Under Gravitation and Simple Harmonic Oscillation, students find Lucia Dexter Brimer 76, an assistant project director of the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, which solicits proposals for experiments to be tested aboard a zero-gravity training aircraft. Student responses to the site have been overwhelmingly positive, says Hudgings. Beforehand, they had stereotypical notions of what physicists were like. They are now discovering that careers in physics do not exclude a family life, and that these are not superwomen. Perhaps most importantly, the Web site has succeeded in boosting confidence, says Packard.
Students are able to look at themselves and see a science person.
The field has taken on a fresh, purposeful, accessible, and exciting relevance. Among the thousands of professionals, graduate students, and industrial researchers who attended from all over the world, the three Mount Holyoke undergraduates were standouts. Their work elicited enthusiastic praise and added momentum to the cutting-edge work they have been doing for their independent thesis study under the tutelage of Mount Holyoke physics professor Janice Hudgings. The new lasers exhibit all kinds of fascinating physical behavior, says Hudgings, and we are hard at work investigating why. A new optics lab, initiated in 1999 by Hudgings with the help of funding from Mount Holyoke and Jean McPherson Bennett 51, a retired physicist who specialized in optics, has made high-tech laser experiments possible on campus, providing students with an invaluable advantage.