Sebastien Murphy
As a kid growing up in France, Sebastien Murphy visited European physics research center CERN and dreamed of one day working there. He eventually accomplished this feat, participating in the T2K neutrino experiment at CERN while studying neutrino physics during his PhD at the nearby University of Geneva.
At CERN, Murphy appreciated the everyday challenges of research, like fixing a detector or correcting a line of code. But he was teaching at the university at the same time and found he truly loved making physics digestible for different audiences. “It’s rewarding to make physics accessible to friends, family and everyone else,” he says.
So, after finishing a postdoc position, he decided to become a secondary school teacher, a position that also allowed him to spend more time with his family.
The transition posed a steep learning curve. “Even though I was teaching at university, I realized that I didn’t really know how to teach,” he says.
At first, he taught middle schoolers who wouldn’t listen to him the way university students would. After taking some teaching courses, he realized he had to pepper his lectures with engaging activities to keep the younger students interested.
Now, he teaches physics, math and computer science to eager-to-learn high schoolers at a school in Geneva, where he’s also a dean. At the start of the year, he tells his students he used to work at CERN, which he thinks gives him some credibility.
Murphy also takes advantage of his contacts from academia. For two years in a row, he has planned a computer science week that encourages his students to work like researchers. This year, they analyzed simplified data from a gamma-ray telescope Murphy obtained through a friend at the University of Geneva.
The students prepared posters about their analyses, and 12 of the students went on to present their posters at the university. “Seeing them present in front of researchers was one of my proudest moments as a teacher,” Murphy says.
Zeynep Isvan
Zeynep Isvan excelled in STEM and loved how physics helped her make sense of the world. In university, she followed this interest, eventually moving from her home country of Turkey to the US to study neutrino physics during her PhD.
She joined the MINOS neutrino experiment at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. While there, she met and started dating a boarding-school teacher who was attending a summer research program at the lab.
At the end of the summer, he left Illinois, but they continued to date long-distance. After visiting him at the boarding school, she realized he wasn’t her only draw to Connecticut. “I didn’t know that boarding school was a thing, and I fell in love with it,” Isvan says.
She eventually left a postdoc position to start working at a different boarding school. And she married the teacher.
Teaching had been on her radar for a while: Isvan had won an award during her first year as a teaching assistant at university. “While doing physics research, a lot of the most satisfying things I’ve done—that I also felt like I was good at—were teaching-related,” she says.
Today, Isvan is on her eleventh year of teaching high school math in private schools. She recently began teaching journalism as well.
She thinks ex-researchers are more commonly found in US private schools because the schools seek out advanced-degree-holders and don’t require a teaching license.
“It can be stressful thinking of what to do once you finish a PhD or postdoc,” she says. “I don’t think it comes up a lot as an option because, unfortunately, teaching isn’t the most prestigious job nationally. But for someone who likes the classroom part of their job as much as research, it’s the right fit.”
Octavio Domínguez
Growing up in Spain, Octavio Domínguez would leave his high school math lessons feeling absolutely hyped. “I had a great teacher, and I thought, One day I want to be the person that instills this feeling in people,” he says.
To explore another side of his love of math, Domínguez studied physics in college. He ended up pursuing a PhD, working on accelerator physics at CERN. While he enjoyed research, he says his favorite parts of his doctoral program were teaching university classes and volunteering as a tour guide at CERN.
Pursuing his high school dream, he applied for a teaching position in a resource-limited area of Bristol, England. He said his time at CERN could not fully prepare him for his experience in Bristol. But some of his proudest moments as a teacher happened in those classrooms as he slowly won over challenging, confrontational, disengaged students. “Making students believe in themselves and proud of who they are is when all of the pains of the profession kind of make sense,” he says.
Today, Domínguez teaches students aged 12 through 18 in a public school in Edinburgh, Scotland. He keeps in touch with CERN colleagues—he once even brought a group of students on a trip to the lab to meet them—and he reads the lab’s weekly alumni newsletter.
He’s glad he had the experience of earning his PhD. “Earning a PhD enriched my life and makes me feel secure in my knowledge,” he says. “I have more experiences to share with my students, especially those looking into academia.”
And he’s still passionate about teaching, often jumping up and down and shouting about math during his lessons. But his frustrations with working in the public school system, including a lack of funds and a dearth of support for the most vulnerable students, make him wonder if he’d be happier in another profession.
“Education is the driving force for a better world and I’m really proud to be a teacher,” Domínguez says. “But maybe I’ll find another way to share my passion.”
Eleni Ntomari
Eleni Ntomari recalls watching magnetism and gravity experiments in her childhood classroom with wide eyes.
“I’d never seen anything like that,” Ntomari says. “And I remember saying to my best friend at that moment that I wanted to be a physicist.”
She went on to fulfill this dream. While earning her master’s and PhD in physics, she worked on the CMS detector at CERN.
Coming to Switzerland from Greece, she loved the lab’s international atmosphere. In 2012, she was at CERN during the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. She says she will never forget slipping into the auditorium to watch the presentations and cheer as the experiments finally revealed their success.
After a postdoc position at DESY in Germany, Ntomari wanted to return to Greece. But she struggled to find a stable, long-term research position there.
Around that time, a former CMS colleague who had gone into teaching asked Ntomari to talk to her high school students about CERN. She enjoyed the experience so much, she decided to change careers. “I’d always enjoyed teaching during research, but that was the first time I considered becoming a teacher,” she says.
Ntomari has now taught for seven years. She currently teaches physics and other science subjects to middle and high school students. She keeps in contact with her research colleagues and tries to stay up to date on the latest particle physics research, which she shares with high school students in her Physics Club.
Though she looks back at her time in research fondly, she’s happy with her career choice, especially considering the time it allows her to spend with her own child. “I tell my students that it’s important to follow your dreams,” she says. “Since I had it in my mind when I was young, I needed to try research, or I would always wonder. And I’m happy I managed to do it for 10 years.”
Her favorite part of teaching is when she shows students an experiment, and they look at her with wide eyes, reflecting her own childhood wonder at science.
