Prize Recipient

Matthew Acosta
California State University, Long Beach

Background:

I was born and raised in Whittier, California and will be entering my junior year at California State University Long Beach.

I originally did not consider physics as a career because I had such a bad experience in my first high school physics class. It was not until I took AP physics that I considered pursuing physics as a career. My AP physics teacher’s enthusiasm for the subject made learning physics fun and I learned that physics was a subject that encompassed all other sciences, a quality which makes physics a versatile subject. I knew I wanted to do physics over any other career when my math and physics class began to describe the same physical phenomena. This convergence of math and physics becomes even more frequent as I take higher-level physics classes, enhancing my enthusiasm to discover more about these subjects. It is this general enthusiasm to discover how the world operates that makes me want to become a physicist.