Matthew Sievert
Budding physicist fast tracks his education.
Matthew Sievert (B.S. ’06/College of Humanities and Sciences; B.A. ’06/College of Humanities and Sciences) graduated with honors – and two bachelor’s degrees in physics and Spanish — in May 2006, and he’s on track to earn his master’s this spring.
He says he’s not an overachiever, just efficient.
“I came to VCU with 30 AP credits,” he says. And while he could have completed the degree requirements in three years, his Presidential Scholarship funded his education for four. “So I took as many graduate courses as I could as an undergraduate.”
Normally, undergraduate students can only count two graduate-level courses toward a higher degree, but Sievert was able to bank four thanks to the Department of Physics’ accelerated B.S./M.S. physics program.
He also credits the department’s 5-1 student-to-faculty ratio for his success. “I would have never been the same in a larger department,” Sievert says. “I really built a close-knit relationship with the professors and have had opportunities that I would not have had.”
Some of those opportunities have included working in the labs of associate professor Alison Baski, Ph.D., and professor Shiv Khanna, Ph.D. This past summer he contributed to a research project studying cluster physics, or engineering new materials out of small, multi-atom particles. “You can build a cluster with the properties you want,” Sievert says. “Some of these clusters, these materials, are several times stronger than steel. This is what we would want to build space shuttles out of.”
Once he earns his master’s degree, Sievert plans to tackle his Ph.D. so that he can conduct research and teach at the university level.
As for the Spanish degree? Sievert has been taking classes since the eighth grade (he wanted to learn Japanese but it wasn’t offered).
“It takes a special kind of crazy to study physics,” Sievert says, “and because I study physics and Spanish, even the physics people think I’m crazy.”
