By: Brenna Cisler
I came to St. Norbert College completely undecided on a major. I thought biology sounded fun because I had always loved being active and thought working in healthcare would be right for me. I thought that business seemed exciting – I could picture myself catwalking down the hallway of a corporate office in my smartly feminine outfit as an up-and-coming businesswoman ready to make an important deal. I thought that something in news and media was my calling – I loved the idea of being a reporter traveling to interview amazing people doing extraordinary things or being a glamorous news anchor on television every night. I took classes in a variety of fields, testing out topics, but eventually decided that I wanted some science in my future. I had greatly enjoyed AP psychology in high school, so I declared my major in psychology at the end of my sophomore year.
I tried out psychology at the college level, and was accepted into an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) internship at Yale University doing psychological research for a summer. While there, I worked in two labs: the Canine Cognition Center (CCC) and the Social Cognitive Development Lab (SCD) with amazing people. Although I enjoyed my time and am incredibly grateful for such a wonderful experience, I found that I was greatly missing the type of analytical problem solving that comes with mathematics. I can remember walking past a classroom at Yale one day and seeing two students working out a calculus problem together and finding myself jealous that they knew how to solve that problem.
While on the East Coast, I took the opportunity to visit science museums in New York City, as well as the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium at Yale, and felt so awe-inspired by astronomy. In fact, I felt a curiosity for astronomy far greater than I had in my classes or research in psychology. I decided to take Calculus 1 that fall to get a taste of analytical problem solving and I loved it. I had loved physics in high school as well and felt an awe and wonder in that class, so I decided to pick up a minor in physics by completing a 5th year of my undergraduate degree to fully incorporate math and science into my work. I have been loving the content of the work and the challenge of solving math problems. I love the beauty of math and its delicate and essential role in our universe and our understanding of it, and want to be part of the journey that helps explore that. I still very much enjoy psychology, as I do most subjects, and am incredibly grateful for the wonderful professors here and lovely classmates who I met through my major, but I have found my coursework in math and physics to be more satisfying, and the large scale, big picture questions surrounding how the universe works to be more awe inspiring and exciting.
I hope to continue my physics and astronomy experience next year through a PhD program in astronomy. Grad schools are still making their admissions decisions, so exactly where I will be next year is yet to be known. Ultimately, I think that it would be fun to work in industry someday doing something related to astronomy or space research. An experience at NASA would be the dream, but there are other opportunities in that realm as well. I think that it would also be rewarding to be a professor at a small liberal arts college just like St. Norbert at some point in the future. For now, I will learn all that I can in my experience here and appreciate the opportunities that I’ve been given to explore my passions and cultivate a career path that I’m excited to venture.
