UC alum: From the gridiron to the stars

Unfortunately, tragedy struck in the form of a ligament tear, sidelining Tyler during his junior season. He would rehab through senior year and did not play football for UK again. 

”That was my lifelong dream. That was what I thought I was going to be successful in,” Tyler said. “Had my entire identity wrapped up in football. Losing that meant losing everything.”

So, how does a former college defensive back find a new path? Tyler turned to rehabilitation and his love of science. While his injury healed, Tyler kept himself occupied with astronomy documentaries. As he was searching for something to alleviate the boredom of rehab, something else happened.

“I had this very limited narrow perspective of the world. Everything that I knew about everything was emanating from a point in which I was the center focus in everyday life,” Tyler said.

The documentaries challenged him to study more of the universe, and changed his worldview.

Everything wasn’t rainbows and sunshine for him. He was grateful for a fresh start, but had to enter a field he had no experience in. He needed the proper guidance and mentorship to get him through the rigor of physics.

Fortunately, the physics department had him covered, particularly his student mentor Rachel Fernandez. 

“One thing I was missing was that guidance. Rachel definitely stood out to me. She really pointed me in the right direction, and mentored me academically,” Tyler said.

In her mentorship, Tyler gained advice for graduate school and joined a research group that studied stars with disks of material surrounding them.

Of course, the award-winning faculty of UC’s Physics Department were instrumental in his Bearcat years for Tyler, “they really helped to guide me academically, otherwise I wouldn't necessarily have known what other steps to take.”

At UC, Tyler worked as a teaching assistant and landed a research opportunity at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. After graduating as a double major in astrophysics and physics in 2019, Tyler gained another opportunity in Maryland, where he studied the atmosphere of Mars during a research project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Afterwards, he enrolled into UCLA’s master’s of science in astrophysics.

“UC was the best decision for me at the time, and ended up being a great experience,” Tyler says, citing his Bearcat years as a major step to get into “the next level in an astrophysics program at UCLA.”

Tyler spent his youth in football, believing his future success was in athletics. However, through injury he persevered and found a passion he otherwise wouldn’t have ever dreamed of. Now, Tyler is continuing his exploration of the stars as a doctoral candidate at UCLA, working towards a career in science communication.

The biggest lesson he learned at UC came about his own feelings of inadequacy. He took differential equations and electromagnetism classes and did poorly. This didn’t stop him, however.

“I needed to have done much better to maintain a good GPA and transcript, but also to understand what’s going on in physics,” Tyler said.

”I retook both of them and got A's. That period of doing poorly in those classes and deciding that I wasn't going to be satisfied with the low grade. I worked incredibly hard on studying, practiced way more. It showed me that I could do anything I dedicated myself to, and it helped me understand physics better which positioned me to get into graduate school.” 

From his success, Tyler urges students from any background to give science a try.

“I would encourage people to look into the sciences in general. The idea of science, and the word ‘math,’ can be intimidating when you don’t have a background in them. That was literally me. There’s a science to anything.”