Karen Kang: A Duality of A Brain

I first met Karen Kang ’25 over Zoom during April Break. Through the two separate conversations we had, we shared some laughs — I had contacted one of her closest friends (Ziji Zhou ’25), who I knew from a class, for quotes to include in this article, and they had told Kang. Somehow, the conversation turned to how one of my professors provided some Churu for Kang’s cat. We talked about the woes of our housing situations (me living in a forced double in Seelye and her living in Seligman as a senior), shared courses and professors in the math department, and the new tiered plans in Val. 

Sometimes, in these small conversations, I forgot I was talking to someone so brilliant. During her time at Amherst, Kang doubled up on theses in math and physics, took numerous graduate-level classes at UMass, and won the Churchill Scholarship — an extremely competitive fellowship at Cambridge that is only awarded to 16 college seniors each year.

Kang’s intellectual curiosity and dedication are reflected in her time at Amherst, where she fully explored the open curriculum, established close relationships with professors, and forged her own path forward in academia.

Before Amherst

Kang was born in the United States, but moved to China with her parents at the age of three. During high school, she returned to the U.S. and attended a private boarding school in New Haven County, Connecticut. After taking French in high school and wanting to learn about art abroad, a winter term in her senior year spent in the dimly lit halls of the Louvre ignited her passion for art history. Kang recalled that, in addition to exploring certain galleries during her classes, which were entirely in French, she also strolled through the Louvre with an EU student pass during her free time. 

However, her study abroad experience was not typical at her boarding school — seniors were generally not allowed to go abroad, and she needed to complete an entire year’s worth of US history in order to graduate. Kang’s determination to go abroad nevertheless inspired her to create an independent studies course with her history teacher in the fall, where she took two history courses simultaneously to fulfill her graduation requirements. Right after her study abroad, the pandemic hit, and she decided to take a gap year and return to her home in China, afraid there would be no other time to come home. Although it could have been intimidating to arrive at the United States at a young age, along with the heightened uncertainty of returning to China because of the pandemic, Kang wasn’t scared at all. Instead, she recalls that these experiences broadened her horizons and made her an adventurous person. Adventurous not only in the sense that she loves traveling, whether to California or New York over breaks, but also in the form of taking academic risks. This would also be reflected in the diversity of courses she took, her switch from art history to physics, and a decision to study abroad in Geneva during her junior year at Amherst.

From Architecture to Physics and Math

Initially, Kang wanted to study architecture in college as a means of synthesizing her interests in art history, studio art, and design. Specifically, when she was applying to schools, she “was looking at architecture programs or art programs that were more interdisciplinary and not pre-professional,” which led her to applying to Amherst and other liberal arts colleges.

Kang’s drive for interdisciplinary fields incidentally led her to a different major. At first, she had taken AP Physics in high school, joking that, “I thought I would do architecture, and somehow that’s related to mechanics, right?” This class eventually led her to become a teaching assistant for PHYS-116 in her freshman year, where she became close with her sophomore-year roommate, Lillia Hammond ’25. But she also wanted to explore subjects beyond architecture. The bright lit atrium of the Science Center inspired her to take classes there, and she started off by taking CHEM-155 her first semester. Kang describes her academic journey as something she “had no idea what [she] was doing, but it was fun.” It was not until her second semester that Kang started taking classes in physics. Rather than following the typical major progression, she actually started with upper-level electives because there was no lab component, allowing her to explore the physics curriculum without the arduous time commitment. 

Kang credits the people in the physics and math departments, who motivated her to continue to take classes in the majors. Incidentally, she also met Hammond, now one of her closest friends, while taking CHEM-155, finding solidarity sitting in the back of Lipton Lecture Hall to beat the crowd of students leaving after class. They would bond over the dread of attending 9 a.m. physics lectures and did problem sets while the “Interstellar” theme played on Kang’s record in the background. “She’s super sweet,” Hammond reminisced. “I had the outer room on our two-room double, and every morning she would make us a cup of coffee every morning. Then we’d walk to our modern physics class.”  

As a result, Kang’s decision to major in physics was very gradual. An interest in one course led to another along with encouragement from physics major friends, and by her sophomore fall, she had already taken five classes in the department and finished most of the major requirements. Even though the switch was jarring, Kang wasn’t intimidated at all. “In the moment, I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was like, ‘Oh, let’s take this class,’ and then [I] kind of just end[ed] up going along with the major.” Similarly, she fell in love with the math major after taking multivariable calculus as a prerequisite for a computer graphics course she found interesting and possibly useful for architecture. 

Despite Kang’s change in academic pathways, her professors were also more than welcoming. When looking into physics research, Kang recalled that she felt comfortable telling professors that she was an architecture major and had only taken a few physics courses before. “You can say that you wanted to do [a non-physics major], but you kind of also want to try [physics], and [the professors] just don’t ask you about it. They welcome you to engage in whatever research they’re working on.” Her research position starting sophomore fall evolved her interest in physics into an academic passion, eventually sparking her idea for her physics thesis, which directly builds on her professor’s research. 

