MEN'S SWIMMING: Koss travels to Japan for physics research
By NOREEN GILLESPIE
Sports Writer
Standing in the bathroom of a Japanese home, Mike Koss realized he was surrounded by a culture in which he just didn't fit.
In a traditional gesture of hospitality, his Japanese hosts had provided him with a pair of house shoes geijas in Japanese worn to keep the house clean.
There was just one problem. Koss has a size 14 foot, and the little wooden heeled shoes his hosts expected him to squeeze his feet into were about a size six.
Not to mention the problem of a tall American male trying to teeter around a foreign house in a pair of heels.
Koss, a senior co-captain of the men's swimming and diving team, was chosen to travel to Japan this year as a member of an international physics research team. While the language of physics comes as second nature Koss, the language of a foreign culture did not.
"It was just completely amazing to me," he said. "There's a huge difference in cultural customs. They have a completely different sense of cleanliness," Koss said, laughing about the shoes.
But Koss is used to fitting into difficult situations as a four-year veteran of the swim team a task he has managed while working towards a physics degree. Between putting hours into the pool and putting hours into the laboratory, Koss has learned to make balance a goal.
"I love the guys I swim with and I love the stuff I do," he said. "Swimming and research are both things I really enjoy ... but it has meant a lot of nights with very little sleep."
Koss' balance was rewarded this year with honors in both of his passions. In the pool, he leads the swimming and diving team as co-captain. And in the classroom, he was chosen as one of only two undergraduate members in an international research project.
The project, completed in collaboration with the Research Center for Nuclear Physics in Osaka, Japan, examines Isoscalar Giant Dipole Resonance a scientific process that provides a way to determine nuclear compressibility patterns. The benefit of that research is that scientists can use the information to determine if a star will sink into a black hole or explode in a supernova.
Koss is the second Notre Dame student to work on the project, which concludes this semester. The research has taken him to Japan twice, once last summer and once this October to collect data. Koss will analyze the data and co-author a paper scheduled to be presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society this spring,
"Mike is a very bright student," said Umesh Garg, Notre Dame physics professor and Koss' adviser for the project. "It's a really remarkable opportunity. Something like being able to go to Japan and be part of international collaboration is not common."
Koss learned about the program from former swim team co-captain Matt Hedden, who participated in the research last year. It was Hedden's encouragement that inspired him to apply for the research position, Koss said.
But accepting the research opportunity meant having to leave the team for a week early in the season and miss two dual meet competitions.
"I gave kind of a speech before I left," Koss said. "I told them that even though I'd be on the other side of the world, [I'd be right there with them.] They were really supportive."
Koss trained during his week in Japan, working out with stretch cords and medicine balls while trying to research and sightsee.
But despite the difficulty in maintaining the responsibilities of both activities, he wouldn't have had it any other way, he said. It's taught him time management, and the lessons he learned in Japan will be invaluable in his career.
"It made me realize a ton of things. When you read your physics books, you have no idea how the experiments took place. It's just this view of some guy with crazy hair with amazing intellect," he said.
He also learned that while he might not know everything about the culture, he could use the talents he had to fit in.
When an instruction manual for a rotary pump written in English befuddled his Japanese-speaking colleagues, Koss was able to read the directions something the other researchers couldn't.
Then, he helped them assemble it.
"I didn't speak English for the first three or four days," he said. But smiling, he adds "I know enough [Japanese] to get by now."
All Sports Stories for Friday, January 18, 2002
