Growing up just two miles from Six Flags New England in Agawam, MA, Torrie Sutherland is well aware that life can be a bit of a rollercoaster. With her eyes firmly fixed on the sea, Sutherland travelled over 100 miles to URI’s Kingston campus. “I chose this school for the marine biology program,” she says. “It’s a great school for that — and many other programs.” And then came a loop, as Sutherland realized early on that studying marine biology wasn’t what she’d anticipated. “I realized I didn’t fully understand what I wanted from marine biology,” she explains. “I enrolled in an astronomy class as a free elective, and I thought it sounded cool. I thought about it and decided to switch my major to physics.”

Sutherland was now looking up to the stars instead of down to the depths of the sea, and she found herself awestruck and inspired at what she found. “I think it’s cool to be able to learn how the universe works and why things are the way they are,” she says. “You learn the mathematical reasoning behind why things behave the way they do and why the planets move the way they do. It’s really cool to be able to study that.” Beginning her sophomore year, Sutherland worked as a research assistant for Professor Douglas Gobeille of URI’s Department of Physics. As she explains it: “I got lots of hands-on experience with research and lots more experience with computational physics and data processing. I’ve been doing radio astrophysics using data from telescopes in New Mexico, so I’ve been studying the polarization of light that’s being emitted from quasars.” In the spirit of URI’s focus on interdisciplinary education, she also participated in multiple music ensembles — most notably in the Marching Band where she was the trombone section leader, and in URI’s Big Band where she performed at the Newport Jazz Festival two consecutive years.

Now at the end of her undergraduate journey, Sutherland notes that her experience in research combined with gaining general physics and problem solving skills from URI’s strong liberal arts curriculum helped her to succeed in her college career thus far. Come May 2020, she looks forward to graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Physics. After that, Sutherland wants to bring people even closer to the stars, stating that her end goal is to design telescopes for scientific use. What’s more, her future looks brighter than a quasar, as she was just accepted into the optical instrumentation graduate program at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. She’ll be working with the university’s telescopes, analyzing the optical range of light. One could say Sutherland’s journey has been a bit of a rollercoaster, yet she keeps her head fixed to her shoulders even while her eyes look to the stars. She encourages incoming Arts and Sciences students to enjoy the ride ahead, stating, “All I’d really say is to keep an open mind and ask as many questions as possible.”

~Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing & Rhetoric and Anthropology Double Major, URI Class of 2021