Below are testimonies about the program from several of our alumni along with a brief biography:
Kyle Butler-Moore, a physics graduate of 1986, earned his Ph. D. in nuclear physics
from Vanderbilt University. Here is what he says about his physics studies:
I graduated with honors in physics from Mississippi College in 1986. The
educational experience I remember most is when Dr. Bill Nettles accompanied me to
Vanderbilt University over a Christmas break so that we could perform
research for my honors paper in nuclear physics. That research experience was not at
all like the well-choregraphed laboratory experiments that accompany a
first-year physics course. Real research is messy, and by no means is the answer
known from the start! Principally because of the challenging and rewarding
experience in the physics honors program did I choose to attend graduate school at
Vanderbilt.
After obtaining my Ph.D. degree from Vanderbilt, I held several short-term
postdoctoral positions in universities and at a national laboratory. Upon the
birth of my daughter, I decided to break with the academic career path and
pursue a career in industry. Raytheon made me an offer, although it required
moving my family to California. We have recently relocated to Huntsville, AL
where I hold the position of Senior Research Analyst with an aerospace and
military subcontractor company, Dynetics, Inc.
Many of the skills I utilize almost daily had their genesis at Mississippi
College. Graduate school exposes you to more difficult problems and thereby you
gain valuable, marketable experience. However, the completion of a rigorous
undergraduate program is sufficient evidence for many recruiters that you can
succeed at a technically demanding job. Dynetics, for instance, recruits
primarily electrical engineering and physics baccalaureates.
Whether your choice is academia or industry, the core physics courses taught
at MC should be good preparation for future challenges. Having taken both
routes for a little while, I'd say that the most valuable courses are those which
demand a computational component, preferably at least one course that
requires demonstrable knowledge of a structured language (e.g., C/C++) and another
that uses a 'meta' language (e.g., Matlab or Mathematica). Of course, I'd
highly recommend making an open-ended research project an integral part of your
undergraduate physics education.
Terry Reeves, a physics graduate of 1982 from Pearl, MS, earned his Ph. D. in particle physics
from Vanderbilt University. He is currently a Senior Software Developer at Aspect Communications in
Brentwood, TN, supporting a workforce management product which is used by call centers to
forecast call volumes, call handle times, required staff, creation of schedules,
assign employees to schedules. He also collaborates with his graduate researcher advisor,
Dr. Robert Panvini, to run Monte Carlo simulations for the BaBar collaboration on a small cluster of
Linux machines at Vanderbilt. Here is what Terry has to say about his physics education:
My physics background has helped me in a number of ways. First, it
helped sharpen my problem solving skills. Second, as a student and as a
postdoc, I spent a lot of time in front of computers. I naturally
gravitated to the software side of things. Third, as an elementary
particle physicist and a member of one of the larger collaborations, I
was exposed to working on software as a part of a larger team. Finally,
my current projects at work require some knowledge of probability and
statistics, numerical methods, and Monte Carlo simulations which I was
exposed to as a physicist.
Greg Tackett, a physics graduate of 1982,is the Senior Engineer
for Distributed Simulation with the US Army Aviation and Missile Research Development,
and Engineering Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He has worked for the
Department of Defense since 1982 in the field of Modeling and Simulation (M&S)
and is a leader in academic and professional initiatives to establish M&S as a
recognized profession with a defined body of knowledge and standardized curricula.
He has gone back to school to work on a Masters degree in Computer Science with
specialty in M&S from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) and teaches a
continuing education class at UAH on Interactive and Interoperable M&S.
His current and past memberships include various Army M&S senior advisory groups,
the Military Applications Society (MAS), Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization
(SISO), Military Operations Research Society (MORS), Defense M&S Office (DMSO)
Architecture Management Group, charter membership in the Tennessee Valley High Level
Architecture Users Group, and co-chair of the Alabama M&S Council Technology Committee.
He is an associate editor of the Transactions of the Society of Modeling and Simulation
International, and the Journal for Defense Modeling and Simulation. Greg has received
the 2002 DMSO Award, the 2003 SMART Award, and a 2003 Civilian Service award for his work
in distributed simulation.
Of his physics degree from MC, Greg writes:
Understanding the fundamentals of system performance at a physics level has always been
of great value for me in my work assessing and predicting the performance of weapon
systems and advanced technologies. The ‘physics level model’ is always the holy grail
of system simulation, and drives the derivative statistical models that we use
extensively in real-time and battlefield simulations.
Likewise, the rigors of experimental process that were integral to our physics labs
and reporting have allowed me to design and execute highly complex experiments involving
thousands of simulated and live entities to produce system-of-systems analysis of future
combat.
Bill Nettles, a physics graduate of 1975, is Chair of the
Department of Physics at Union University. After earning his M. S. and Ph. D.
in nuclear physics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Nettles joined the U. S. Navy as a Naval officer and worked
on the staff of ADM H. G. Rickover as a nuclear engineer. He returned to MC to teach in 1983.