There's a renowned freshman course at Caltech called Physics 11, which is a sort of think tank to get students involved in research early, and to explore interesting ideas. The catch is that to get in, you'd have to submit solutions to two 'hurdles', which are open-ended questions that you're meant to think carefully about, and only the students with the most creative solutions are awarded entry into the class.

Every year, about 50 students submit solutions to the hurdles, and only 4-6 people get in - so, I was shocked and delighted when I found out that my solutions had been accepted. During the 3-quarter sequence, we would read a paper each week and meet every Tuesday evening to discuss the paper, which would often reflect new ways to model phenomena across Math, Physics, Biology, CS, and Finance. We often created our own models which we sketched out on a blackboard and discussed.

It was a privilege to learn from Professors Rob Phillips and Dave Stevenson about the methods by which new scientific research ideas originated and to get intuition for ways to develop them. I was also fortunate to get awarded with the Richard Brewer fellowship to pursue a research project during the Summer of 2020 with LIGO and Prof. Rana Adhikari, where I worked on developing an "acoustic invisibility cloak" for the gravitational-wave detector. Here, I present my solutions to the Physics 11 hurdles for the 2019-2020 academic year.