Q: What classes are you taking this semester?
A: I’m taking Observational Astronomy, and I’m taking math and physics, and also this really cool course called Civilization in Question, which is team-taught by three professors, one from history, one from philosophy, and one from classical studies. I really like that because you get three different perspectives. It’s a challenging class — challenging in the sense that it pushes you to examine our society’s ideals and to look at how those ideals evolved. Right now, we’re reading the five books of Moses from the Old Testament. I never really liked reading the Bible, but the way we’re doing it in this class is actually fascinating.
Q: So you’re really taking quite a broad range of classes…
A: I think that’s why you go to a school like Vassar. I took a cognitive science class and a women’s studies class. That was one of my favorites. It was team-taught also. One of the professors was from the Classics Department, and the other is chair of the Sociology Department, and it was great because they’re so different, and we got two perspectives on everything we read. I read a lot of stuff that I still reference — like Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality.” Really interesting, one of my favorite essays ever. And I took Problems of Philosophy, which was another one of my favorite classes.
Q: How did you get interested in astronomy?
A: I’ve always been interested in it. I had a telescope when I was much younger. And I tried to start an astronomy club in high school, but that didn’t really work out. My first semester here, I took Life in the Universe with Professor Deborah Elmegreen, and I loved it. It was one of the choices for the freshman writing requirement. She’s just such a wonderful professor. It was a lot of work, but it was by far my favorite class. And then second semester I took Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology, which was equally interesting, and I knew that that was what I wanted to do.
Q: Weren’t you an URSI (Undergraduate Research Summer Institute) fellow after freshman year?
A: I was. I had a great time. I worked with Professor Fred Chromey, who is equally as wonderful as Professor Elmegreen, and three other students. We lived in Main Building over the summer, and it was great because I became really good friends with the people I was working with, and I got really close to my professor, who’s so smart but also so fun to work with, and the best boss ever.
Q: So what was your URSI project?
A: We were studying five quasars. A quasar is an active galactic nucleus, which is basically a super massive black hole in the very center of the galaxy that’s billions and billions of light years away. They’re important to study because they’re sort of a window into the early universe. The light from these quasars is reaching us 10 billion light years later, so it’s like looking at a picture of the universe 10 billion years ago.
Q: What was a typical URSI day like?
A: Around 8:00pm, we’d meet at the observatory and we’d do sky flats. That’s where you take an image of a totally blank sky that you can use to make corrections in the images you’re going to take later. And then we’d wait until it got really dark, and then we’d start taking pictures of the five quasars using different filters. It’d take about an hour for each quasar. And then we’d send the data back to the lab in Sanders, and then we’d go to sleep at around 6:00am. Around 1:00pm, we’d get up and go over to Sanders to analyze the data — basically measuring changes in brightness — and then looking at the light curves. At the end of the summer, we wrote two papers on our observations, and we presented them at Keck, which is the Northeastern Astronomy Conference, and then again at the URSI Symposium at Vassar.
Q: You’re also a cellist — is that your main extracurricular activity?
A: Yes, it takes up a lot of time, but I really like it. I’m studying with Sophie Shao, who is am amazing cellist. And I’m in the orchestra, which rehearses twice a week. When you audition for the orchestra, the conductor, Eduardo Navega, asks if you want to be in a chamber group. So that’s my formal chamber group. I’m in a quintet, and we’re playing a piece by Schubert which is really pretty. We’re directed by Eduardo, who’s great — I love him. And then I’m also in two other chamber groups which we just set up ourselves — a trio and a quartet. And that’s really cool, because we pick the pieces and we get very excited about what we’re playing. We can literally work on two measures for 20 minutes. This semester we’re playing Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8.
Q: So why did you choose Vassar?
A: Vassar was my number one choice for a really long time. My aunt had just put her two daughters through college, so she kind of knew the whole process. My freshman year of high school, she brought me out here and took me to Princeton and NYU, but I really just liked Vassar the most. It was a gorgeous fall day, and my tour guide was really funny.
Q: Did you apply Early Decision.
A: I didn’t. I actually applied to 15 schools. Yeah — it was a lot. There was a lot of tension in my house all through the month of December. But I was really happy when I got the big envelope from Vassar.
