A Different Face of Physics

I am not the most talkative when it comes to people I don’t know, and my appearance often precedes me.

This became increasingly clear to me as I stood alongside another junior in the Physics Club as we oversaw the table at our school’s club fair. I did not have high hopes for our club as frankly, not many people are interested in physics; underclassmen, I thought, would be intimidated by the daunting new subject, while most upperclassmen found (or find, for juniors currently taking the class) physics notoriously boring and difficult. Additionally, we had a conspicuous lack of snacks compared to the other tables: we borrowed a variety from our friends. As I stood, smiling quite plainly, wearing my typical attire of lace-trimmed, fluffy dress and pink patterned tights, I could not help but think that we would not have many new members for our email list, and even less who would attend the meetings.

Ram, the fellow junior, gave an entire elevator pitch to everyone who stopped by, which seemed to work quite well. I occasionally spoke to the people around us, most particularly Peter, one of my friends hosting the Philosophy Club table besides us. The Philosophy Club was entirely populated by talkative junior guys with the occasional underclassman. I proposed to Peter that I would exchange his email for my own signing up.

Otherwise, I acted mostly as a representative who stood aside, nodded, and, I think, acted as an indication to girls that they should not be intimidated. I was really pleased with the amount of emails we collected, and even more surprised that a large portion (although certainly not the majority) consisted of underclassmen girls. I know that when I was a freshman, with hardly any knowledge of physics, I never would have signed up for such a club (actually, the Physics Club didn’t really exist at that point), but some type of feminine role model may have swayed me. I actually like being atypical in my appearance in STEM fields in the sense that I may be an outstanding (literally) role model to some young person who may otherwise feel too intimidated to join.