Aurelia Meyer, Goodnight Transfer Scholars class of 2027, is not afraid of the unknown. In fact, she sees the beauty in it. 

As a Physics major with a concentration in particle astrophysics and data science, Meyer was selected to attend an REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) at the University of Utah this past summer. She spent her time in Utah creating a camera response test bench for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory upgrade.

“We use computer simulations a lot in ice cube to be able to understand what our results should look like,” Meyer said. “My job was to set up and build a wet tank, which is a giant tank that is about five feet tall, filled with water, then you place an mDOM – a multi digital optical module, our detectors – in there.”

Meyer explained that the problems they’d been having with previous results in IceCube is that the pictures were blurry, and she planned to resolve that. 

“If we were able to construct, in a controlled setting, the worst condition – which is water, because it’s non-uniform like melted ice – and have our cameras take pictures of every way light can be perceived in the x-plane, y-plane, and then angularly. Then, we can have an entire table built of all of our results, and use machine learning to put that all together in a simulation of what we would see,” Meyer said. “So, when we actually deploy the new mDOMs, we’d have an idea of what we’re going to see, and we can refine what we see.”

This experience was both an academic professional development program, as well as conducting research. They went to see a new professor presenting their research every week, and then would do workshops of everything a professional physicist would do. Also, they would go on little excursion trips – like the one they took to Moab, rafting on the Colorado River – here and there. 

“On the plane ride over, I thought ‘what if I just do everything?’ Maybe I’ll never be in Utah again in my life, I don’t know what the future holds for me, so let me just do everything that I possibly can,” Meyer said. “That attitude led me to this belief of: I’ll do it scared, I’ll do it hungry, and I’ll do it cold, and I’ll just juice all of the experience I possibly can out of this. I realized that I can rely on myself, and I’m pretty cool, I don’t need outward validation from anybody – I can do it on my own.”

But this research wasn’t the end of her experience at the University of Utah. It turned out that the IceCube Collaboration Conference was happening in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October. The University asked Meyer to come back, and she knew she had to be there.

She presented everything that she did during her REU that summer. It was three days where she attended plenaries – updates about what was happening in IceCube and new papers to be released, presented her work and made sure everything was running well, so that when her postdoc went to the South Pole everything would go smoothly. 

Meyer described that being recognized in this way from this experience reinforced her path, really allowing her to see that this is what she is meant to do.  

“It’s something else for people that are way older than you, that have been in this field for so long, to then ask you questions about what you did,” Meyer said. 

She also admitted it was neat to see how everyone’s part played into the bigger picture. 

“If everybody doesn’t do their part, then we can’t move forward,” Meyer said. “It’s an interesting type of group project, because you have your specific thing, but you need to do your specific thing really well so that everybody else can do their thing. If my stuff doesn’t run, then the people that do simulations can’t have my data to then do simulations with.”

Moving forward, after she gets her undergraduate degree, Meyer plans to immediately pursue her PhD. Then, she will become a research and teaching professor. She will use the confidence that she gained from this experience in her future lifestyle and profession, as a goal to let everyone see the beauty in the unknown. 

“I got so much confidence there. I didn’t realize until I got back here and I was like ‘oh boy, I’m a different person than I was the year before I came here,’” Meyer said. “Working on my own, being driven and knowing what I want, and then also making friends in physics that appreciated me for who I was, that was amazing.”