Whitman College students tell their stories—about their unique experiences in choosing Whitman and being part of the Whitman community and what they love most. This is Feras’s story.
Feras Natshen is a Physics and Astronomy combined major. He came to the U.S. from Palestine and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. At Whitman, he's found a place where he can explore a challenging and exciting academic and career path forward. Hear about his journey from researching in the physics lab to studying abroad in Dublin.
The “Our Whitman, My Story” podcast is a collaboration between the Whitman College Office of Communication and author and podcaster John Moe ’90. To meet more of our talented students follow Whitman on social media.
Whitman College students tell their stories—about their unique experiences in choosing Whitman and being part of the Whitman community and what they love most. This is Feras’s story.
Feras Natshen is a Physics and Astronomy combined major. He came to the U.S. from Palestine and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. At Whitman, he's found a place where he can explore a challenging and exciting academic and career path forward. Hear about his journey from researching in the physics lab to studying abroad in Dublin.
The “Our Whitman, My Story” podcast is a collaboration between the Whitman College Office of Communication and author and podcaster John Moe ’90. To meet more of our talented students follow Whitman on social media.
Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell how they got here and what happened once they did. And every story is different. This is our Whitman, my story.
Hello, my name is Feras Natshen, a physics astronomy combined major at Whitman College. He/him pronouns. I'm from Bethlehem Palestine. So how did I end up at Whitman College? I grew up in Palestine and my parents didn't want me to stay in Palestine, pursue a more bright future. And since I was young I was involved in English classes and exchange programs in Palestine and also in the States. I developed a decent English background. And then in high school I did an exchange program where I spent my junior year of high school in the States and I was up in Bellevue, just outside of Seattle for a year. I lived with a host family from the US. Spent the year there and then went back home and that's how I learned about colleges and that's when I knew that I wanted to pursue my college education in the States and I really liked Washington and the Pacific Northwest and I learned about Whitman from my host family.
And then I went home for senior year of high school. I applied to colleges and Whitman was my first early decision choice. And I got into Whitman. I really enjoyed the small size class. I don't see myself thriving at a bigger school. And I like that Whitman has the physics astronomy combined major because that's been my interest since high school and it's good to be able to pursue the education that I want to my full extent in the States.
So the combined major that I'm doing is instead of double majoring in physics and astronomy where you do almost the same amount of credits for each field, you end up doing about the same amount of credits for a physics major. And then on top of that you do 70% of those credits for astronomy, mostly because there's a lot more physics classes offered than astronomy and the department of physics is a little bigger than astronomy here, but you end up tailoring your physics knowledge to that knowledge that you need for astronomy and astrophysics, which I really like because I really enjoy physics, but there's a lot of physics is such a vast field that there's a lot of things that I don't particularly find as interesting as other fields within physics.
And just seeing that there is an astronomy tailored narrower field of physics offered here is really interesting because that's my main interest is learning the physics of astronomy, the physics of space and the applications available on how to utilize our physics knowledge in exploring all kinds of fields in astronomy and deeper space, cosmology, the universe, everything. And then on top of that, I'm doing a math minor to actually be able to understand physics, you need to know as much math as physics. A lot of people just like to say that physics is just applied math. So after I've done a lot of math classes at Whitman, I realized that I'm not too far from just completing a math minor and even if I take more classes than required, they'll just help me in my major more. So I just went for a couple more classes and fulfilled my minor requirement for math.
During my sophomore and junior year at Whitman, I lived in the multicultural house. It's the little yellow house behind the Cleveland Commons, the dining hall. It's a house for a lot of the times, mostly international students or students of color live in there because the mission of the house, it fosters diverse backgrounds and diverse cultures and ethnicities and traditions and its focus is narrowed down to celebrating those diversities and cultures and fostering a environment where we all express and don't struggle in just being comfortable with our cultures or our differences. And I really enjoyed living there. I lived with three other students from Armenia, El Salvador and Brazil, and then a domestic student from DC but originally from India. And I really enjoyed my time there. We had a lot of house activities where we'd celebrate by cooking food from our home countries and do cultural nights where we just play music and dances from our own also cultures. And yeah, it's a really good community.
Every year the physics department gives the opportunity to students to conduct research with all the professors that are doing research where the professor works as a supervisor and a mentor to the students. And I worked with Professor Doug Joors from the physics department. I was working in the crystallography lab and it was a biophysics project where I mostly was working on the physics side of it and I was developing a computational model for modeling the fracture and the liquid or fluid flow in nano protein crystals or nano-porous crystals. So we'd first grow the crystals through some chemical reactions. It was foreign to me. I haven't done any chemistry since high school, so it was fun to just relearn the chemistry, grow the crystals, and then study them experimentally and then later move on to building a computational model using computer software and coding and stuff to model how the interactions and the dynamics within those nano scale protein crystals. It was a really good experience. After the summer research was over, I signed up for more research credits with the same professor.
I studied abroad in my junior year or spring semester of junior year in Ireland. I think 40% of the junior class every year studies abroad throughout the year. I went to University College Dublin, which is the largest university in Ireland. And it was nice getting a glimpse of how bigger schools or universities work. I think UCD, University College Dublin, is a school of 33,000 students, so it was quite massive and a very different experience from Whitman. And then Dublin in general, or Ireland in general is a very welcoming place for immigrants or Palestinians. Ireland is a lot more sympathetic, or the Irish people usually tend to be more sympathetic towards the Palestinians. And as a Palestinian I found it very easy to obtain my visa to Ireland. It was quite surprising how simple sometimes that process could be. It was my first time ever experiencing such an easy process to get a visa, which was nice.
I really enjoyed Dublin. It was really cool. Classes were definitely a different experience. Most of my classes were in a very big auditorium of 200 students and just a professor or a lecturer that most likely you won't meet. And then you have class TAs that take smaller groups. There was some pros and cons to that system. I very much appreciate connections to professors and I didn't get that chance in Dublin, but it was good timing to experience that because when you're abroad, you need to focus on academics, but also you want to see the area, you want to explore, you want to go around and generally students take a lighter load than they take regularly at Whitman.
I think one of the best things or the major advantage of studying abroad in Dublin in the spring is you get to experience St. Patrick's Day in Dublin, which was definitely an experience I will remember. A lot of people from the states visit Ireland or Dublin on St. Patrick's Day there was a lot of school bands or march bands performing. There was a very big parade. It goes on for three, four hours. But yeah, the parade was really fun. I think that's definitely one of the major memories of my study abroad experience in Dublin.
I'm Feras and this has been Our Whitman, My Story. There are more episodes of Our Whitman, My Story available right now wherever you get your podcasts. Music for this podcast provided by Big Joe, a band made up of Whitman students. For more information, go to whitman.edu/stories.