Karmela Padavic-Callaghan is a physics reporter at New Scientist. Her writing has been featured in Wired, Slate, and Scientific American, among other publications.
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Growing up in a small Croatian town, my main exposure to science was watching my father, an electrical engineer, fix broken appliances. From him, I knew what engineering was—building and fixing things. In school, I learned that math is about solving countless problems about dividing up candy or counting combinations of pants and shirts. It was all fun, but I didn’t overthink it.
I took my first physics class in the seventh grade, and it knocked me off my feet.
Physics was different. Here were some numbers, of the familiar kind, and some operations, also familiar, but now they meant something. Something as tangible as a ball rolling down a hill or a penny falling from the top of a skyscraper. Math could, apparently, help us understand the physical reality around us. Immediately, I decided to become a physicist.
Ten years later, when I was starting graduate school at Illinois, I still had that sense of awe. I had left Croatia, first for a boarding school in New York (where I polished my English and took standardized tests so a college with a strong physics program would accept me), then for the University of Chicago (where I learned abstract math and sat in research meetings so a school with a strong graduate physics program would accept me), and had finally landed in Urbana-Champaign. A mentor from college told me it was a place where I could really immerse myself in physics. My new adviser presented me with a cornucopia of ideas when I first met her.
We were going to send extremely cold atoms into space and shape them into bubbles, we were going to find fractals by shooting potassium gas in a small glass box with lasers, we were going to find special quantum effects in a chain of fidget spinners… This was better than anything I could have imagined in the seventh grade.
I never fell out of love with physics, nor did physics fail me. But turning it into a profession and a livelihood was difficult, not because I lost my enthusiasm and curiosity, but because everyone who told me enthusiasm and curiosity would be enough might have been even more idealistic than I was. Now, as a science journalist and a former physics teacher, I am grateful for the way studying at Illinois rewired my brain to think like a scientist and for all the incredible lessons in what the physical world is, which I absorbed. I can also now see how my often having been among the minority with respect to my nationality, gender, and sexuality created moments that dampened my excitement and made me feel like I needed to be more small and hard.
When I came to Illinois, having left my college study groups behind me, I thought I’d also left behind the experience of having my ideas affirmed only after a man repeated them. But I still got talked over often enough to remember it.
No one ever told me I could not be a physicist, but colleagues noted that I didn’t look like one. No one ever told me I was not respectable, but my teaching reviews called me condescending and referenced my clothes, all in one breath. No one ever told me my research was not good, but friendly faculty occasionally remarked that they would not let their own students work on what I was working on. No one ever told me I could not have a life outside of physics, but after I got married, questions about my postgraduate career stopped flowing as freely.
Graduate students are trained to be problem solvers, and I wanted to solve these troublesome moments that became an inextricable part of what being a physicist and doing physics was like for me. This resulted in some of the most nourishing experiences I had in graduate school, because many of my peers also wanted a little more kindness, support, and inclusion, and we only had to find each other.
I was an early member and was later part of the leadership team of the Guidance for Physics Students (GPS) mentoring program. I co-organized the first two Women and Gender Minorities in Physics retreats and put together workshops about everything from CV writing to what intersectionality means. Other student leaders became dear friends. I traveled across the country for the Access Network Assembly and eventually also co-organized it at Illinois.
At Illinois, I learned as much about community as I did about mean field theory or the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and the former made the latter possible. From my involvement in graduate student–labor organizing on campus, I learned about a broader need for solidarity, beyond my immediate community.
All of these lessons are still with me.
At my PhD defense, I devoted a few slides to acknowledging how much all this work improved my graduate school experience and me as a person. And, after graduate school, when I had to summarize it in a way that a potential employer could understand, words like “organizer” and “community facilitator” sounded too cold for what it had been—had meant.
The groups I worked with did not solve all equity and inclusion problems in the Physics Department—we probably just scratched their surface. Still, I left feeling hopeful because I could see that we’d nudged some changes into being. Some were visible and structural—groups like GPS became a fixture in our community, and the department leadership took action toward making admissions more equitable and buildings more comfortable for more bodies. Some changes were less tangible, like the feeling that we now had more ongoing conversations—and more honest conversations—about how who you are and how you identify affects your individual experience of becoming a physicist. And that we were now a department that intentionally tried to make room for all its students to show up as full people.
These days, I am always on the phone with physicists, interviewing them about research in my role as a physics reporter at New Scientist. Inevitably I mention that I also used to be a physicist, and we end up talking about Illinois. Almost everyone has either been to Illinois or has a dear colleague or acquaintance there. I often say that it was a very singular place to be trained at. I never mean to imply that it was an easy one, but rather that it was often a home for people that wanted to, and could, find excitement and deliberation for both incredible science and for each other.
I still frequently get awestruck by a physics paper or an experiment.