Chris Salvo
A few years ago your television and remote control would have been safe around Chris Salvo. Now, not so much.
After two years of hands-on experience in physics labs and through undergraduate research at California State University San Marcos, Salvo has gone from a non-tinkerer to a might-as-well-pop-the -hood-and-take-a-look kind of a guy.
“Before I would look at stuff and see it for what it was – like a remote control and a TV,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to open either one, not be able to get it back together and mess it up. Now I understand the theory of what makes things work. There’s nothing going on inside that remote or behind that panel that’s going to blow my mind.”
As an applied physics major at CSUSM, Salvo thought he would go to class, make good grades, move on and search for a job. He never really expected that there would be a concentrated effort by faculty to relate what he learned in class to lab experiments and undergraduate research. He did undergraduate research his junior and senior years at CSUSM and spent two summers at San Diego State University and University of Nevada at Las Vegas doing the same. Of course, setting up cryostats, calibrating water isotope analyzers and crunching data after observing the sky for ten nights in a row can make electronics – and almost anything else - a lot less imposing.
“When I showed up here I didn’t think of this as going through a program,” Salvo said. “But they trained us to do things and solve problems. There are two classes in physics where it’s just the lab – that’s what you do. It teaches you how to work better in a lab and use equipment. Overall, the professors teach material in a way that we can apply and use it – not just know it.”
Salvo plans to pursue a Ph. D. in condensed matter, which includes anything from nanotechnology to semiconductors to superconductivity. And now he can’t imagine not having had the hands-on experience as a part of his science education.
“It’s free – take it,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you?”
Just like, why wouldn’t you open up that television and take a look. No telling what you might learn.
