Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Okay, now that Apr. 15th has come and gone, where did everyone decide to go?
As for me, I'll be @ UCSB .

goin to Princeton for plasma physics on an NDSEG fellowship...any other Princeton people up in here?

Cornell

University of Chicago - any more new chiagoans out there =)

Harvard for astro. Excited to move to Boston!

I will also be at UCSB

UCSC

U of Washington

caltech for astrophysics, most likely working in the tapir (theoretical astrophysics including relativity) group. it was a tough choice between caltech and princeton, though!

is their mascot a tapir? thats a pretty badass acronym

Johns Hopkins for biophysics

Harvard Physics

Nowhere as good as any of these universities, I'm afraid I'll be at the University of Rochester

MIT for cond-mat theory (I'll work under Prof at Harvard)

UCSD for Astrophysics

Caltech working with an applied physics professor.

harvard astronomy

Berkeley...seemed to be the place most in-line with my academic interests, but I'm still going through buyer's remorse, since I kind of wanted to leave California to try something new...oh well

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

@mcschram

I totally sympathize.

Even when you are fortunate enough to have plenty of good choices, the "buyer's remorse" effect seems to be everywhere you turn. I usually get around it by telling myself that even if my decision might not be perfect, it's definitely good enough. i.e., we might have some slight misgivings about where we decide to go, but when we're talking about going to grad schools of Berkeley's caliber, we can't have chosen THAT badly.

in physics and academia especially I think we have enough freedom to pursue our own interests that you have to be pretty lazy not to be happy. Physics is a rich and interesting subject and its hard to not find interesting things to study. as far as I can see the only reason one might be unhappy is if there is some adminstrative aspect of the school that makes it hard on grad students.

...which is exactly what I hear about Berkeley. I hear that grad students there are petty unhappy...is this the case? I also hear that the accept more students than they can find advisors for and accordingly, the grad students are unhappy. Can anyone confirm/deny these rumors? Im curious.

Re: Berkeley: that's the opposite of what I hear; or of what my impression was when I visited. Perhaps it's the west-coast thing and the sun shining 300 days a year, but they seem to be pretty happy and knows how to balance work/life and have a good time.

But I turned down Berkeley to go to MIT, and I hope I don't regret it in the midst of a March snowstorm while thinking of the Californian sun.

i heard the same thing about MIT... did you see any evidence of this?

Evidence of adminstrative aspect of the school making it hard on grad students? Not really. The qualifying exams are brutal; the environment is intense and everybody seem to work hard as hell, but I suspect that's what makes it MIT.

what percentage of students don't pass the qualifier and have to leave?

Very small. About 2/3 pass at each exam session but they can rewrite it a few times, and in the end I think they told us that on average only one person leaves per year due to quals.

Oh ok. Thats sounds pretty standard. But you haven't heard anything about students struggling to find advisors? This sounds like the primary pitfall to avoid in grad school. I was really turned off by UIUC because a ton of people I talked to there said they didn't end up working with their first choice of professor. I'm just curious to see at any of the(sometimes abitrarily) competetive programs like berkeley or MIT if any good physicists are every driven out of the program by despair over not being able to do the type of work they want.

Yeah, I heard that about UIUC too. I turned it down for Austin Texas instead. There are usually fewer grad students at Austin that usually apply for CM theory than there are in UIUC.

I haven't heard of such things at MIT. Perhaps best to ask a current student? Anyway I don't think the frequency of such occurrence there is higher than normal (otherwise I hope I would've been warned...)

llhop: I was at both Berkeley and MIT; did I see you? I was the guy with shoulder-height blond hair. What ended up swaying you towards Berkeley?

I just realized that Cornell was willing to pay health insurance in addition to the huge stipend they were offering...nice

mcshram: I pm'd you.

Yeah I think MIT covers health insurance too. Sweet.

stony brook

I will be going to Texas A&M on a full scholarship. I will be working in quantum optics / quantum computation. One of the great things about Texas A&M is that it's one of the 3 best universities in the US to work in this field of research.

I'll be going to Princeton for physics (not astro, bio, plasma, etc). It was a tough decision, but I feel that I made the right choice.

Are there any other people here who are going to Princeton for physics? It would be nice to compare notes with someone and find out if either of us is missing any documents, deadlines, etc. It can be tough to keep track of all of that stuff and write a senior thesis at the same time.

Best of luck to everyone in here.

hey HEPdude,

congrats man. btw, we'll all be taking the same quals (plasma requires taking physics dept. quals). I'll probably run into you in QFT, etc, as the plasma dept. has given me complete freedom over my academic curriculum and encouraged me to pursue all of my interests (and my interest in plasma and high energy were in a dead heat leading up to choosing a grad school, and still are for the most part). did you decide to room at the GC, or did you go for an apartment? pretty much everyone I talked to said GC is the best bet your first year if you want to meet other people, so that's what I wound up signing up for, though i'm not looking forward to moving out there in july and dealing with having no air conditioning...yeesh

Brown University

Damn podunk genes...I envy all of you. Anyway, I still have another year of undergraduate work left before I apply. I am starting to study for the GRE and hunt for grad schools. Anywho, congratulations again to all of you.