A Summer at the South Pole • Cyndia Yu

(Physics PhD Student, Stanford University || CA USA)

“I spent all of last November and December at the South Pole. I was part of a team studying the cosmic microwave background with a radio telescope. It was so unlike anything I’d experienced before, colder and drier. The sun was up the entire time I was there — it was bizarre. There are 30 or 40 scientists at the station over the summer, all living in close quarters — you definitely have to like your coworkers! You have slow internet for about three hours a day, a library with movies, a small gym. I appreciated how simple life was. In the real world you have to remember to go grocery shopping, go to meetings, people are always asking for your attention. There, you wake up, eat breakfast, walk a half-mile to the telescope in your government-issued jacket — ’Big Red’ — and go to work building your systems and running experiments. It was a unique experience and nice to have time for uninterrupted work, but I think I’d be content if I never went back.

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Physics isn’t all just thinking about black holes and string theory and writing down cool ideas about how the universe might work. I’m a graduate student studying experimental cosmology — I want to build tools to measure and understand as much from nature as we can, to ask the oldest questions about the universe: where did all of this come from? How far back in time can we see? The oldest light in the universe is the cosmic background radiation from 380,000 years after the Big Bang. And there are currently two places on Earth where you can observe cosmic microwave background precisely: the Atacama Desert or the South Pole.

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I’m undecided on what I want to do after my PhD. I know doing science would be fun as a career. But there are lots of days I wake up and think, do I really want it this badly? If I quit now, is it because I wasn’t strong enough or didn’t like it enough? Perseverance alone isn’t enough. I realized as I’ve gotten older how important it is to surround yourself with supportive people who are champions for you and your success. I think that matters so much more than how much innate talent you have or how much you want it.”