The Physics & Astronomy Congress Creates Community and Belonging

The 2025 Sigma Pi Sigma Physics and Astronomy Congress is just around the corner, set to take place in Denver, Colorado, October 30–November 1. The congress consists of three days jam-packed with amazing physics and astronomy content, speakers, opportunities to share your research, and time to celebrate what makes your SPS chapter unique with undergraduates from across the country.

To learn a bit about how the meeting can impact physics and astronomy students, I sat down with SPS alum Tracy Paltoo. She has bachelor’s degrees in physics and civil engineering and is currently a project manager at Turner & Townsend, an architectural and real estate management firm. She says she regularly leverages the critical thinking and problem-solving skills she learned in physics to ensure that projects are properly executed.

Paltoo began her physics career in 2013 at Adelphi University, a small school with a small physics department. She was in their 3+2 program, which involved studying physics for three years at Adelphi and civil engineering for two years at Columbia University. Adelphi provided the “typical physics student” experience, she says, where students worked together during late nights at the white board solving “difficult, but interesting problems.” She joined SPS and notes that the department faculty wanted to see all of their students thrive.

During Paltoo’s junior year of college, she became vice president of Adelphi’s SPS chapter and attended the 2016 Congress in Silicon Valley with her chapter. At the time, LIGO had recently confirmed the first detection of gravitational waves, and University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Professor Patrick Brady was a plenary speaker on behalf of the LIGO team. Paltoo got the unique opportunity to introduce Brady’s plenary talk to the 1,200 attendees. As a part of this experience, she even got to meet Professor Brady beforehand.

“What’s so great about the congress is that they get these really great speakers,” Paltoo says. “As students you put these scientists on a pedestal, and you want to be like them one day, but you really don’t think it will happen,” she explains. “But then you hear them speak, and you hear them talk about how they discovered things, and you say, ‘Wait, that sounds like I could do that!’”

Another highlight for Paltoo was proudly supporting her friends and peers during the poster sessions as they gave their first conference presentations. “At that time in my life, congress was the biggest conference I had ever been to,” says Paltoo. Still, she didn’t feel out of place. "[It] gave me the opportunity to meet other physics students from all over the country. . . . It helped me see all these other students who looked like me, who didn’t look like me, doing the same things as me, and really liking physics.”

She also found the talk by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell moving. Bell Burnell, who will be a plenary speaker again at the 2025 Physics and Astronomy Congress, gave a talk in 2016 about discovering pulsars as a graduate student. Thinking back on it, Paltoo notes that she “struggles to find words” to explain how powerful it was.

The congress gives students food for thought, she says, and promotes “the curiosity to continue to do what you want and learn as much as you can” in a supportive, fun environment. “It’s really nice to feel as a student that someone is caring about your experience and showing you all these incredible things.”