For one high school teacher, an APS meeting was a “life-changing” experience
Teacher Jack Stillman recalls highlights of an APS annual meeting, including the travel grant that helped him get there.
For high school educator Jack Stillman, the 2019 April Meeting in Denver “was a life-changing experience,” he says.
After graduating high school in Humboldt County, California, Stillman left home for one year to study mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but quickly returned. “That’s what’s called the old ‘Humboldt shuffle,’” he says, “where you move away for a year and then move back because you miss it.”
Back home, he completed a semester of community college at the College of the Redwoods and then transferred to Humboldt State University to complete his four-year degree. “When I came to Humboldt State, they didn’t have mechanical engineering,” he says, “so I went to the next nearest thing, which was physics.”
His academic advisor offered an experimental research opportunity in his National Science Foundation-funded program — “essentially a test of the inverse square law of gravity at very small length scales.”
During Stillman’s senior year, his research advisor was planning to attend the 2019 APS April Meeting. And because Stillman was “the most dedicated” of the research interns, his advisor invited him to attend and present the paper they had submitted on their research.
“But I didn’t have any funding,” Stillman says. “My advisor recommended that I apply for a travel grant from APS.” He applied — and received it.
“I’ll never forget flying into Colorado, the endless parallel streets,” he says. “I’d never been east of California.”
Highlights from the meeting include NASA’s exhibitor booth and a visit to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He recalls the tungsten cube that NASA staff let him hold. “It was a model of a gold cube that’s actually in a satellite, the laser interferometer space antenna” — an experiment designed to better understand gravity.
The cube “was so dense that it felt like it had its own gravity. I’ll never forget that,” he says. “Small experiences like that really matter.”
But the highlight was his visit to NIST in Boulder, where Stillman was able to get up close and personal with the lab’s atomic clock. “My dad is a clock and watch repairman,” he says. “I’m a clock guy’s son, and I got to see the most accurate clock in the world.”
In 2019, after college, Stillman set his sights on an applied physics master’s degree from the University of Oregon, but COVID disrupted the program. Instead, he began tutoring students via Zoom from home in Humboldt. Before long, a local school in need of a long-term physics substitute quickly learned of Stillman’s background and offered him a position.
He’s now in his fourth year as a high school educator, fully credentialed in math and physics. “It sounds like next year I’ll be teaching the physics class, a couple of math classes, and hopefully an electronics elective,” he says.
Although he isn’t active in research at the moment, he still keeps up with APS activities. “I love the periodicals,” like APS News, he says. “I put the magazines out for my students … [it’s important] for students to have exposure to the physics world.”
Soon to finish a master’s degree in education, Stillman is once more thinking about pursuing graduate school for physics. He thinks attending more APS meetings in the future could help him explore his options. Plus, he says, “getting back into the science community would feel much more daunting without the years of continued direct contact from APS.”