Sabrina McDowell
Physics
Palo Alto, Calif.
What was your favorite class and why?
My favorite quote in the entire world is from Schrodinger about quantum: “I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” Every day, I think about the fact that these poor, poor scientists just kept discovering things that broke their models, and I am inspired by their tenacity and adaptability to reshape their thinking again and again. If this major has taught me anything, it’s that a first try will almost always be wrong. Learning is the iterative process of reviewing mistakes and accounting for them the next time around. Also, according to quantum mechanics, if I put a sock in a dryer there’s a (small) probability that it will escape. Now that’s a practical application of scientific theory I can get behind.
Further, I enjoyed the imaginative nature of Quantum mechanics and I love the whimsy of wave equations. Finding the familiar equations of mechanics when taking the classical limit is like finding your best friend in a crowd. And deciding that you’re ready to bet your problem set on a shaky approximation and then finding out you were right to do so is like Christmas: your gift from Santa is a Gaussian function and it’s due at midnight.
What is your main extracurricular activity and why is it important to you?
My main extracurricular activity is staying at home in my pajamas. It just so happens that my house includes a dance studio, three pianos, a ceramics studio, a painting studio and a sewing shop as well as some of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Living at Risley Residential College has been the highlight of my college career and has allowed me to engage with so many different hobbies in an amazingly communal environment where we can build off one anothers' skills and inspiration. For example, I’m not the best painter, but I’ve trained in ballet since before I can remember. So I taught my friend ballet and she taught me how to paint.
Risley is an amazing place to live. It’s also dangerous and will eat all of your time if you’re not careful. My final semester alone I got roped into acting for a show, cleaning the library and helping run a thousand and one events including Wizard’s Feast, an event where we take advantage of our dorm’s wonderful castle-like architecture to stage a fairly decent recreation of the Hogwarts great hall. There’s always something going on when I go downstairs and I’m only ever five minutes away from getting roped into it.
My main extracurricular activities are ballet, taking care of the dorm’s library, crochet, painting, trying and failing to throw ceramics and running a fake coffee shop every Thursday. And I do every single one of these in my dorm in pajamas.
What Cornell memory do you treasure the most?
When the solar eclipse happened, the Cornell Astronomical Society chartered buses to the Rochester solar eclipse festival. There were live bands, food trucks, merch and an incredible amount of cloud coverage. All day. Actually, I don’t think I saw the sun once that entire day. Instead I saw a band spend two hours playing nothing but songs about science and the sun. I saw my friends trying to find a light source they could see through solar eclipse glasses. I saw a muddy field of people shouting and cheering at a clouded sky like it was a sports event. And it did still get dark, so I saw street lights light up all over the park and birds stop singing 'cause they thought it was night. On our way back home, the traffic was backed up for miles, and it struck me that every one of those cars held people who had gone to see the eclipse with me. And on my phone were the messages of family and friends who weren’t at Rochester, but were watching the eclipse nonetheless. We had all slogged our way out of the house to stare at a cloudy sky together. And I felt so thankful to be in that traffic jam together with such wonderful friends and classmates in such a wonderful, global moment.
What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of?
At Cornell I am most proud of my work on a senior thesis in physics education research (PER). It’s amazing to look back at my sophomore year, cleaning data and taking the first steps in categorizing student responses, and then seeing where I am now, with concrete findings I can present and write about, hopefully to be published.
My two favorite parts of my work were getting to experiment with training AI models and designing graphs to display my results. Training a large language model is a really interesting way of interacting with the English language. Analyzing the output of the model to find trends in the errors in its predictions, I would see how some key words were taken by the model to mean some entirely different homograph, warping student responses. It was amusing. My other favorite activity is designing graphs. In order to display our data, my graphs required a ton of different layers and colors. Picking these colors I would aim for the overall graph to look like bright orange shells washing up on a beach or flowers. One of my grad students said the flower one looked like toenails and I haven’t forgiven them yet. Though it is perhaps not the most efficient use of my time, I loved setting a color scheme for my paper and then working it into all of my posters and presentations.
Working in PER has also shaped my education in that it has lent me a sense of belonging and continuity at Cornell. It sounds silly when I say it, but having a dedicated desk in the office was a timeline altering event. Having a dedicated space that was always available and ready for me to do work outside of my dorm did wonders for my work-life balance as well as my focus. I have done some of my best test prep, essay writing and problem set solving at that desk. Further, working on the same project for such a long time lent my education a sense of continuous progress that courses which restart every semester lack. Seeing myself progress slowly but surely through one large project was much more rewarding than the weekly assignments of normal course work. I learned more in depth and more deliberately about PER than any other subject and, though it may be an uncommon choice, I am really glad I chose to stick with the same lab my entire time here.
Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most?
The person who most influenced my education is my physics study buddy Emma. Emma and I took the intro physics sequence together and were inseparable in class and out. Emma has a marvelously unapologetic way of asking questions and continuing to question until they’re satisfied with the information they’ve learned. We ended up in different classes later on, but I tried to bring the same attitude to our new office hours. Whereas before I worked only in broad strokes of intuition, I tried to imitate Emma’s attention to detail and made sure to ask my professors about even the smallest gaps in my understanding. Sometimes we’d look foolish at office hours, insisting that there was a flaw in the reasoning of a well known theory or just staring sadly at an equation we didn’t understand; this too we refused to apologise for. Instead, we began to envision our persistent badgering of professors and TAs alike as an extended bit. We went as far as to sew matching jester costumes to wear to class on Halloween. At that point questions I had previously been too embarrassed to ask were a point of pride and we went as far as to ask other people’s questions for them during lecture if they were too shy to ask themselves. We branded ourselves the CEO and CFO of Idiots Incorporated, the professional business of adding whimsy to whimsy-less course work. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing that we and 10 of our friends ordered matching sweatshirts with those words printed on them, but it was certainly formative. Because of Emma, I learned to be persistent and detailed about my work, I learned not to be afraid of looking foolish, and I learned how to design and make custom T-shirts. I think that’s pretty good for a study buddy.
Every year, our faculty nominate graduating Arts & Sciences students to be featured as part of our Extraordinary Journeys series.Read more about the Class of 2025.
