Tara | Westgate
“My name is Tara, and I live in Westgate. I worry about climate change, plastic pollution of the oceans, biodiversity loss, a few political things, famines and wars, justice and where we as a society are going.
I’ve got a masters degree in medical physics, and that’s about radiotherapy and medical imaging, but I’ve been finding it rather difficult to find a job in that field. So, I’m currently working two jobs. One as a tutor, one is at Pita Pit, and they’re both perfectly good jobs, but they’re not in my field. They’re not something I’ve devoted years of my life studying for. For my dissertation, I studied the MARS scanner in Christchurch. You might have heard of it because it was in the News a few months ago. It’s a type of CAT scanner, and a CAT scanner takes thousands of x-rays of a subject at different angles, and the computer constructs cross-sections of them. The MARS scanner uses a broader range of x-ray frequencies than conventional ones.
My mother works as a toxicologist and she kept getting hired by different groups, so I’ve lived overseas for most of my childhood. I’ve lived in the US, Australia and England briefly.
What I value in life? I want to seek personal fulfilment. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. That’s a big part of why I went into medical physics. I want to be a part of healthcare. I want to use my physics degree for something beneficial. I don’t want to make weapons. I think that’s the biggest danger of physics, is weapons. But I don’t want to be involved in anything detrimental to society, to humanity, to the planet.
I think we as a society need more compassion for those that we tend to think of as having deserved their own fate like prisoners, for instance. One of the things I do is I write to pen-pals in prison, and a lot of people who support tough on crime measures or locking people up for very long sentences, they don’t really appreciate the destruction they’re doing to other people. They’re not on the receiving end of really devastating, life-destroying policies. I think instead of tougher on crime policies, we need smarter on crime policies. It’s been recognised since the days of Aristotle that poverty is the parent of crime and revolution. If we want to cut down on crime we’ve got to cut down on poverty. If we want to reform criminals, we need to evaluate criminals not just on the severity of their crime, but on their capacity to change and to regret what they’ve done to try and be a better person.”
