Colonel John “Ike” Dirk
Marine Fighter Pilot and Operations Analyst
Why physics?
Working from first principles
John Dirk refers to himself as a “curious human.” When he graduated high school, he was looking for a degree that would help him to better understand the world. After considering pursuing a degree in robotics and in English, John finally settled on physics.
Thinking back on his decision, John recalls that he likely wasn’t experienced enough to have picked physics “because [it’s] a first principles way to look at the way the world works." He says that in retrospect gaining initial knowledge in physics was "a mind-opening experience that continues to be built out as you go into more advanced parts of physics."
During his undergraduate education at the United States Naval Academy, he started to develop a “first principles” approach to deconstructing problems. In his first physics class, he used free-body diagrams to understand how each individual force on an object affected its position and rotation. During John’s senior year, he continued to hone this skill of breaking problems down into their simplest parts by conducting research with professors and graduate students on the effects of radiation on microelectronics. To understand these effects, he helped to create the first portable thermal neutron detector that was NIST-traceable, meaning it was up to specific standards created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). John also worked a few weeks at the Northeastern Proton Therapy Center during his senior year at the Naval Academy.
Meet John
Using physics
Active duty service
After finishing his undergraduate education, he was deployed several times with the U.S. Marines in an assortment of different positions.
John shares, “I was fighter squadron commander of an F35 unit. And we had a lot of technical people maintaining a lot of high technology airplanes and a lot of data systems to support that. And my background as … an undergraduate in physics was really helpful.”
Test piloting as a physicist
John’s physics education served him twofold in his time as a test pilot. Becoming an experimental test pilot involves attending a program that is very similar to getting a master’s degree. John says that to be competitive in the application process you need to have an engineering or hard science degree. Once he was accepted and started the program, it was “all physics, all day, every day.” In explaining the work he did, John rhetorically asked, “Fundamentally, you're just conducting a physics experiment, right? How do I design my experiment, so that I can test for certain characteristics and then confirm or deny this hypothesis of whether or not this system has those characteristics?”
Once he completed the program, John began his role as a test pilot. He worked directly with engineers who needed to communicate high level ideas about the aircraft they had designed to the pilots. Often, the engineers communicated their ideas with analogies, the nuances of which would be lost to someone without the technical training John had. Because of John’s physics background, he understood the technical concepts being discussed and could speak the language of physics and mathematics with the engineers.
Disciplines collide
Currently, John works as an operations research analyst doing cost assessment and program evaluation for the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense. John’s time studying physics as an undergraduate provided the foundation he needed to communicate with his highly technical peers, while his experience as a deployed marine lent him the fundamental understanding of how certain decisions will play out in reality. For example, on a project, John and his team needed to create a “discrete event simulator” to fully understand the costs and resources needed for a particular campaign. Because of his unique background, John was able to learn Python and write the code himself, which was more straightforward than explaining the intricacies of the decisions being made by fighter pilots to other physicists on the team.
Advice for students
Work from first principles
John believes that when examining a problem, it is important to take the time to fully understand each of the component parts, as well as how each of those parts interact. That was the core practice that he believes set him apart from his colleagues. “Really understanding the first principles of how the world works, the big picture, and getting at that mathematically and analytically [is extremely important]. That's just a great foundation,” states John.
Pursue knowledge through different avenues
It’s important to John that all students know that no matter how you are spending your time, you are working toward understanding one large whole that is the world. All of the different things we do are not necessarily separated and if you specialize your skill set too early, you can lose opportunities to approach the world in new ways.
“It's all tied together, you know … your hobby, your school, and your work. They're all the same, right? There's one body of knowledge out there. And if you're always pursuing it from different directions … and you're looking at it from different angles, they can all help you understand how the world works. Whether it's what you're doing for fun or what you're doing for further school, I think sometimes we lose sight of that. And we really focus on, ‘I'm doing this to pass this test.’” says John.