Madeleine Coles

Life Editor

If you happen to see Kirk Long on campus, he’s probably wearing a suit because, according to him, you never know who you might meet. But if you catch him in his casual attire, he might be wearing a t-shirt with the periodic table printed on it, with the words “I wear this shirt periodically” printed below.

Long, who is in his second year at ISU, is already a force to be reckoned with. He’s a physics major with a double minor in math and piano, and last summer he started an internship at StarTalk, a radio show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Many interns for the show have been film or marketing majors who have connections with the producers. Long is the only intern in a STEM major, and he got the job from Neil deGrasse Tyson himself.

“I wanted some experience in science communication because I do plenty of math and physics, but I want to do someday what Neil and Bill Nye do,” Long said. “So not only do you have to be good at math and science, but you have to be good at telling people why the math and science you’re doing is important.”

So he reached out to StarTalk about a possible internship, but never heard back. Then, his mom bought him a ticket and backstage pass to see Neil himself when he came to Boise.

“She joked that I should bring him my resume, and I was like, ‘actually that’s probably not a bad idea,’” Long said. “I got a picture with him and gave him my resume, and he said to send them an email again, and he would make sure they got back to me. So I sent another email, and they got back to me, like 30 minutes later.”

As an intern, Long mainly writes tweets and Facebook posts for the show’s social media platforms, but he also writes blog posts.

His most recent post about the movie Hidden Figures, reached over 100,000 people.

“I think it’s really cool to see my blog posts,” Long said. “I can click on all the people who shared it, and these people who I’ve never met are saying really nice things about how this makes math cool, or things like that. So the coolest thing to me is being able to reach people that I wouldn’t otherwise. This kind of platform allows me to say what I’m really passionate about.”

According to Long, the blog posts are both the best and most difficult part about the internship.

“It is hard for me to be openly creative about things,” he said. “I can write about whatever I want, which is kind of a blessing and a curse. I’m good at writing from a prompt, but my more successful work has come out of ideas that were self-generated.”

After graduation, Long hopes to attend graduate school and receive a PhD in astronomy or astrophysics.

“I’d like to go to Columbia in New York. That’s where Neil went for his graduate degree, and the Museum of Natural History is pretty closely tied with their departments,” Long said. “So it’d be really cool for me to go to grad school there.”
After graduate school, Long said he hopes to work for NASA or a university and be involved in space research.

“Anything space-related is really cool to me,” he said. “And the end goal is that I’d like to keep doing outreach stuff. I’d like to have a planetarium or something like that one day because I really like teaching people.”

However, he added that he doesn’t think he could be a normal teacher because he doesn’t like teaching people who don’t want to learn.

“Normal teachers are a lot stronger than I am,” Long said. “I love math, but if I’m trying to teach it to someone and they don’t care, that irks me.”

Long also plans to apply to be an astronaut as soon as he has his undergraduate degree, but said becoming an astronaut is often as much about luck and timing as it is about skill.

“Anyone can apply to become an astronaut, but I think they had like 18,000 people apply last time for only three spots,” Long said. “So I’ll put my name in the hat, and if it happens, cool.”