeah, physics is cool.

What helped you to find that physics is a bit above the other?

My way of thinking matched better with physics.

The experiments they do to learn new physical theories are so logical.

And then neuroscience is something that I liked, but again, it was like, where do they come up with these experiments?

It wasn't a very clean, obvious process, and understandably so because humans are complicated.

Human brains are exceptionally complicated.

Physics was like, step one, step two, step three.

What was your reasoning for going to MIT?

Oh, that's kind of a fun question.

So I didn't want to go to MIT.

The reason I chose MIT is because I visited MIT.

Before that, I didn't want to go there.

I just had this preconceived notion that there were a ton of really awkward, nerdy people there.

I don't know.

I guess I thought that I wasn't awkward and nerdy at the time.

I was, so I was mistaken.

So I applied to all these different schools.

I was wait listed at Stanford, wait listed at Harvard, wait listed at Columbia.

These were the other top schools that I guess had more liberal arts and humanities and were more well-rounded, whereas MIT was definitely for tech and science.

I didn't know until I got there and met everybody that there were people doing music and there were people with acapella groups.

There was a chocolate club.

There were people motorizing shopping carts.

There were people who were in fraternities and sororities.

There were just the gamut of people.

I wanted to study something in science or engineering, but I wanted to be around a lot of different people of different interests.

And I didn't know if I would find that at MIT.

Maybe it would have been different if I'd gotten into Harvard or gotten into Stanford.

I might have chosen those.

I can't say I'm so glad that I didn't get into one of those places, because my experience at MIT was amazing, especially in the physics department.

The teachers were really supportive.

There was a class I took called statistical mechanics, I think.

It was kind of like a thermodynamics and statistics class.

The very first test I got a 95 or something.

I did really, really well.

Thank you.

Hold that.

Save that.

Because the second test I got a 50.

But one of the professors of the class called me into his office and was like, hey, I just want to check in on you and see if everything's OK. You did really well the first test.

We had so much hope for you.

They're like, what's going on?

Are you OK?

It wasn't like, you were disappointing us as a physics student.

It was like, no, we just want to check in with you.

Whatever your major is, I think it's really important to think about your mental health.

Do you think that had you not got that mental support you might have considered physics to be too challenging, maybe gone into something else?

This is an interesting story.

I got to MIT and I was like, oh, I loved physics in high school.

I wanted to take it again, and I wanted to take this specific class that was meant for physics majors, the class called 8012 that they called physics for masochists.

Got into the class and then I just bombed the first exam.

I got a D. I remember being like, ugh, I can't do this.

The first week I was crying.

I was calling my mom, being like, this is too hard.

I can't do it.

I went to Adam Burgasser, and I was like, this was my score, did I fail, should I stay in the class, what should I do.

And he was like, you didn't fail.

You squeaked by with a D. Stick it out.

Come to my office hours.

And then that's when the support started.

So I learned to go to office hours, which were after classes, to really go through the concepts.

And I learned that way to work with other students, to work with professors, make sure that I really had the concepts down.

And then the second test I did much better, and I ended up passing the class with a B.

So that was probably my proudest moment was getting a B minus in 8012 at MIT.

I think that I was really lucky going to MIT that I didn't feel any type of social anxiety or anything about going and talking to strangers and going and meeting new people.

So I went to professors' office hours, into their offices and emailed them.

And I know that it is hard for some people to put themselves out there and to ask for that help, but a lack of that is often the cause of some people's failure at their first or second shot or whatever at school, just not finding a way to ask for help.

If you don't do physics now, what is the physics that you've done in the past?

When I was in undergrad, I worked in this lab doing dark matter research.

They were searching for dark matter, and specifically we were making a detector to detect neutrons and looking for a neutron background, a neutron showering down on us from whatever source.

They come from a lot of sources.

So that first group, I was working with Jocelyn Monroe, who was a professor at MIT at the time.

After I graduated, I did this fellowship at Harvard working with Anna Frebel, helping her look for low [INAUDIBLE] stars, looking at the spectra of stars.

And we were looking for the oldest stars in the universe.

I loved both experiences, but what I learned from both was that physics research just wasn't for me.

Because one of the things that I loved most about doing both of those projects was the coding.

I just liked the problem-solving aspect of it.

After my second try at doing physics, I was like, I'm going to just try software engineering.

And then I worked as a software engineer at GE for a year.

Learning physics and doing physics is completely different.

With physics research, you have to stick with one thing for a long time.

Physics experiments just take a long time.

And I have and I've always had an interest in a lot of different fields, which is why I tried out neuroscience, mechanical engineering, electric engineering, all these different things.

And so the idea of sticking with one thing for so long didn't appeal to me.

With science communication, you get to learn so many different things.

I can make a video about dark matter one week, and then I can make a video about stars the next.

I feel like this is a good time to clarify that I did a physics degree, but I actually did it a little differently than other majors.

MIT has this option where you can either do physics, extreme physics, or you could do something called physics flex or physics B.

And you could do a focus within your physics major.

So I focused on electrical engineering, and so I ended up doing this physics with electrical engineering major.

What inspired you to get the electrical engineering flex program?

What inspired you to do that?

I'm not sure exactly.

I thought electricity and magnetism was really cool, and I was like, if I do some kind of engineering, that's more applicable for a job.

I think that's probably the only time in my education where I thought about what would be good for a career.

It is important to think about what career you're going to do and what jobs are available.

It's good to look at the numbers.

There are not that many jobs available for straight-up physicists studying physics and doing physics research.

There are more jobs for people who are working in the industry with physics.

And so I was like, if I can specialize in something with this electrical engineering-- and through that I took an optics lab and I made holograms.

We did the double slit experiment with fringes of light.

We did all those things.

So I was like, maybe I'll go into optics, and that gave me a very specific skill that I could be more easily hireable if I had that specialty.

Ms. Cowern, are you ready for the Twitter lightning round?

I'm ready.

Here we go.

So is there something in physics that you consider that can only be learned in college?

Kind of, yes.

Experiments.

So there are a lot of experiments that it's really hard to do without the equipment at a university.

Very cool.

What actions of your parents inspired you?

Oh, man, I love them.

They were super supportive.

And seeing them also struggle through different times.

Like, there was a time when I think our dog got hit by a car and they couldn't afford for the surgery, so they had to put-- that was a really sad story.

But they lived through a hurricane that blew the roof off the cottage they had just built.

And there were hard times like that, and then seeing them just power through it was inspirational.

Nolan Ryan asks, tips on encouraging and sparking my young daughter's interest in science early?

Yeah.

Try lots of different things.

Try going to science museums, doing experiments at home, doing fun puzzles, and getting interested in math.

And playing music also is a really good way of learning, sort of patterns and thinking like that.

So Josh Peterson asked, do you remember the first science experiment or experiments that you did as a kid that really sparked your interest?

We did a lot of stuff in the kitchen.

I think I asked my parents what would happen if you burned alcohol.

So we burned some alcohol on a plate in the kitchen.

And then burning different types of alcohol and burning different things, burning different colors.

And I was like, well, that's cool.

Why does that happen?

We used to play this game called "mind trap."

It was a bunch of riddle questions, and I loved that logical way of thinking, tests like that.

And cut.