Not a Beginner Project ( College Application Essay )

I was looking for a project to work on during the summer of my freshman year. I applied to a space science camp at the University of New Hampshire called Project Smart. This camp involved developing, launching, tracking and data collection from weather balloons. I was hooked on Project Smart! To my surprise, a few weeks after I got accepted I was asked by the head of the space science program if I wanted to build a magnetometer. 

I didn’t know what a magnetometer (mag) was, nor did my high school teachers or my family. I attended a meeting discussing this new project, which went completely over my head. But I still agreed to try to build the magnetometer anyways. 

I was given a broken down cardboard box covered in packing tape, containing small bags filled with components I couldn’t name and a 83 page cryptic instruction manual with the words NOT A BEGINNER PROJECT written on the first page. Keep in mind that prior to this I had only completed the most basic circuit projects but I luckily knew how to solder. So during the early stages of building, I realized that there is a difference between building something and understanding how it actually works. 

A magnetometer is a device that measures the local fluctuations of the earth’s magnetic field. This device can detect subtle changes in the magnetic flow at ground level and detect variances like solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The plan is for each mag device to eventually operate as part of a larger array that can collect data to provide a bigger picture of how earth’s magnetic field flows. 

Over the course of two years of trial and error, I navigated this project as an independent study in the spaces that fit between school work, dance classes, chemistry club, rocketry, engineering and yearbook. I began to understand the nuances of a magnetometer from both a hardware and software perspective. 

At the end of my sophomore year, just hours after passing my driving test, I drove to the UNH campus where I subleased a room in an otherwise vacant house to spend the summer employed by the UNH physics department. I continued work on the magnetometer build and was invited to participate in a research project involving the analysis of sixteen years of satellite data from the Ulysses spacecraft. While living on my own and working on my “lab tan” (as my brother called it), I was part of a team of undergraduates researching pickup ions due to waves, using the data unique to Ulysses because of its trajectory over the sun’s poles. 

By the summer of my junior year, Our team working in the physics department at UNH had compiled enough significant event data from the satellite to send out for peer review in preparation for publishing our results. For the other project I had assembled several magnetometers from scratch. I also provided troubleshooting assistance to other students and teachers in building their own devices.Through my Mag work I was formally listed as a co-author on a paper “The Space Weather Underground: A Student-Built Array of Ground-Based Fluxgate Magnetometers in Northern New England.”

I intend to spend the coming spring and summer publishing additional papers related to the Ulysses research, and re-writing the magnetometer manual in order to make it more user friendly, for the students who follow after me. 

This fall, I was invited to attend the AGU 100 Fall Meeting to present the magnetometer paper in front of a group of scientists and educators. In my everyday life, I am not the most socially confident person, and I prefer not to speak in public. However, when I stood up at the podium during my presination session at the AGU 100, I did so without hesitation and with the confidence that only four years of work could have provided.