Patrick Mang and Katherine Panebianco: dual perspectives on physics at MIT
This Student Spotlight interweaves two diverse perspectives on both physics and the broader MIT experience
Trigger warning: mention of suicide
Hello! The Student Spotlight column is back — with an alumni twist this time.
Instead of just one student, we’re putting two Course 8s in conversation with each other. Patrick Mang ’98 is a Course 8 alum who moved to London after his PhD and runs the non-investment side of the hedge fund Trium Capital. Katherine Panebianco ‘26 is a double major in Courses 8 and 18, President of the Society of Physics Students (SPS), and doing research that analyzes James Webb Space Telescope data.
All together, their experiences show what Course 8 can look and feel like across generations and careers.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you choose Course 8 as a major?
For Patrick, it started with a museum gift shop. During his childhood, he went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and bought a popular science book. “Probably about black holes, gravity, and general relativity,” he recounted. Once he read it, he got hooked on the subject. The challenge enticed him. “I wanted to study physics because I thought it was hard,” he said.
Katherine gave what she calls the stereotypical “cheesy” answer. “I always liked physics in high school,” she said. “I always liked how mathematical it is — the way it uses math to describe the world.” Her interest does not only derive from the coursework, though: “I’ve always found the physics community to be a very welcoming environment,” she noted.
When you were an undergraduate, what did you think you would do as a career? Alternatively, as a current undergraduate, what do you think you will do as a career?
Patrick’s initial plans were straightforward. “I wanted to be an academic. I wanted to be a professor,” he said. “I didn’t become one, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
After graduating, he went to Japan via MISTI’s MIT-Japan program to work at an American manufacturer’s Japanese office. Within two months, he realized it wasn't for him, so he decided to apply to graduate school. As he made this decision, one empathetic MIT professor told Patrick a funny story about his own struggles with culture clash in the corporate world: specifically, dress codes at IBM. With this professor’s support, Patrick went to Stanford for a PhD. The actual career he ended up in — banking and then Trium Capital in London — came later, accidentally.
Katherine didn’t exactly have a five-year plan at the start. “When I was in high school, I was like, I’m going to get into college, and then I’ll figure out what I want to do with my life,” she said. “Then as a freshman, I told myself, ‘I just got here. I don’t need to have everything figured out.’”
At some point, for a multitude of reasons discussed later, physics filled that void. “I’ve fallen into [physics],” she said. “I’ve done a bunch of physics things, so now I’m applying for grad school.” For her, graduate school is the natural continuation of what she’s been doing all along: falling deeper and deeper into physics.
What are you doing now, and how is it similar or different to what you imagined?
Patrick finished his Stanford PhD and fully intended to remain an academic. But life had different plans. His best friend was in finance and highlighted Wall Street as a career path. Patrick’s mother was also an amateur commodities trader, so careers in finance were always in his periphery.
He tried returning to Japan, this time in banking. Deutsche Bank wanted to hire him in Tokyo, but it didn’t work out. Despite that, a compromise was made: “They said, ‘We need you to go to London, the headquarters of the investment bank,’” Patrick said. “I flew to London, and then an influential man who had studied physics at Stanford said, ‘We’re going to make you an offer, but give it to you from London because we think it’s better for you and for us.’”
Patrick had one job offer, an almost completed PhD, and no other options. He took the offer. “For financial reasons, I went into banking. For accidental reasons, I came to London,” he summarized. He has been in London ever since.
“I think many things in life are accidentally true,” Patrick remarked.
Right now, Katherine is close to the academic pipeline. She is applying to graduate school, inspired by her current research on a gravitationally lensed quasar in the Cosmic Dawn Group under Professor Anna-Christina Eilers. “The research is about a lot of things that are high redshift — very early in the universe, 12 billion plus years old. It’s crazy that we can look that far back in time and see these things,” Katherine said. “And that’s definitely influenced the physics I want to do in grad school.”
How did you find (or build) a community in physics?
Patrick spoke more broadly and bluntly about his MIT experience: “I felt my MIT experience was actually quite horrific,” he admitted. “I had a really hard time there. I found it very, very difficult. I was sort of glad to leave.”
This sentiment wasn’t in a drinking-from-the-fire-hose, academic-overload sense. “It wasn’t the work that bothered me,” he noted. “It was the uncaring environment of everything around me and the cold, sterile concreteness of it.”
He vividly remembered crossing the Harvard Bridge and talking to a friend about this. “My friend Wilson said, ‘MIT is not a college, a university. It’s an institute — an institute where they queue up the machines.’”
Despite those experiences, Patrick still trusts MIT people more than almost anyone else. “Even today, if I could hire any person, I would preferentially hire an MIT person because you can trust them to complete a task they said they would,” he said.
