Trial and error

When times get tough, some prefer to throw in the towel — but not Aaron Wirthwein. Every struggle, trial, and tribulation electrifies him, and uncertainty is what helps him identify his passions in life.

Wirthwein is a lecturer in the physics and astronomy department at USC. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana but spent most of his formative years in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he uncovered a passion for science from a young age.

“When topics got difficult in school, I actually got quite excited,” he said in an interview with The Lab Report.

Wirthwein often aided his peers by tutoring them in classes they were in together. When he eventually became a teacher’s assistant in graduate school, he continued supporting those around him and found it rewarding on two fronts. 

“As I tutored more and more students…. I found it more and more gratifying — not only in terms of, ‘Oh, I know I'm helping somebody,’ so I'm elevating their understanding, but also… I want to know that I understand things, and when I teach them to people, I feel like I do,” he said. 

For Wirthwein, the seeds of being a leader and educator were always there. But, he acknowledged that his path to teaching wasn’t exactly the “light bulb moment” that is often sensationalized.

He explains that, “maybe it was just a confluence of things.”

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, is quoted saying, “Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” Wirthwein was inspired by this sentiment, as it helped push him to explore the difficult interests he had. 

For students encountering tricky subjects now, he says, “Just start a five minute timer and start reading, start working on it, think about it a little bit. If you're still pulling your hair out, then just give it up, because you're not in a good headspace. But you'll often find that after those first five minutes, that was really the hardest part.”

Before his undergraduate years, Wirthwein put his grit and work ethic to the test by competing for an academic scholarship. He studied a diverse array of subjects, from history to math, acing all of them and ultimately earning a full ride to Wabash College.

“That was incredibly motivating. ‘Maybe I'll stick with academia for a while,’” he thought to himself.

While physics may seem a daunting subject to many, Wirthwein doubled down on the opportunity to engage in a subject that was both challenging and rewarding in his undergraduate and graduate education. 

“To be a good physicist, I think requires that conceptual level — that conceptual understanding,” Wirthwein said.

In physics, it’s not enough to simply do the math; you’re essentially building the solution from scratch, which presents more than arithmetic obstacles. 

When you’re learning a new language, you have to understand the rules before you can string together sentences — mathematics works the same way. When you add physics on top of it, you have to be able to comprehend the physics before utilizing mathematics to translate the solution on the page.

It’s important to build the intuition that’s required to complete physics problems: name your initial interpretation, identify what the constraints on the problem change about the equations, and then interpret your final result in a physical way. Without this deep understanding, it is difficult to replicate mathematical solutions coherently.

Wirthwein appreciates when students expose the holes in his explanations of fundamental concepts, because it allows him to guide students in building deep, conceptual understanding. 

“There are so many opportunities where in class someone will ask a genuinely interesting question, and I’ll think about it for like a week because it's just that interesting or that good. Sometimes a student will ask a question, I go ‘you know what? I could have avoided that confusion if I taught it this way,’” he said.

Much of Wirthwein’s career has been trial and error, figuring out what works for his students and what doesn’t. This has led him down a path of compassion during his interactions with them, as he wants to help them build appreciation and insight in any way that he can. 

“You’re seeing the best version of me,” said Wirthwein. 

Working as a lecturer has allowed him to grow more than just his scientific bandwidth — he has grown in character as well. According to him, “patience” is a strong virtue he has learned as a teacher.

“Wirthwein tries really hard to answer questions in a way that is easily understandable or makes a comparison to something you already understand. Whereas other professors will give a more complicated answer and use a lot of jargon, just expecting you to know what they mean,” said Rhea Richards, a junior physics major, in a statement to The Lab Report.

Richards believes that Wirthwein’s office hours are more beneficial than other office hours she’s been to because he strives to bridge the gaps in his students’ understanding of difficult concepts.

While Wirthwein acknowledges that he has the tendency to be impulsive or critical, careful personal reflection on his interactions with students has allowed himself to become more supportive of them in all scenarios.

“That’s just the nature of the job.”