Study Physics at Otago

Marisol Hunter:

Hi, I’m Marisol Hunter and I’m studying a Bachelor of Science majoring in Physics.

I chose to come to Otago because I think Dunedin is a really great place to be a student. It’s really student-orientated. It’s a small city so it’s really accessible even without a car, and it’s also really easy to get out of the city and up into the hills or the bush.

I study physics because I find it really exciting to learn about reality on the most fundamental level. I also really enjoy the problem-solving aspect of it, where you can take a theory and apply it to a physical system to predict what will happen.

Professor Neils Kjærgaard:

Physics attempts to uncover the clockworks of mother nature and describe how the world works at a very fundamental level. Why is this important? Well, understanding physics underpins all modern technology, including MRI scanners that you will encounter in the hospital looking inside your body, and also cell phones including its touch display, its camera, and the wireless communication abilities.

You may be able to build something like a stone axe using the lived exterior experience of a Stone Age person, but something like a cell phone requires securing new knowledge in a very systematic way and recording it efficiently using the language of physics and math.

In your first year of physics, you will be upskilled in math and you will also be doing our guided tour of physics, which includes many of the topics you have encountered in high school, but also radically new concepts such as the special relativity theory by Einstein.

The reason I do physics is I like solving problems, and I think it’s fascinating. Doing physics lets me tap into a vast body of knowledge out there which I can then use to solve problems at hand. If I look up how someone else built an atomic clock, I can build an atomic clock. If I then improve on this atomic clock, I can then put my thoughts into this language of physics and math, and people can then take my solution and run with it.

When I talk to young people, I typically don’t focus too much on the careers available to them afterwards, but tell them to live in the moment and actually just do what you think is fun. So if you think problem-solving is fun, then physics is certainly something you should consider.

If I look at the mates I shared an office with when I was a student: one is a patent attorney, one works in hospital with radiation therapy, one is a product manager of a major electronics consumer company, one is a high school teacher. So you see there’s a vast number of careers out there you can tap into.

But really what I want to say is that some people take a year out to climb Everest. But at Otago, we have these state-of-the-art facilities where you get this once-in-a-lifetime chance to really work on something exciting and something you can tell your grandchildren about.

So if this made you curious, please do get in contact with me, because I’m always happy to talk to young people who are passionate about problem-solving.