Katherine, in some sense, is actively building the communities that Patrick desired. In her freshman year, she participated in the physics freshman pre-orientation program (FPOP). She found the experience a lot of fun. “I met a lot of people who I’m still friends with now,” she said. “We still pset for physics classes together, several years later.”
After her FPOP, she was drawn into the Society of Physics Students (SPS), since many physics FPOP counselors were also in the organization. Katherine noted that SPS did “a really good job” of building community, which made her “feel more comfortable.”
In her sophomore year, Katherine became treasurer of SPS. Now, she is the president. She remains committed to the organization because of its mission in building the physics community here at MIT. “The community has always been a big part of why I enjoy physics,” she said. “So it’s always been important to me to try to help other people also feel that way.”
On top of all this, Katherine became a social chair for Undergraduate Women in Physics (UWiP), organizing “community dinners” and connecting different physics sub-communities. “I’ve been able to encourage more people from UWiP to do things with SPS, which I hope is helping to bridge the gap and make physics as a whole feel more welcoming,” she said.
Is there anything specific you learned in Course 8 that you still use?
“I think very highly of mens et manus,” Patrick said. “You just got to get started. You get your hands dirty; you’ll learn something. I think a lot of people don’t have that — they feel that there should be a procedure. It should be established.”
For Patrick, one canonical Course 8 class that especially embodied the mens et manus spirit was Junior Lab, also known as J-Lab. “When I did Junior Lab, it was a full-year course,” he said. “We had 24-hour access to the lab. I learned a lot about experimentation.”
Patrick was laser-focused during this Course 8 requirement. “My partner and I might have been the only people in our year group who never were late with anything,” he noted. “You got one free late report. We never used it.”
All that time in the lab left a strong impression on him. At some point, he could tell you where the “center of the hydrogen 21-centimenter line” was above the horizon during any time of day.
Katherine’s answer humorously delves into “physics BS,” mentioning the “fake math” that she thinks is “funny.”
In Quantum III (8.06), she learned a classic thought experiment. Even though students are taught in Physics II (8.02) that magnetic monopoles don’t exist, assume that they do. From that assumption, one can show that electric charge has to be quantized. This fact is already known to be true, so it’s fine. However, if there are multiple magnetic monopoles, an immediate logical contradiction arises.
“You can do this weird workaround logic to argue that there could be one magnetic monopole in the whole universe and we just haven’t found it yet,” Katherine joked. “This is probably not true, but I think it’s a really funny thought experiment.” This thought experiment came up again in Electromagnetism II (8.07) — a recurring joke.
While the jokes are funny, they are the perfect example of how Course 8 has changed Katherine’s perception of reality.
“Physics made me appreciate the world around us and the universe more,” she said. “Maybe that’s kind of cliché, but it’s amazing that we’re able to describe everything with these mathematical models.”
What was the highlight of your undergraduate experience? (And, if you’re comfortable, the lowlight?)
Patrick’s lowlight at MIT is clear: a suicide at his dorm. He still carries the pain of that memory. “I wasn’t very close [to the victim], but to this day, it bothers me. A person I know jumped out of my dorm.”
Despite the weight of that experience, Patrick also highlighted the friendships he made at MIT: “I had good friends right here,” he said. Although he was “not so much in touch” with these friends since he left America, they are people he feels like he could always trust.
Katherine found it hard to choose just a few highlights. Academically, one of her favorite memories is from Real Analysis (18.100B). To her, the class material converged in a beautiful and elegant way: “Towards the end of the semester, we had this one 30-minute stretch in a lecture where we proved the product rule, chain rule, and quotient rule,” she recalled. “Rigorously proving these calculus concepts that we take for granted was a really neat experience.”
Katherine doesn’t pinpoint a specific low, but her words hints at something she’s observed throughout her time at MIT: “My biggest point of advice would be to get enough sleep,” she said. “Get eight hours of sleep every night. I know it’s hard, but it’s truly so important.”
What would you tell a Course 8 student trying to navigate MIT now?
Patrick zoomed out and implored students to think about the big problems we face. Income inequality is one issue that is particularly salient for him. “I worry there’ll only be a few trillionaires, and everyone else will be on universal basic income,” he said.
Climate change and global warming are also concerns that Patrick has. Solving these issues will “require some technologies,” but he emphasized that they cannot be solved by “a technology solution” alone. “Technology has the ability to make [climate change] right. It also has the ability to make it worse,” he said.
While technology is a double-edged sword, Patrick remains confident that the people best positioned to tackle these problems are MIT alumni transformed by their undergraduate experience. “‘Pressure makes diamonds,’” Patrick said, quoting another alumnus. “It’s a challenge that will make you who you are, and it’s these people [at MIT] who are going to be important for solving the problems of the future.”