Anil Ganti
Class of 2011, Physics major
Graduate Student at Duke University Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
Q & A
I like being in an academic environment. Doing research is more than just a job. I've finished my course requirements, but since I get to take classes for free, I like to make the most of them. Now I'm actually one or two classes away from an unrelated Masters in hydrology and fluid mechanics. In grad school, you have your Ph.D. research but you also have lots of other resources and opportunities available to you so that if you're interested in something else, you can do that in your free time. It means that I am kind of overloaded in terms of my time, but that's my choice.
I have some ideas, my Ph.D. will be in model-based signal processing and is really transferrable to any application where you may want to estimate parameters from a physical model. I would like to apply these skills to study groundwater and surface water contamination, aquifer depletion, and other environmental applications. I am pretty interested in environmental work and love that it involves physics at multiple scales, so I would like to move back towards that.
Going to Baca is pretty special. Leaving 华体会, I realized that is not normal; it is not most people's experience. Baca encapsulated the environment of CC physics which was collaborative and supportive. It's all about working together, and that isn't the norm at other undergraduate schools. At other schools, I've seen that the students can get pretty stressed out and competitive.
My work is really linked to physics, so I use it a lot, but there are two things particularly that I learned at CC that I draw on all the time: 1, Unit analysis, and 2, taking limits of expressions to gain intuition. Both of these techniques will help you avoid being wrong (so often) and make you look way smarter than you might actually be. Someone will put up an expression and even if I'm not fully following their math I'll check the units and look like a genius for spotting the error. In the physics department, we emphasized these simple analysis tools, and it is definitely something that sets me aside from the folks with engineering undergraduate degrees. Thinking about the units of an expression and where it might blow up or go to zero helps me understand what something physically means. Limiting cases can be a helpful way to get a sneak peek at the answer without having gone through all the steps.