At the close of another year, the Randolph College Physics Department is very proud of where its students are going.

Senior Emily Schuetz ’08 has a keen interest in baseball and in art. Her independent senior research was a study of the physics of elbow injuries in major league baseball pitchers. Emily's conclusions were that conventional wisdom is not always right about changing the way a pitcher throws (e.g. overhand vs. submarine throwing) in order to minimize injury. Emily would like to advise or work in baseball at some point, but will follow her other passion: she is seeking a career as an art preservationist and restorer.

Senior Reeju Pokharel ’08 studied the state of solar power generation for her senior research, titled "Why Not Solar Power". Included in her research was the building of a solar cell, and data taking on the power generation of a commercially available cell. Reeju found that the efficiency of the currently available commercial systems for homeowners made it economically unavailable to most. Reeju will be attending Carnegie Mellon in the PhD program for Materials Science and Engineering.

Senior Kacey Meaker ’08  is finishing her honors research project on the general relativistic treatment of a rotating disk. Among other things, she is trying to address the age-old Ehrenfest’s Paradox about whether the circumference of a circle gets larger or smaller as it rotates at relativistic speeds. Kacey will be attending Berkeley in the PhD program for Physics. In addition, Kacey has begun work on a book with Peter Sheldon, and will continue as a participant in the Randolph College Summer Research Program on “A Book for the Roller Coaster Enthusiast that Does Good Physics.”

Iva Gerasimenko ’10 was chosen to participate in the Randolph College Summer Research Program with Tatiana Toteva, to work on the project  “Fault damage and healing processes from semblance analysis of waveforms generated by repeating earthquakes.”

Wai Sze (Winncy) Cheung ’09 was chosen to participate in the DAAD Summer Research Program in Germany, as a RISE intern, doing research in physics.

In alumnae news, Sarah Lanter Erlinger '03, chemistry major, is teaching physics at Northwest High School, a public school in Justin, Texas.