astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
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?
- HappyQuark
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Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
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.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?
Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
take a graduate course instead if you can.
Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
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...
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Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
. We used that for an astro class I took at my school. It's a crappy book, really crappy. My advice: find another class.elliott34 wrote:The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz
Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?
thats for the advice. that seals the decision. i hate bad textbooks.