Road to Theoretical Physics
This is documentation of my journey into theoretical physics.
Background
As a child I never had a definitive answer of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Growing up in South Africa I was obsessed with animals. Naturally, I wanted to be a zoologist but that soon faded during the pandemic. By the third year I decided to skip transition year – TY. My reasoning was completely unrelated to academics. I wanted to be a professional cyclist and I said I would give myself a gap year after school to find a pro contract and if that failed I would go to University. I wholeheartedly believed that TY was a waste of time and a 15 year old me had to decide what subjects I would take for Leaving Cert. At the time i mainly wanted to do Economics so I chose Economics, Biology, French and Physics. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough people that chose economics to facilitate an economics class so I had to chose another subject. I hastily chose business. I remember not doing enough research into each subject and making properly informed decisions but rather going off generalisation and assumptions. If I knew what I knew now I would chose very differently. With that said when fifth year started, I fell in love with mathematics. I was planning to study abroad and that led me to UCAS.
UCAS
UCAS is my favourite university admissions application. In my opinion it is superior to the CAO in every way. But I digress. I watched lots of videos on YouTube to figure out how to tackle the UCAS personal Statement. One thing came up over and over again – supercurriculars (A.K.A academic extracurriculars).
By this point I had already bought books into both mathematics and economics and was definitely enjoying the “Book of Integrals” by Miguel Santiago a lot more than “The Changing World Order” by Ray Dalio. My mathematics was absolutely taking off and I would eat, dream, sleep mathematics. So when time came to make a shortlist of university courses it was mostly mathematics and economics courses. I had now bought two other books “Book of Marvelous Integrals” by Miguel Santiago and “Mathematics for Economics and Business” by Ian Jacques. However, it is worth mentioning that I had looked at physics courses mainly astrophysics since I watched a lot of Brian Cox as a kid and despite him being a theoretical physicist, his movies about planets also appealed more to me. But nevertheless in the summer between fifth and sixth year I went to the UK to visit some of the universities I was going to apply to and attend open days.
UK Universities
My family and I visited 3 UK universities being the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh and Warwick. I was dead set on either going to St. Andrews because of the campus or Warwick due to the course. At the start of sixth year I began to put the final pieces in place for my UCAS application and by the 14th of October I sent it off.
CAO
Because the CAO application deadline was after the UCAS deadline and the open days were later in the year I had more time to decide what courses I would apply for. I was looking at the mathematics courses both single and joint honours with economics and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) when I discovered the theoretical physics programme. Because theoretical physics is inside the school of mathematics the list of the modules was on the same page of the website as the single honours mathematics modules. Curiosity killed the cat and I saw the modules and thought this is very interesting. During the same time I had been doing very well in physics tests at school and could see myself doing these modules. I then starting comparing the courses and slowly my first choice preference went from joint honours mathematics to single honours mathematics to theoretical physics. Because I couldn’t do economics at school I didnt have a very good idea of if I actually liked the subject more than the more mathematical topics. Contrary to this I knew that I liked physics and mathematics and Trinity’s theoretical physics programme is jointly taught by the school of mathematics and physics so I knew it was the right course for me. Attending the TCD open day and speaking to a recently graduated theoretical physics PhD mentor further reinforced my choice.
Final Decision
At this point my UCAS application was already submitted and even if it wasn’t I wouldn’t have time to do enough supercurriculars in time before the official deadline in January. So I waited, and I got 4/5 offers. At St. Andrews I could change my course due to the flexibility offered by the university’s programmes. However, I was unsuccessful in getting a scholarship at St. Andrews and I couldn’t change my course at durham to a physics course. Therefore, I was left with no choice but to fully rely on the CAO. With a good leaving cert I was able to get theoretical physics and thats how I ended up here.