This past weekend, I traveled up to Boston for the first time, and visited some very good friends from my undergrad days at Stevens. I had lived with this group in Hoboken for a few years, but after our graduation, we became more geographically dispersed, so it had been a while since we all were together in the same place.
Despite the time away, it almost immediately felt like the undergrad days of living with them. This is in large part because we have very similar interests—namely, in mathematics, physics, and computer science—and have continued on career paths in these areas after getting our bachelor’s degrees from Stevens. Coming from similar STEM-focused backgrounds and working on similar areas now, many of our discussions featured technical details of our career pursuits in research, or other interesting things we had learned about these fields.
I absolutely loved this experience. It reminded me of how a shared passion can bring people together and form lasting bonds. It also makes for intellectually stimulating interactions, learning about new research topics and questions that piques curiosity and excitement for the work we are all doing. As I traveled home, I began to miss my friends. But I also felt high degrees of motivation and fulfillment as I continue to go about my research work, looking forward to making more progress and thinking of my friends from afar as they progress further too.
Additionally, the meeting place was symbolic — Boston is home to not just a subset of this group of friends (the reason this subset could host is actually why we met up there) but also to some of the leading universities and research institutions in the world. STEM has also come into sharper focus in other aspects of life — for one, funding disputes and cuts arising from government attacks on universities, or the federal shutdown leading to delayed experiments, has brought STEM research into the realm of politics. There is also an economic aspect to this, as companies race to develop increasingly powerful AI models. As an interesting aside, I read on my train ride home from Boston a piece on AI data centers in The New Yorker that discussed some of the intricacies of matrix multiplication.
Even this exciting economic story features its darker developments, surrounding the enormous energy consumption of developing large language models, or the ethics of generative AI. And living in a country with a dysfunctional government that nonetheless has already greatly harmed the financial stability and academic freedom necessary to support universities, is a deeply anguished state of affairs.
Because of all that, it’s especially important to cultivate friendships and community. And having technical discussions about unstable singularities of the Euler equations, or simulating excited states of heavy nuclei and fluid flows around an underwater unmanned vehicle, or requiring a special glue to augment a new detector with photonic crystals (yes, my friend group and I talked about all this stuff!), provides a great source of excitement, motivation, and optimism, even in the most challenging times.
Many of you share this deep passion for STEM, and all of us have deep passions for something. I encourage all of us to find new ways to share these passions for each other, or to keep up the impressive efforts we’ve already made in doing so. This is a radical form of engagement with others, discussing the most exciting and challenging ideas, and the tight bonds a community like this has is massively self-reinforcing, building a whole far greater than the sum of its (already formidable) parts. And even after we graduate, we should maintain this growing community of Stevens students, staff, and alumni, tackling new challenges together, and fulfilling our school motto to muster through adversity and reach the stars.