An Unquenched Thirst for Knowledge

Inspired by intense classes and research at Amherst, Kang applied for a Boston University study abroad program to work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. She wanted to explore particle physics and liked CERN for its high-output research, particularly because of its discovery of the Higgs boson. At CERN, she would take two courses while predominantly doing research with 15 other undergraduates.

Research was much different in Geneva than in a small liberal arts college. In Europe, students usually only take classes in one subject starting in college and even high school. While her professors at Amherst were more hands-on, Kang remembered that her EU professors were not. “When I worked with my European supervisor, they’d tell me to just look up an equation. And I was like, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’” 

Rather than discouraging her, the demanding independent research she conducted at CERN motivated her to take more rigorous classes upon returning to Amherst to gain a deeper understanding of physics. Being at a liberal arts institution further provided her with motivation to explore theoretical physics — the relatively small curriculum meant that concepts like “string theory” or “landau theory” would forever just sound like “smart, cool” concepts. But Kang didn’t want these concepts to seem abstract and far away, she wanted to understand what exactly constituted theoretical physics or math. And that’s exactly what she did — in the following school year, she was registered for a string theory course at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

When talking with Hammond and Hannah Dimas ’25, Kang’s freshman year roommate, I asked them what words they’d use to describe Karen. They both immediately responded with one word: humble. Hammond described Kang as always “full of surprises” and slightly “elusive” about her accomplishments. Dimas jokingly added that when asked about weekend plans, Kang would casually mention going to a conference at MIT for a weekend, like it was no big deal. “She doesn’t do it for recognition, not for pride, not for awards, but she is driven most strongly by her curiosity,” echoed Zhou. “To be honest she never looks that far ahead when she dives into her work.” 

When I asked Kang about if she was scared of making such an abrupt shift in her major trajectory, she told me that it didn’t really feel like it at the moment. “After my first semester of college, I realized life isn’t necessarily linear,” she mentioned. Her strive for intellectual growth, taking courses from multiple departments in order to learn for learning’s sake, is truly impressive and to me, embodies the very purpose of a liberal arts education and open curriculum. Oftentimes, students who are interested in graduate school feel pressure to specialize as early as possible and find a specific niche they will spend the rest of their life researching (or at least during their Ph.D.). Especially in math and physics programs, doctoral students take the bulk of their classes in the first two years and conduct research in their narrow field of choice for the remaining years. But Kang believes that the model is limiting, expecting students to know what to spend the next many years studying when they often don’t have a full understanding of the field. 

Her intellectual thirst is what brings her to Cambridge on a fully-funded scholarship, as a Churchill Scholar. “I just want to take more classes and know what’s out there,” she told me. Although she isn't certain what she wants to study for a future doctorate in theoretical physics, she knows she wants to look at general relativity. Her work in the field began during a summer research program at the California Institute of Technology, where she studied gravitational waves formed by binary black holes and neutron stars. In fact, it was Professor of Physics Jennie Traschen, who Kang took a general relativity class with at UMass, who encouraged her to apply for the Churchill Scholarship (and was a Churchill Scholar herself 40 years ago). 

“Duality of a Brain”

When conversing with Kang, something else that stood out to me was her incredible thoughtfulness and positivity, along with her strong quantitative skills. Hammond added, “She’s just such a positive person … she has a lot of faith that things are going to work out.” Kang reminded me that life isn’t necessarily linear, and I don’t really have to have it all figured out right now. “Undergrad is just a time for you to try different things,” she reflected. “I didn’t know I was going to end up doing math and physics, and I’m happy where I am now.”

Dimas had a similar experience with Kang during her freshman year: “We would always just stay up talking and talking about everything. She’s … someone you can really trust, and someone that gives really great advice about things when you’re having a rough moment.” Similarly, Zhou called Kang “caring almost to a fault,” which is also reflected in academia, specifically “the way [how] she collaborates and seeks out connections to people related to her work is so genuine … she really just wants to have a positive contribution.”

Despite her heavy math and physics workload, Kang still enjoys the fine arts. She carries a sketchbook wherever she goes and fills the pages with vibrant colors. She’s crocheted some blankets and stuffed animals. This semester, she’s even picked up pottery, and goes to the Smith College studio after a long hiatus of art classes. She effortlessly gives off “cool girl vibes,” whether skating to UMass to take her class, driving to the Berkshires to ski at night during the winter, or spontaneously adopting a cat in New York City one Thanksgiving break. As Dimas puts it so eloquently, “She has such a duality of a brain … she’s artistic and analytical, which I feel like is such a rare find.”