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[no dialgue].
I'm Dr. Jim Conwell.
I'm a professor in the Physics Department at
Eastern Illinois University and director of the observatory.
In the Physics Department many of the freshman activities,
if you take a physics course, have a lab component.
This is really necessary because a lot of people, when they
take a physics lab, they think it's all math, but in reality
you have to also develop your intuition.
In a recent lab activity, what you see here is the students
learning about the principle of conservation of momentum
by actually getting hands-on experience and measuring it,
to actually see what it's doing in real life.
Anybody who has actually played a game of pool has had to
actually use this conservation of momentum.
It's used all the time when anything collides with each
other, bounces off, you use the same principle, in general, to
find out about how gas exerts pressure on walls in a room.
Now, we also go on later on with a mentoring relationship.
Once you get beyond the first or second course, if you're really
interested, we like to use our freshman, sophomore, junior,
senior students in our own research, a mentoring
relationship to try to actually get them and sort of acclimate
them to how you become a professional physicist,
a professional scientist.
A lot of this has to do with, it's something that's just like
an old medieval apprenticeship, it's communicated one-to-one.
One of the things that we want our students to get out of this
is the ability to ask questions.
What a lot of people don't really realize is in science,
sometimes the answers are easy.
What's really the stumbling block is to get a good question.
And the ability to ask, okay, what's a good question, is it
interesting, is it doable, because there's a lot of very
interesting questions that really people don't have enough
knowledge to even do yet, so there's that balance point.
One of the best ways to learn that is to get in some sort of
mentoring relationship with one of your professors.
And this can be either experimental or theoretical
or things like that.
In our department, we do all of this.
So depending upon what the particular student would like
and also the interest in the professor, we can actually
pair them up pretty easily.
Any student who is actually sort of interested in doing
this sort of research, expanding their horizons,
and learning how to do this.
The other good thing is, once you actually do this research,
we have this integrative learning experience in the
sense that you have to communicate to us.
So we always try to get it so that you have to write up
a paper if the research is good enough or give a talk
at one of the regional meetings.
That way these people know how to actually communicate
both verbally and also in writing, too.
And if you want to know anything about what we do in integrative
learning, either with myself or within the Physics Department,
feel free to contact me or any of the professors or call our
departmental telephone line and we'd be happy to talk to you.
[no dialogue].