Alexis LaViolette talks about her dedication to physics

Connector Contributor

“Everyone thinks I must be somewhat of a genius for choosing to study medical physics,” said Alexis LaViolette, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Striving to become a medical physicist, LaViolette says she puts in hours of studying equations until she begins to develop a slight migraine and blurry vision. “I’m not a genius at all,” she said. “I work hard so that one day I will be able to graduate with some kind of credibility in my field.”

Exactly one year after being deferred from UMass Lowell because of low SAT scores, LaViolette is now one of the few physics majors in the undergraduate program. Of those students, less than half of them are females.

As disheartening as this may seem to her, she said she is grateful for the opportunity to study at UMass Lowell, even after being denied the first time.

“It separates me from my peers because it means that I was one step below everyone else when I first got into this school,” she said. “It forces me to catch up and surpass everyone else. It’s kinda like a second chance.”

Being amongst mostly male counterparts doesn’t seem to intimidate LaViolette, she says, and she did not bring it up as a reason for her struggles.

“Grades do not matter to me as much,” she said. “However, understanding every single equation and format means everything because I need whatever knowledge I can get here, in order to apply it in my field.”

Even dressed in sweats and a ponytail, LaViolette can be seen as attractive, and there is an undeniable sense of will power that emerges from her presence. Her passion for a subject like physics, which can give most students a hard time, is commendable. This drive to excel in the area of physics comes from her late grandfather.

“My grandfather whom I looked to as a father died slowly of cancer and I remember feeling helpless. Sitting there waiting for it to kill him, made me sick to my stomach,” she said.  “I don’t like not being in control of things and situations, which is why I decided to go into a field that would give me a say in things that people tend to think we have no say in, like cancer.”

LaViolette said she wants to take her degree into the medical side of physics, specifically, and work with radiation and the way it affects cancer cells. To some extent, she says her college career has become a tribute to her grandfather’s death, as well as a tribute to her grandmother’s legacy as the medical physicist for Bay State Hospital in Western Massachusetts.

LaViolette is in a five-year master’s degree program at UMass Lowell and needs to maintain a 3.0 overall GPA in order to stay in the program. She has long and tedious homework assignments that are due almost every other day that often time require her to re-teach the lessons to herself because the professor did not do so the first time around, she said.

She further explained that most of her professors speak English as a second language, and it becomes difficult to understand concepts like “Bulk’s modulus and Avogadro’s law from someone with a thick German accent,” she said.

“It’s tough being any kind of science- or math-related major at UMass Lowell, because it seems like only English teachers speak English on campus!” LaViolette said.

With so much expected of her, LaViolette says she has a lot cut out for her as a medical physicist prospect of the future and that she understands how hard it will be to fully understand every single concept that is presented to her.

“It’s a really hard subject, and to be honest with you, there are some days that I hate it and I want to quit, but then I think about my mother and that hatred gets washed away,” she said.  “I’m everything my mother couldn’t be because of the way her life panned out, I’m everything she wanted to be, and I just can’t mess that up.”

Physics, according to LaViolette, has become an intimate part of her life, in which she spends days and nights tending to her knowledge and skill on the subject because she is “bounded by it and feels like she can’t put anything before it.”

“I have a social life though, thanks to having popular friends on campus,” she said. “Without them, I probably would’ve lost my vision to reading my calculus text book all damn day.”

Although she lost a lot of time to being deferred her first semester of college, she has doubled up on classes this semester in order to keep up with her peers.

“I don’t want to seem perfect or like the stereotypical perfect student, because I’m so far from it,” she said, her voice softening. “I lose sleep from my not-so-good grades, and sometimes I even skip meals because I have no time in my day to stop studying for an exam worth 50% [of my] grade to eat a turkey on wheat sandwich.”

“I just wanna look back and say, ‘Wow, I deserved this for how hard I worked,’” she said.