I spent 20 years in the US Navy, retiring from active duty in 2003. I had earned my Associate's Degree in Electronics in 1996, but it was hard to complete the last several semesters of lab-intensive coursework for my BSEE due to military and family commitments. After my retirement from active duty, I worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in DC as a contractor for a year, after which the funding for my position dried up. The Veterans Administration (VA) determined that I had a service-connected disability, and so they would pay for me to go back to school and finish my undergraduate degree. I was living in the very expensive area around DC and could hardly afford to attend school full-time and survive on the small living stipend the VA pays, even with tuition, books, fees, and special equipment paid for. Though I grew up in South Dakota, I never dreamed ofreturning there to live for any length of time, but it is cheap to live there and there is a decent science and engineering school in my hometown.
I ended up switching majors from EE to Interdisciplinary Science (IS)with a focus on science communication and the public understanding of science. Though many of my fellow science and engineering students were undoubtedly more gifted than I in their narrow areas of study, I was concerned by how uninformed, and uninterested, they appeared to be in areas outside the necessary, yet artificial, boundaries of their respective disciplines (and yes, there was the issue of my personal "glass ceiling" in my mathematical aptitude). In defense of the "hard" science/engineering majors, the amount of study required to obtain such a degree today makes it entirely possible to graduate with honors and yet know little about how we came to know what we know about the cosmos. Not being a "hard" science/engineeringmajor, students like myself were generally thought of as "rejects"from the really tough majors. Unlike many of my fellow IS majors though, I do have a full year of physics and calculus, a semester of differential equations, and upper-level coursework in biology and geology. Exhibiting my usual sense of lousy timing, I graduated in December 2008. As the economy spiraled downward, I saw many of the engineering students I graduated with loose the good-paying jobs they had negotiated. As an aspiring science writer/communicator, I am fortunate to have a job that, while at first seems to have no connection at all to my undergraduate major, allows me the opportunity to explore how people think and reason.
I am an autodidact and voracious reader by nature and there is virtually no area of human inquiry that does not fascinate me. My intellectual heroes are Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Neil deGrasseTyson, Richard Dawkins, to name but a few. I joined this forum to be able to network and interact with others having similar interests and to occasionally bounce my thoughts off those who are more expert in physics than I.
And I am still trying to get the heck out of South Dakota.