Reidyn Wingate, 2024 APS Education Programs Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hi everyone! My name is Reidyn Wingate (he/him), and I’m super excited to be the APS Education Programs Intern for the Summer of 2024! I am a rising senior studying Physics at MIT, and after graduation I hope to pursue a doctorate degree in Physics or Physics Education. I’m really passionate about Physics Education in particular because I think there is something so valuable and profound in teaching others to learn about and explore the world around them, and I’m super grateful to have the opportunity to work with the APS this summer to do just that.

Outside of academics, I have a lot to keep me busy. I play Wide Receiver on the MIT Football Team, I perform in many different ensembles around campus as a vocalist, percussionist, and composer, and I’m active in a lot of Diversity and Outreach programs. When I’m not running around, you can find me reading, playing video games, and watching movies.

I am extremely fortunate to have this opportunity, and I’m looking forward to taking you all on this journey with me!

Internship

Host: American Physical Society

Internship Blog

Good Morning DC (Week One)

Good Morning DC!

Good Morning History,

Walking down the same streets as some of our country’s greatest leaders,

Passing by the scenes of some of our nation’s greatest triumphs and most devastating defeats,

Getting a front row seat to centuries of stories from the comfort of my dorm window.

Good Morning Responsibility,

Being a part of an organization committed to changing the world for the better,

Being surrounded by people who are so talented and so passionate and so humble,

Being in a room where people want to hear my voice,

Being mentored by leaders whose number one priority is to make sure I feel like I belong,

Welcoming me,

Respecting me,

Loving me as one of their own.

Good Morning to Friends,

To late nights talking and smiling and laughing with them,

To silly jokes and silly stories and silly games and silly movies with silly people,

To football and spikeball and frisbee on the National Mall,

The Washington Monument towering in the near distance,

Smiling down on us from above.

Good Morning Fire Alarms.

Lots and lots of Fire Alarms.

Good Morning Adventure,

Traveling around the city at 2 AM with people I respect, admire, and cherish

Leaving the subway stop and wandering around aimlessly until I remember where I am supposed to be going,

Eating the largest slice of pizza I’ve ever seen (I promise you, it’s absolutely massive),

Trying to absorb a lifetime of art and history and culture in a mere 10 weeks.

Good Morning Opportunity!

Opportunity to combine my love of physics with my passion for humanity,

Opportunity for my work to help give voices to those who historically remain unheard,

Opportunity to forge relationships that will last the rest of my life,

Opportunity to make this wonderful city my new home.

Good Morning Opportunity

Good Morning Adventure

Good Morning Fire Alarms

Good Morning DC,

My New Home

I offered a pretzel roll to NASA (Week Two)

This is Dr. Mark Clampin .

He is the director of astrophysics at NASA.

This is a pretzel roll .

It is delicious.

At a lecture led by Dr. Clampin and Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather, I couldn’t keep my hands off of these things, and with a couple minutes left before the presentation I found myself with too many rolls to finish. So I somewhat humorously approached the NASA director and offered him one; we laughed about it and then headed to the lecture.

“Sometimes we need a big enough telescope to see the important things”

That was one of the first things Dr. Mather said. Of course, he was speaking literally, discussing the possibility of building scopes and scanners that could one day identify life on other planets. But this really made me want to take a step back and look at the big picture. Look through the big telescope, per sé.

For a while now I’ve had this question in the back of my mind: “What makes people like physics?” For people who are already physicists, what was it that helped them realize this is what they want to pursue? And, perhaps more difficult to answer, for people who want nothing to do with physics, is there anything that would convince them to give it a try?

This question is the reason I joined this program as the APS Education Intern.

Whenever someone asks me what I major in and I tell them Physics, everyone always reacts the same way: “Wow I could never do that” or “You must be a genius or something” or “Physics was my least favorite class, I don’t know how you do it”. It doesn’t matter what school they went to or what level of education they have, it’s always the same. There seems to be such a stigma around physics that scares people away before they even want to give it a try.

Yet

It seems like, almost paradoxically, physics is the most popular it has ever been. YouTubers like VSauce and Veritasium, who have channels dedicated to physics, get tens of millions of viewers every week. The most popular movies and shows all seem to be about time travel and quantum physics. But the same millions who are going out of their way to consume physics content cannot seem to stand being in an actual physics classroom. What’s up with that?

It’s my job to figure that out. I’ll be working with the American Physical Society to create personas, essentially characters representing your typical student in physics. I’ll be conducting surveys and interviews with young physics students, including my fellow interns, and combine the core ideas to create 3-6 personas that can help answer questions like: how do we connect with someone who engages in physics through social media? or what are some motivations and resources for a student who loves physics but doesn’t plan on getting a graduate degree in physics? By talking with people about physics and getting to get a glimpse into their goals, their motivations, their inspirations, I feel like I can get a little closer to building my big telescope.

