Student Leadership Drives Change

Chief among my goals as SPS Associate Zone Councilor for Zone 13, located geographically in the great state of Texas, is to establish clear and durable lines of communication and cooperation between the zone’s SPS chapters. I also aim to promote the sharing of information, ideas, philosophies, and operational plans among SPS chapters in all zones.

As an extension of that objective, I hope to expand student engagement not only with SPS itself but also with Member Societies and Affiliates of the American Institute of Physics, home to SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma. Organizations such as the American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union are among those that offer significant professional opportunities for students. As a benefit of their SPS membership, students receive complimentary membership in two physical science societies. I strongly encourage my colleagues, and all students reading this, to actively participate in both SPS and their selected societies.

My secondary objective is to promote and reignite the spirit of cooperation between SPS and the International Association of Physics Students (IAPS). SPS has historically been active in IAPS; however, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that collaboration fell by the wayside. I have been working for the past year with the SPS office and the IAPS Executive Committee to reestablish and revolutionize that cooperation for the present-day student landscape. This would provide opportunities for SPS members to step up their global engagement and interact with like-minded physics students from around the world.

In addition to being an associate zone councilor, I also serve as a student ambassador for the American Physical Society, where I work to actively promote the study of physics, and STEM in general, to both my academic colleagues and the greater community. I have taken on other student leadership roles as well, such as my university’s Criminal Justice Club President.

My diverse career interests—engineering and criminal justice—represent a subtle rebellion against mainstream academia, which encourages its members, particularly students, to silo themselves into a single topic for their entire careers. I have found that working in both fields simultaneously allows me not only to exercise my academic freedom but also to approach challenges, such as those related to public safety, as both an engineer and an end user. Students have the youthful vigor necessary to operate across boundaries and beyond the walls of siloed fields.

A major issue I have been advocating to resolve relates to what I believe is a fundamental incompatibility between the traditional models of academic career progression and actual career progression in my two areas of study. Both are highly practice-centric fields. The traditional progression of bachelor’s degree to master’s degree to PhD to faculty appointment, while the gold standard for many natural sciences and social sciences, falls short when applied to the engineering and criminal justice spheres. The current system produces professors who have little to no industry or field experience, yet are responsible for training the next generation of practitioners in the field.

To address this issue at home, I have leveraged my position in student government to advocate for my institution to hire faculty who have real-world industry experience. The majority of students in engineering and criminal justice will enter the workforce upon graduation, and it is incumbent upon schools to tailor their curriculum and instruction toward the needs of these students by hiring faculty who hold academic qualifications and also relevant professional and industry experience.

Students are perpetually the demographic that stands to make the greatest impact on the academic fields and industries they are preparing to join. We have our entire careers ahead of us, and we are in the unique position of having one foot in and one foot out of our respective industries. From this perspective, we can identify dysfunction in systems and industries that might be dismissed by those already embedded in the field and take initiative to effect real change in our organizations, institutions, and industries.

Over my tenure in student leadership, I have come to realize that nearly any challenge I face is almost certainly one a previous student leader faced during their tenure. So I readily encourage student organizations, including SPS, to maintain effective lines of communication with alumni, especially former officers. My message to alumni is this: The best way to support your SPS chapter may come after you walk the stage at graduation. The long-term health of a chapter is tied to its ability to maintain institutional memory. Alumni engagement is critical to sparking and sustaining leadership in every new generation of students that passes through an SPS chapter.