Texas A&M Physics And Astronomy Honors Spring 2024 Mechanics Scholars

This semester’s top three performers — Annie Pellegreen ’27 (first), Samuel White ’27 (second) and Alan Zhou ’27 (third) — each received a textbook for the second semester course (Physics 207) as well as a monetary award for their achievements. In addition, Pellegreen was presented with the inaugural Dr. Phyllis Toback Award recognizing this spring’s top student.

The event is part of the Mechanics Scholar Program, founded by the department in 2002 to celebrate the best students in Physics 206 and encourage career exploration in physics. The competition was held every semester through fall 2019 but then halted in spring 2020 due to the pandemic. This semester marked its official return.

As a large introductory course with challenging subject matter, Physics 206 is open to all majors, but the majority of the enrollment consists of first-year engineering students, along with physics and other science-related majors. At the end of both the fall and spring semesters, any student enrolled in the course is eligible to take the Mechanics Challenge Exam, which covers the same material as the semester-long course — Newton’s Laws of motion, gravity and the concepts of energy, work and momentum. However, Youngs notes that the difficulty level is higher than the course’s typical midterm exams by design in order to identify the top performers out of the roughly 2,700 students enrolled across all sections each semester.

“The Mechanics Challenge Exam allows students to demonstrate their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills,” Youngs added. “Despite the difficulty, the exam is meant to highlight fun and interesting problems using skills the students have developed as a result of the course.”

Learn more about undergraduate courses and undergraduate degree programs in Texas A&M Physics and Astronomy.

This story source was originally published by Texas A&M Arts & Sciences.