After the lecture, Dr. Clampin walked up to me, shook my hand, and told me it was great meeting me, before he was escorted away to do whatever a director at NASA does.

I hope he looks back one day and smiles about the kid who offered him a pretzel roll.

Bonus Goodies:

A Playful Summer (Week Three)

A couple weeks ago, Muji said something funny while the interns were fooling around in the office: “APS must stand for ‘A Playful Summer’”.

Given I spent most of Friday learning how to play Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train ” using Boomwhackers, I’m inclined to agree.

Boomwhackers are the cool new instrument on the block, plastic tubes that will play a specific pitch once you smack the ground or hit your best friend with it. We’ll be using these marvelous music-makers as a demonstration for our volunteer event Astronomy on the Mall next weekend, showing how we can use the physics of sound waves to make pipes that resonate with a certain frequency, or pitch, that we can then use to play songs.

Making music together with others has been one of the cornerstones of my life. There’s something special about it. It’s all physics. I vibrate my vocal chords in a certain way, and the person to the left of me vibrates theirs in a slightly different way, and then the sound waves bounce around and interfere and amplify until suddenly, there’s music. The waves somehow transcend the physics and become meaningful.

This weekend I went back to NJ for a choir reunion, and I got to see some of my friends whom I haven’t seen in years. In some cases we didn’t know what to say; too much had happened in too little time and we simply didn’t know where to start. So we let the music do the talking. And we sang together and we made music together and it was like we never left. There were lots of memories. Lots of tears.

Lots of music.

Back in DC, I eventually came to the realization that I simply don’t have enough hands to play Crazy Train by myself, so I recruited some of the other interns to try it out with me. I’m not sure if “music” is what you can call the end result, but whatever it is, we’re making it together.

Gray (Week Four)

Since I’m writing this from America’s capital, we will be spelling it with an “A”, not an “E”. Sorry Brits, around here we call it

Gray.

That’s the color of the evening sky as I write this. The sun has set, taken its leave, but the pitch black hasn’t quite replaced it yet. In its stead is a wispy shadow, the clouds aglow with the memory of the sun’s last kiss, turning the sky into a warm, resounding

Gray.

That’s the color of getting older. I feel like a lot of people in my life have been doing that recently. This past Wednesday on Juneteenth my younger brother turned 17, and by some stroke of miracle we were able to spend it together despite living hours apart. He loves baseball, so we were able to get him a

Gray Nationals shirt that he wore to the game against the Diamondbacks, where we watched the Nats win 3-1. It’s bittersweet seeing him grow up. I’m so proud of the man he’s becoming, but so upset when I have to slightly raise up my chin to talk to him because he’s tall and grown and not my baby bro anymore. After we hugged goodbye and parted ways, I went back to the dorm to celebrate another birthday, this time one of the interns, one of my dear friends Charles who was turning the big 21. 15 of us were gathered around the table as Charles sliced up a delicious yellow cake topped with white and

Gray powder. The following night we went out on the town to celebrate. I threw on my

Gray drawstring shirt and my

Gray khaki shorts and my

Gray low-top shoes and headed out for another adventure, where we laughed and we danced and we joked about how Charles is becoming an old man, and somewhere hidden in those jokes was a genuine understanding that one day our knees will weaken from years of playing and dancing and celebrating. And our faces will wrinkle and form valleys of smiles and laughter and memories. And our hair will pepper and fade and dry up, leaving behind a desert of

Gray.

I think the color gets a bad rap. It’s always seen as bleak or boring, but I think there is beauty in it. It’s very neutral. Very calm. It can complement any color or go with any outfit, and interestingly enough, some of my favorite things seem to match those 50 Shades. It’s the color of the

Gray cup of water I’m currently drinking from or the

Gray sherpa hoodie I’m currently wearing or the

Gray laptop from APS I’m currently writing on. Me and this laptop have gone through a lot lately. If you remember my persona project , these last weeks have seen great progress. I’ve started the process of interviewing my fellow interns, and it has been an extremely powerful experience getting to hear their passions and their goals and their stories, and being able to package their cooperation into resources that have the potential to empower countless people like us, giving them more agency over their learning and their life. It’s great. And hey, you can’t say “great” without

Gray.

That’s the color of change. When day becomes night and boys become men and fire becomes ash, in the metamorphosis is a powerful, profound, yet quiet gray.