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astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 9:57 pm
by elliott34
Hey all, my senior year is approaching and I've basically taken all the physics courses in the department and have all the core courses for a phys PHD program, I was wondering if taking an astrophysics course is worth it down the road? I am not interested in it really, and plan on going to grad school for AMO theory/experiment. I realize that there are a lot of things in astrophysics that uses things from every subfield of physics and in that way it's a good way to learn a bunch of physics. But frankly I'm taking topology and writing my thesis and I'm not sure if I care enough to do the Problem sets. The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz...Do you think taking it would have any appreciable impact on what adcoms think of my transcript?

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 10:22 pm
by HappyQuark
elliott34 wrote:Hey all, my senior year is approaching and I've basically taken all the physics courses in the department and have all the core courses for a phys PHD program, I was wondering if taking an astrophysics course is worth it down the road? I am not interested in it really, and plan on going to grad school for AMO theory/experiment. I realize that there are a lot of things in astrophysics that uses things from every subfield of physics and in that way it's a good way to learn a bunch of physics. But frankly I'm taking topology and writing my thesis and I'm not sure if I care enough to do the Problem sets. The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz...Do you think taking it would have any appreciable impact on what adcoms think of my transcript?
I wouldn't worry about it. It's not a typical or expected course for most undergraduate physics programs and it's largely unrelated to the types of programs you seem to be applying to.

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 10:40 pm
by pqortic
take a graduate course instead if you can.

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2011 12:45 pm
by elliott34
cool. yeah i'd rather take something more general relativity based. I'm much more interested in quantum mechanics related topics, and I really don't feel like spending a semester plugging and chugging the radius of planets into my calculator...there is some thermo and mechanics which would be helpful for the gre maybe but nothing I haven't covered in one way or another...

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2011 2:53 pm
by vesperlynd
elliott34 wrote:The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz
. We used that for an astro class I took at my school. It's a crappy book, really crappy. My advice: find another class.

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2011 8:40 pm
by elliott34
thats for the advice. that seals the decision. i hate bad textbooks.