Going with the flow

From childhood, Blake Mincey wanted to know how the world works. He still doesn’t have all the answers, but at this point in his life, he has amassed enough life experience and academic training to feel as if he’s made some progress.

The 39-year-old Georgia native is set to graduate this spring with his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College — decades after his search for answers to big questions began. His path has been interesting if not direct.

“As a kid, I wanted to know why things were the way they were,” he said. “And in high school, physics and chemistry really fascinated me, because I started finally getting real concrete answers for all this curiosity that I had.” 

Mincey grew up in Adairsville, a small town in northern Georgia. He spent his high school career prodding teachers about electrons, protons, and neutrons. Impressed by his curiosity, a teacher bought him a copy of “The Elegant Universe” by theoretical physicist Brian Greene. 

“Of course, I didn’t understand any of it at the time, but I found it fascinating. So it kicked off this thing where for the rest of my life, I would just read all of these different trade books by like Sean Carroll or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or just physics books written for the general population,” he said.

After graduation Mincey decided to join the Army, where he did 4½ years in the infantry. He deployed to Iraq in 2006 and spent 15 months overseas.

During that period, he ended up spending a lot of time in Hawaii and California — and he developed a taste for a more adventurous and transient lifestyle. When he got out of the service, he used the GI Bill to train as a drummer at the Atlanta Institute of Music. 

“I’m a drummer and spent about 12 years after that playing music professionally — bar gigs and stuff,” Mincey said. “And then from like 2015 to 2019 I toured the country with a country band.”

But the scientific curiosity remained. During his time with the band, Mincey met his wife — a medical student in surgical residency at the time. 

“I decided to take a hiatus from the band, and I had more GI Bill money left over from the military, so I was like ‘I’ll go back to college,’” Mincey said. “It was always in my back pocket as kind of a backup plan.” 

So while his wife was finishing her residency, Mincey went back to school at Georgia State.

Another fork in the road presented itself when it came time for her to apply for surgery fellowships, and she matched at the University of San Francisco.

“I loved California when I lived there in the military, and I’d been back in Georgia for like, 10 years. So we were like, ‘Let’s just pack everything up,’” Mincey said. 

He applied to transfer his college credits to the University of California but ran into some administrative snags. Mincey also submitted applications to other schools, including some he considered a reach.

“Somehow,” Mincey said, “I got into Stanford.”

Then the pandemic hit, forcing all Stanford classes online. Mincey spent the next year doing his coursework online, while his wife finished her fellowship. 

When she was done, the couple decided it was time for a new adventure.

“We’re go-with-the-flow people,” he said. “We just try to, try to do things that we find interesting, try to live in places that we find interesting, and wherever that is and whatever that is, we just go until we find it.” 

So the couple moved to Chicago, where they stayed for about two years, and college plans got put back on the back burner.

“Then we decided to try out the Northeast,” he said. “And so I just applied to everywhere on the East Coast.”

Once again, he thought his unconventional record might get in the way of his highest academic ambitions. And once again he was proven wrong, as Harvard offered him a seat, and he started taking classes in Cambridge in fall 2023. 

Returning to school in his 30s, Mincey said, was a challenge from the start. To retake the SATs, he had to relearn all his high school math using YouTube and Khan Academy. 

“I just started at, like eighth-grade algebra and just went through the courses, one at a time, until I felt confident enough to take the SAT,” he said. 

The jump in rigor from Georgia State to Stanford had been astounding, he said. And then moving from remote classes at Stanford to in-person at Harvard was another shock.

He also discovered some holes in his academic preparation. Mincey, unlike his classmates, who were coming straight from high school, had long forgotten some of the basics for his physics curriculum. Then there was the matter of never having had calculus till College.

But, he added, even though the coursework has been challenging, it has allowed him to explore complex ideas he couldn’t otherwise. 

“He asked many interesting questions,” said astronomy lecturer Xingang Chen, who taught Mincey in his undergraduate cosmology course. “And some of these questions clearly reflected ideas he had been considering for some time, even before taking the class, but further deepened and sparked by the content we learn in the class.”

As for what comes next, Mincey says he explored environmental physics during his time at Harvard and is open to applying his degree in any new way that piques his interest. 

But mostly, he said, he’s looking forward to spending more time with his family, including his 1-year-old daughter. 

“I’m ready to work a little less, to be honest,” he said. “I think even getting a 40-hour-a-week job is going to be a reduction in workload. So that’ll be nice. And I’m just excited about what the future holds.”