Name: Maddy Brosius
Class Year: 2024
Major: Astrophysics & Mathematics
Minor: French
Hometown: Arlington, MA
Internship Organization: Haverford College
Job Title: Researcher
Location: Haverford, PA
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
I’m assisting Professor Dan Grin with his research at Haverford College. Most days, that involves troubleshooting and modifying existing code to test different models for the effect of the fine-structure constant on properties of the 21-cm hydrogen line. I work with a team of students, each of us working on different portions of code to approach this project from slightly different angles, with my specific project focusing on redshifts around the “dark age” epoch of the universe (shortly before the formation of structures like galaxies). There’s a lot of making plots, comparing them, remaking them with different data, and trying to use our collaborative knowledge of astrophysics to explain the results. When I’m not coding, I spend my time combing through scientific articles to help us understand and define the physics we’re using or making presentations to share my findings at our weekly meetings.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I knew that I wanted to spend my summer doing research with a professor since I expect to do a lot more of that throughout my senior year and into grad school, and Professor Grin’s work hit the niche of astrophysics and computation that both interested me and suited my skills. I had taken his Computational Physics class the previous semester, and it felt like it opened up a whole new world to me in terms of using computers to help solve physics problems that are difficult or impossible to solve analytically. I really wanted a better understanding of the type of work an astrophysics researcher might do on a day-to-day basis, and this felt like an amazing opportunity to do so.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
The most important skill that I’ve developed here, other than the coding itself, is how to present relevant information to other people. Due to the nature of our projects (and due to “The Entire Universe” being such an enormous topic of study that it would take centuries for one person to learn all of the relevant skills), I can never assume that the other students have the exact physics background to understand what I’m doing, and similarly, I know that they’re using physics concepts that I may be unfamiliar with. Regardless, we all use our weekly meetings to update each other on projects and share results, which means I need to know my audience and figure out what condensed background information would be the most helpful. That skill isn’t easy – in our first few meetings, I gave them too much background and ran out of time to discuss my research itself. But with practice, I’ve gotten better at figuring out exactly what they need to know. I know that I’ll be able to apply this type of concise information-weeding not only for the remainder of this internship but throughout the rest of my classes and into the workforce as well.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced at your internship?
This internship has given me a very quick and very thorough lesson on how to fail. It’s not a shortcoming on my part or on the part of anyone involved in the internship – the very practice of researching involves at least three times as much failure as it does success. For every successful result I get, there are multiple failed trials: models that didn’t work out, data that didn’t make sense, and equations that contradict each other. The point of research is that we don’t know exactly where we’re going, so we have to explore incorrect routes as well as correct ones, but that was a frustrating lesson to have to learn. Even now, it’s difficult not to get discouraged when my code has been flashing error messages at me for the past five hours, but I know that when I do produce a result, it will be all the more satisfying for having taken so much effort.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.