Three All-Star Students Share Their Post-BYU Plans

Terik Daly, a geology major, already has experience studying cosmic collisions, thanks to a simulator he built with Dr. Daniel Austin. Daly credits the undergraduate research opportunities at BYU for helping him secure a spot at Brown University.

Each student participating in graduation ceremonies this week has his or her own story to tell. We caught up with a few of them to find out their post-BYU plans and to ask what they’ll miss most about BYU.

Terik Daly’s cosmic collisions
One new graduate’s post-BYU plans include firing a gun built by NASA that shoots projectiles up to 7 kilometers per second. Terik Daly is launching from BYU into a Ph.D. program at Brown University where he will study impact cratering on his way to becoming a planetary geologist. The geology major already has experience simulating cosmic collisions. Terik and chemistry professor Daniel Austin built a system that charges ground-up meteorite powder so that it can be accelerated to the same speed that cosmic dust hits spacecraft such as the Cassini Orbiter. By recreating those collisions in the lab, they hope to understand more of the data being sent back from scientific instruments that have already been dispatched to far-flung places in our solar system.

Read the article by Kristi Smith and Joe Hadfield, BYU News

Photos by Mark A. Philbrick

Editor's Note: The first paragraph of this article (in italics) was written by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry news writer and does not appear in the original article.