Mopsickle

Backstory

When you're done with all seven years of magic school and still feel like there is more to learn and interpret, you go to the only place on this side of the world where you can engage in higher education. As a Ravenclaw graduate, I was highly qualified to enter several of the research positions in the Ministry, but I felt like there was too much politics involved in the Ministry and most of the funding went to the Auror and Curse breaking departments anyway. What can you do? Most wizarding conflicts arise so close to that part of the world that I was forced to leave. Networking aggressively with help from my ambitious Slytherin friend, I managed to find out about higher study options. Limited though they were, I was able to complete the wizarding equivalent of college at a very prestigious school, known even to muggles around the world for churning out brilliant scholars and inventors.

It took me seven years to graduate, given that the few witches and wizards who went there with me were required to complete muggle requirements as well. I was one among two purebloods in the program - the remaining students were muggleborn or had one wizarding parent, and most of them took only five years to graduate. For the first time in my life, I was able to study some really profound muggle subjects, of which physics interested me greatly because it seems to be so fundamentally true. I had the advantage over muggles, of knowing that magic exists, so there must be much, much more to these fundamental theories than they know. My thesis started off as a proposal to explain magic using physics, but what do you know, it is extremely hard to do. If I were better at making friends, I would be the friend of an extraordinary physicist and collaborate with her or him to make sense out of the nature of magic, much like how brilliant muggles have made so much sense of the nature of nature.

Graduating was no joke. Due to existing No-maj movements and legal matters about secrecy, my thesis, along with the theses of the rest of my wizarding cohort, were charmed under extremely strict ethical codes (to keep the muggles from being completely confused) before being reviewed by a committee. It was hard to sound muggle enough to the usual professors and also present substantial magical research to appease the witch or wizard in our committees. It was exhausting, but I loved it. So I decided to go to graduate school.

I am having an extremely hard time, but with my exposure to muggle studies and technology, I have learned that there is always Netflix and some good ol' pumpkin juice to fall back on when stresses pile high. In another seven years (this seems to be a recurring time period) when I have a PhD and I'm married to my muggle partner, I want to propose the idea of introducing magic to the muggles in education. I know it is a lofty goal, and there will be a worldwide upheaval in the wake of it, but the world around me seems to be growing more and more accepting everyday and who knows, in seven years it might be a bit less impossible than we think it is now.