Re: A first-year undergraduate seeks advice.

Dearest PHYSICSGRE.com forum members,

Allow me to introduce myself. Just kidding.

I need to master the PHYSICSGRE. I am a freshman (in more than one way, gi... oops) attending a mildly competitive university. [Trailing off into third-person...] Though considered bright, this student neglected his duties during high school (the audience gasps in surprise at this combination of character traits). !!STOP!!

Okay, sorry about that. I have problems focusing. Now I'm studying from Halliday, Resnick, and Krane. I've purchased (BEGRUDGINGLY) the three-volume Feynman Lectures and I'm very pleased with them (him) thus far. (God I love Feynman. I LOVE YOU FEYNMAN. Fine man, Feign man, THE EVERYMAN.) Also the 3,000 Solved Problems in Physics which I'll work through over the summer (see: Ripley's Believe It or Not!). Got Rohlf's Modern Physics book as well. Anything else I should be doing?

I mean, what would YOU do were you again a freshman? Imagine that, but add a small detail: strip yourself of all (your clothes ahahaha that'd be funny but also very challenging) ability to interact with people. Now I don't want any cheap stuff, I want to learn this stuff genuinely. I want it be like... you know, like qualia. Any tips?

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/tyger.html,
PAINpainfullyQuick

Put all your *** away until the summer before your senior year. Start doing research, do well in your classes, and have a good time in college. Become less full of yourself.

Yes, take that one seriously !

That was from his first post.

All right, thanks guys. I'd like to apologize for my first post and second posts. They're blatantly immature and undeserving of this forum's attention. I'm not full of myself, though it must certainly seems so. I'm just a little strange -- I'll temporize my posts from now on. My three main physics guys are Feynman, W. Lewin, and Sagan. I'd be really embarrassed if they read that stuff.

So I'll focus on my research and GPA until the time grae313 mentioned. Beyond that, I'll just spend my free time learning about whatever interests me. I don't want to bastardize the subject I like so much by shaping my studies around a high test score.

Thank you guys for setting me straight, and I hope this post doesn't come across as contrived or something. I blushed just thinking about opening this thread, 'cause I knew I'd embarrassed myself again!

Wow if you started studing for the GRE physics exam you could ace it by your senior year. Say you are studying E&M or classical mechanics this semester you could do problem sets that correspond out of a gre physics exam book. Here is the one I am using now. It is broken up into the topics such as
*electricity and magnet. * atomic physics, * relativity etc. So each semester you could just change the problems.

I would highly recommend against that test prep book. It is notorious for providing example problems that are entirely unlike the actual test questions (if I recall correctly they are significantly easier than the actual test problems). It does provide the 4 available practice PGRE tests which will be invaluable to you, however they can be found for free on the Internet.

Another big problem with is book is that some questions require a calculator to be done in 1.7 minutes and you are not allowed to use a calculator.....


Back to topic: listen to grae and you will be on the right track