Physics Major
Back to Majors, Minors & Academic Programs
About the Major
Physics majors develop a background in the foundational principles of nature, laboratory and computational research and problem solving that can be applied to any discipline. Students learn physics by doing physics, and the curriculum also includes the study of mathematics and computer science.
Jobs in Physics
- Technical specialist
- Entrepreneur
- Project manager
- Secondary school teacher
- Science writer
Past Elon Physics Internships
- Brookhaven National Labs
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- Henniges Automotive
- University of California at Davis
- University of Iowa
Related Majors
Research experience prepared Elon undergrad to jump into PhD program
When Anne Williams entered Elon University as a teaching fellow in 2018, she had her sights set on becoming a high school physics teacher. She had been hooked on physics since her junior year of high school when she took her first of two AP Physics courses. She also found a love for teaching when she started tutoring classmates in need of help. A career in education seemed like the right fit for her.
But after doing her first placement in a high school classroom, she felt like she needed a little something more.
“I loved teaching and always have, but I needed more knowledge,” said Williams, who graduated from Elon in December 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Arts in math.
My time at Elon has helped me. The one-on-one supervision does go a really long way. At bigger universities, you’re not going to get as much of a chance to develop those kinds of relationships.
That potential for more knowledge was at her fingertips at Elon. By the summer after her freshman year, she was working with Professor Evans on a research project she would pursue throughout her time at Elon. The two looked at the use of magnetic materials for heating therapies in the medical field, and the opportunity was priceless.
“I had to write abstracts, and Dr. Evans just tore them apart, and I think I learn that way really well,” she said. Reading over his changes, she started internalizing best practices in academic writing, “which I think has made me a great scientific writer today,” she said. “Obviously I still have a lot to learn, but I sometimes look at other people’s writing and I feel very lucky that I got that kind of mentorship.”
Today, Williams is working on her PhD in microbial physics at the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. Because she went straight from undergrad to a PhD program — without the typical master’s program in between — she could have struggled to keep up with her peers.
“In the U.K., you can go into a PhD with or without a master’s, but the PhDs are a lot more fast-moving,” Williams said. “You hit the ground running, whereas in the U.S. you do coursework starting out and ease more into research.”
But with her experiences at Elon in both research and scientific writing, she has been able to keep up just fine.
“My time at Elon has helped me,” she said. “The one-on-one supervision does go a really long way. At bigger universities, you’re not going to get as much of a chance to develop those kinds of relationships.”
Williams still enjoys teaching — in fact, her ultimate goal is to one day teach physics at a university like Elon where she can continue doing research — and she’s been able to do so at the University of Sheffield, giving 15 lectures last year for an electromagnetism foundation-year course for students who didn’t get the physics groundwork in high school. As a graduate teaching assistant, she also works in labs and recitation classes, helping students work through physics problems.
And though she’s a few years removed from Elon, she still can rely on her mentor for help. Every few months, she chats with Evans over Google Meet.
“When I was teaching, I was struggling quite a bit, because writing lectures is not easy and giving lectures is not easy,” she said. “And Dr. Evans was really helpful.”
In addition to the research opportunities Williams had at Elon, the university also provided her with many ways to get hands-on experience and extra preparation for her PhD program.
She was a teaching assistant in an introductory physics class and tutored a lot for Elon’s Learning Assistance program. And through a campus organization, she met the person who would encourage her to apply — and eventually become her supervisor — for the Research Experience for Undergraduates in Nuclear and Particle Physics at TUNL and Duke University.
She was also the president of the Society of Physics Students at Elon for two and a half years, where she encouraged students to get involved in physics through “weird demos”— like Cloud in a Bottle, which involves rubbing alcohol in an empty disposable plastic bottle, pressurization with a bicycle pump, and the releasing of pressure to form a white cloud — experiments that involve interesting physics and make sense to a large group.
“We got a good amount of involvement when we did it like that, made it more fun,” she said.
She still uses those demos whenever she has the opportunity to teach today — and she’s confident she made the right decision to pursue a career doing both research and teaching.
“Teaching wasn’t going to be stretching my brain in all the right ways,” she said. “Obviously, teaching is very hard, but it’s a very different process of working your brain than research is, and I felt like I just wasn’t going to be fulfilled with one or the other. Right now, I’m quite happy doing research, but I do teach here as well, and that can be a big relief. It calms me, even when it’s really stressful. I think I made the right choice.”
Did You Know?
- Research is a vital part of Elon’s physics program. Experimental, computational and theoretical research opportunities help students develop professional skills and give them the chance to experience life as a scientist. Students engage in exploratory lab activities from their first year, and junior physics majors take a yearlong Research Methods course that focuses on experiment design, data analysis and the communication of scientific information. In the Senior Seminar course, students hone in on scientific presentation skills.
- The strength of the physics program lies in small class sizes, a supportive and stimulating intellectual environment, and the close mentoring relationships that develop between physics faculty and students. Physics majors complete a mentored research project or participate in a mentored internship.
- Students have access to advanced scientific equipment, including X-ray and spectroscopic devices, a high field electromagnet and a vacuum system, as well as an atomic force microscope that magnifies objects at molecular scales. They also have access to supercomputer facilities for computational astrophysics and virtual reality tools.