Hi, my name is Brent Bargeron I am the Department Chair in the Physics department. I have a PhD in Physics which I obtained from the University of Illinois. We have a wonderful department here at Utah Valley State College, with a faculty who have a wide variety of experience and background. We have a particle physicist, an astronomer, someone who is experienced in geo physics and has actually worked out in industry in the geo physical area. We have others who have had much teaching experience at various levels around the country. We have one faculty member that actually has an electrical engineering background.

We teach a goodly number of students, we have in the department fifty to sixty students. Our number of graduates is increasing. We were granted the opportunity to give a Bachelor degree about 3 years ago. In 2004 we had 2 graduates, in 2005 we had 3 graduates and in April of 2006, we had 5 graduates with 7 more expecting to graduate in December 2006.

These students are getting a good core experience in physics and coming to a good understanding of what physics requires. Physics is actually a very demanding discipline, you have got to be good in math, you have got to have good physical intuition and yet at the same time, when you get up into the upper physics courses like quantum mechanics or special relativity, you have got to be able to trust the mathematics more than your intuition because your intuition will tell you one thing and the mathematics will point to something else and all of these things have been verified even though they are sometimes counter intuitive.

What does Physics do for you? Above all, Physics teaches you how the world works. All the physical things in the world have reasons for doing what they do. Physics provide an understanding of how they work, weather they are on an astronomical level out in the universe or on the particle physics level which is so small we only see with instruments. We have developed instruments to understand what is happening even down in the very very microscopic area. When I say that, I mean areas that are like a million billionth of the size of an inch. We are talking very small dimensions. One interesting quote that I like very much that Einstein gave us; he said "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". So if you can learn how to comprehend what is going on around you, if you are learning to think, sometimes it takes a lot of deep thought to understand physic.

I shouldn´t make it sound like it is all fun because it is a lot of work. It is a lot of work mathematically and physics student tend to need to study considerably to understand the material. There are a lot of challenging classes that the students find really test their true metal and test how well they are able to think. Physics is a discipline that will allow you to do a lot of different things in the future. We have physics students that go into medicine. We have students that have gone into law and become patient attorneys. We have students that go on to do medical physics where their medical training has to do with being able to understand radiation doses and how much radiation a person should get. So you have a number of health physicists that work in say Nuclear power plants or just in hospitals because in hospitals people are exposed to radiation and instruments need to be calibrated and checked so patients, doctors, and nurses don´t get over exposed in any particular area.

Physics is an area which you can go into after you have graduated and you can actually diffuse into other disciplines. Many physicists diffuse over into and perform engineering functions or computer programming functions. One of our graduates here before going to graduate school, went to work for a video game programming company and is making a big splash in that company, just on his ability to do mathematics and cause the video games to turn and rotate and do all kinds of fancy things and that is all based on mathematics and how you can make mathematics to rotate systems or move systems or translate systems. So he is diffused, for the moment into video game programs. We have another one that has a big interest in computer programming but in this case he is interested in programming robots. We have had physicists that have done things that are mechanical engineering like and really their interests are in that direction and when they finish school here with a bachelor degree, they will move onto become master students in an engineering discipline. We have some students that have gone directly into the workforce. We have a couple of students that work for a local company by the name of Moxtex which is a technology company that makes specialized optical components.

We have a big effort in the valley right now where we have a big semi conductor industry Intel coming in and joining with another big industrial company, Micron. They have formed an agreement to produce certain types of products and they will be produced right here in the valley. We have students that are applying to work there and it will be a great opportunity for them to work there and be exposed to real world manufacturing and I expect they will turn out to be production managers or production engineers with a physics background.

In short physics provides career and employment opportunities as well as a great understanding of the world around us and will help us understand the physical nature of our world and understand any phenomena we may see and wish to understand.