{"id":103,"date":"2017-12-14T22:10:55","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T22:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.carleton.edu\/mbaylor\/?p=103"},"modified":"2017-12-14T22:10:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T22:10:55","slug":"the-accidental-physicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/the-accidental-physicist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accidental Physicist (Pre-Tenure)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wanted to be a paleontologist since the age 5, ever since I pointed to that<\/em> word in the dictionary and asked my mom what it meant. From then on, I was obsessed with learning about dinosaurs. Living near Washington DC, I was able to attend lectures by leading paleontologists at the Smithsonian and in neighboring cities. I spent my summers from the age of 9 to the age of 15 volunteering at a local archeological dig, the closest thing to a paleontology camp that my parents could find and afford. Although I started working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center during the summer after my junior year in high school, it was only because my mom made me. I was going to be a paleontologist; that is until I decided I couldn\u2019t raise a family and be a paleontologist who worked \u201cin the field.\u201d It was clear that I was the academic in the family and I was going to college. I needed something to major in and quick. I didn\u2019t read fast enough to major in a humanities field. I thought about being a math-physics double major, but quickly decided that math wasn\u2019t applied enough for me. So I settled on a physics major. It wasn\u2019t until I was teaching middle and high school physics at the Maret School after I graduated from Kenyon College that I decided I loved physics and wanted to pursue a career in it.<\/p>\n

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Marty standing next to her Blind Source Separation System in graduate school at CU Boulder.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to be a paleontologist since the age 5, ever since I pointed to that word in the dictionary and asked my mom what it meant. From then on, I was obsessed with learning about dinosaurs. Living near Washington DC, I was able to attend lectures by leading paleontologists at the Smithsonian and in Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","category-research","tag-research","tag-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbaylor.people.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}