Physics GRE Discussion Forums

what do you guys think of University of Victoria?

UVic is one of the more underrated schools in Canada in my opinion. They have a decently large astronomy subdepartment and a wide range of interests.

A few years ago, I did a summer project at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. During the summer, they had an invitation-only conference and UVic and UToronto were the only Canadian schools that had representatives (I don't know whether other Canadian schools were invited but chose not to attend). For what it's worth, to me that's a sign that they're doing something right.

In talking to an instrumentation professor at my school he did mention that Victoria and British Columbia had very good programs if I wanted to look for something out of the country. They are both organized under the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics so you'll be getting quality work/standards from either.

Then in comparison with University of Heidelberg? (Very near Max Planck)

m42 wrote:In talking to an instrumentation professor at my school he did mention that Victoria and British Columbia had very good programs if I wanted to look for something out of the country. They are both organized under the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics so you'll be getting quality work/standards from either.

UBC has an extraordinary cosmology instrumentation program, probably no. 3-4 in the world (behind Chicago, Berkeley, and maybe UCSD).

zjudracula wrote:Then in comparison with University of Heidelberg? (Very near Max Planck)

In regards to the field of instrumentation (as this was the convo I had with my professor), the German, Canadian and other systems tend to work as giant projects. So usually people are a small part of a subsystem of a much larger subject - at least in the instrumentation field. That's where individual universities in the US would be more preferable if you wished to work on more aspects of a project that a sole university may work on constructing the whole thing. Max Planck, BC, Victoria are all very good places for astronomy - I'm sure someone else could expand on the non-instrumentation side of those places.

I have accepted Uvic.
I hope that will be a nice choice.

zjudracula wrote:I have accepted Uvic.
I hope that will be a nice choice.

Congratulations! Victoria is a beautiful city!

You know Canada is a world leader in astrophysical research and much of this leadership depends on access to forefront, world-class telescopes. Astronomer's push to understand the Universe depends on building ever more powerful, and specialized, telescopes. This push has seen telescopes grow from Galileo's 2.5 cm (0.025 m) specimen to the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

What about Waterloo? I looked at the department webpage and even though they're a VERY small department, the research they do is really interesting.

InquilineKea wrote:What about Waterloo? I looked at the department webpage and even though they're a VERY small department, the research they do is really interesting.

I don't know much about their astro research. Waterloo physics is generally known for its quantum computing and quantum informatics stuff. Waterloo also has a bunch of profs that are affiliated to the Perimeter Institute (located in the city of Waterloo), so I would imagine that there's some interesting theory opportunities there as well.