Hi,

I was in a fairly broad department in graduate school - people in it studied every thing from the Earth's atmosphere through the solar system and out into the universe. I was interested in most of those things - but you need to settle on something in particular when you write your thesis. There was a professor who was looking for a student to work with data from the Sun. I thought that would be good because it related to astronomy, which I had like since I was a kid, with something that affected life on Earth, making it more immediate. I ended up studying radio waves from solar flares.

cheers,

Terry

Hello Anonymous!

I don't actually study the sun directly, but I do study the effects of the solar wind on Earth's magnetosphere. I have been interested in the space sciences since I was very small and my parents took a trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I became interested specifically in magnetospheric physics when I was in high school. It was solar maximum and there were frequent displays of the aurora or northern lights visible where I grew up in Minnesota. Now I work at the University of Iowa with a group that has experiments to study the Van Allen radiation belts and launches sounding rockets to study the aurora.

Kris