A Swift Kick to the Career Path

After being encouraged to get involved in research in his freshmen seminar at University Park, Adam Morgan (see previous story) introduced himself to Dr. John Nousek, the mission director of an astronomy department project that he had found interesting. Soon, he found himself part of the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer Project team, working with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the international community, helping to prepare a satellite for launch, and later, analyzing the data it produced to better understand gamma-ray bursts and, in turn, the early universe.

“I initially didn’t care for the size of Penn State, I thought I’d get lost in its size. But I found you can find a niche really quickly,” says Morgan. This niche has not only provided him with a paying job and additional credits but also an intimate look into the workings of a space mission. “It has gotten me really far…the Swift project let me see first hand what a mission would be like and helped solidify my future career goals,” he says.

Swift, a satellite equipped with three telescopes for the measurement of gamma-ray bursts, was launched into space in November of 2004. This orbiting observatory surveys outer space for gamma-ray bursts (the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and similar to those produced by a nuclear blast). Its ability to quickly focus on the origin of a burst lends the Swift satellite its name. Prior to the launch, Adam was responsible for troubleshooting the program and for helping to set up operations at the Mission Operations Center a few miles off of the University Park Campus. While he admits the pre-launch process could be tedious, now that the satellite is in space, Adam performs the data analysis tasks that originally had drawn him to the project.

Since its launch, Swift has been observing gamma-ray bursts at a rate of about 100 a year, including the second-oldest object ever seen—12-billion light years away, it is located at a time close to when the universe first began. The study of the early universe with Swift cemented Adam’s interest in the field and allowed him to be a co-author on four papers published in scholarly journals, an accomplishment that does not go overlooked on graduate-school applications.

For Adam, private industry, government, and international collaboration with academia on this project have meant regular teleconferences with the United Kingdom and even visits to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “It is nice to see how much work goes into this kind of a scientific project and how many opportunities there are to contribute to it, to work with people abroad, and to see what science is really like in other countries.” After graduating from Penn State, Adam will be getting an even closer look at what science is like abroad by attending University of Cambridge on the prestigious Marshall Scholarship.

However, for Adam it is “necessary not only to do science but to share with the general public—especially with kids.” To that end, he has been an officer of the Science Lions and has participated in AstroFest—a program of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics that puts on interactive and educational activities about astronomy and the universe during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. “Why do science if not to share it with others?” he says.

Not everyone taking an internship or cooperative-education experience will find themselves loving to do what they study. Adjustments to degrees and programs are known to follow such experiences in the field. Some students even have found on taking an internship that they so much preferred the work of another department at the company that they chose to study a completely different field for graduate study.

Adam agrees: “If you try something and you don’t like it, there’s a wealth of other things to do. Changing majors is common.” And in the wealth of opportunities in life and here at Penn Sate, his experiences have made him sure that at least he is on the right career track.