Physics and Computer/Data Science at Houghton: An Active Learning Experience

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

This idea will shape everything you do at Houghton College, including your regular course is the only way to learn a skill is to do it. So rather than listen to us talk at you with long winded lectures, you will spend your class time actively engaging in problems instead of pre built. Step by step lab modules, you will work on open ended labs that might take several weeks of the semester to complete outside of class. You can work in the study spaces and labs that are positioned right outside of faculty offices because we want to be a part of your educational experience. Whether the conversation surrounds technical challenges that you're having with a problem or questions about God and what he wants for your life or maybe you're having a personal struggle that just needs someone to listen. So you'll spend your time at Houghton doing projects that professionals in these careers are actually doing projects that don't have well known solutions or even procedures. Instead projects that you can contribute to the world. If you decide to study physics and engineering, you'll spend three years doing projects with faculty and you'll have an opportunity to work in our summer research institute. We have lots of different labs for you to choose from. You can work in our nuclear physics lab on the student built cyclotron particle accelerator or are Farnsworth fuser that uses 30,000 volts to press particles together until their nuclei fuse, join Houghton faculty and students along with faculty and students from jena ceo to study inertial confinement fusion at Rochester University where huge lasers are focused onto a tiny little palette that compress it and hit it up to temperatures hotter than the sun so that the nuclei fuse and blow out enormous amounts of energy. Another option is to work on creating thin metal films in our materials research lab and study the crystal structure using a different thermometer and an electron microscope. Travel to Cornell with Houghton faculty and students to collaborate on projects in the summers or work right here in Houghton on research equipment in our radio frequency lab analyze electromagnetic wave transmission and circuit design. This might also involve a trip to Arizona to collaborate with faculty on radio frequency analysis projects over the summer. If you love programming, you can develop software and analysis tools for neutron multiplicity and data from low temperature detectors, travel to new Mexico with faculty to collaborate in the Los Alamos national lab or develop a new image recognition system that's inside of a small handheld device. If you decide to study computer science or data science at Houghton, you will complete a semester long focused research project and again, you will have lots of opportunities for internships and summer research at the summer research institute. As a computer science major, you will create new machine learning algorithms for use in robotics and research. You will learn high level computer programming languages and cutting edge techniques and quantum computing because the world of computer science is growing at an enormous rate faster than ever before. You want to be right at the front edge of that growth. As a data science major, you will use machine learning techniques to search through enormous data sets to find information that can help institutions. You might work with a partner company to improve their productivity and marketing or join our Houghton manners chapter to help farming corporations, medical scientists, nonprofit organizations and missionaries are all using data science every day to save lives and poverty and spread. The Gospel Hour Center for Data science analytics will help you get connected so that you can start changing the world.