Fermilab - Day 3

Our third day at Fermilab was definitely the day we had all been waiting for.  We started off our day with a group photo right in front of the iconic Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall, permanently leaving our mark in Fermilab history as the 2013 Davis-Bahcall Scholars.  After our photo shoot, we moved to a classroom setting where we met Dr. Liz Buckley-Geer, who talked with us about her “Dark Energy Survey.”  During the talk, we learned a lot about dark energy, which in summary I would say is essentially “We know nothing about dark energy.”  The most interesting thing, I would say, was Dr. Buckley-Geer’s project which is called the Dark Energy Survey (DES) in which they use large digital cameras in Chile to measure galaxies and look for the gravitational effects of dark energy.

After our talk came the most anticipated moment of our three day experience at Fermilab, which was our tour of D0 and the famous Tevatron.  We started off by crawling around the D0 detector, which was unbelievably intricate and stunning to say the least.  Then it was time to go inside the much anticipated Tevatron, which inspired nothing but sheer awe and amazement.  After this inside tour, I was convinced that these machines at Fermilab are some of the greatest feats of human creativity and engineering.

To finish off our final day, we met with two Fermilab scientists.  First, we met with a man named Ralph who is a versatile mechanical engineer at the lab, but is also involved with a new proposed experiment named “Project X,” which is planned to be completed in 2021.  Project X will be a new proton accelerator complex that will provide the world of particle physics with new tools to explore a new frontier in physics.  Next we talked with a physicist names Dr. Don Lincoln who taught us a lot about the career of a physicist at a national laboratory.  Dr. Lincoln actually gave me one fantastic piece of advice to take home at the end of the day.  He told us all that choice of our undergraduate university was not important, and that we don’t need to find the biggest, best, and most expensive college.  What does matter is our choice of graduate school.  If we get the choice, it is far better to choose the most difficult and most challenging school possible with great and innovative research.  Graduate research is the most important tool for our future careers and lives, and that is something that I will not soon forget.

-Eric Roach, Sioux Falls, SD