The story of how I decided to take up physics as a major is a rather random one. In fact, physics was not even a subject I took during my high school. In my second year, I chanced upon a CD of a film in my school library about Stephen Hawking titled “The Theory of Everything”. Out of curiosity, I watched the film and was very quickly intrigued by the various physics concepts introduced in the film, particularly black holes. After that, I read up a lot and watched many youtube videos about the various physics phenomena. I was hooked. It was very interesting to me to know how the world around us works, and it fascinated me even more that in many situations, nature operates in a manner that does not seem intuitive to us, sometimes in wildly bizarre ways. When the time came to choose my university major, I took the leap of faith and made the switch to physics.

Physics is inherently a difficult subject. It relies heavily on strong mathematical foundation and good grasp of the concepts. I doubt there is even a single physics student who does not think that physics is difficult, no matter how intelligent he or she is. But physics was also a very manageable major to me. What worked for me was to first really internalise the various concepts introduced in a qualitative manner. Only once I had the big picture would I work on the mathematics. It helped a lot to be able to understand why we were trying to calculate certain things, rather than to just tackle the mathematics head on. Additionally, professors typically would not go through the complete working in lectures, which makes sense since they have limited time. Therefore, while it definitely required a lot more time and effort on my part, I tried to make it a point to derive all the workings at home so that I could understand where certain formulas came from (it also helped a lot in exams when you needed to do certain workings since you have already worked it out before). Of course, sometimes you will not be able to figure everything out on your own no matter how hard you try so it is equally important to rely on friends and professors for help. In my experience, most professors are very willing to clarify any doubts.