The day is approaching fast when grad-students-to-be need to be making decisions about where to choose. Probably undergrads, too, although I confess that I have no real idea what the calendar for that looks like.
So, good luck with all that decision-making! Here are links to our previous posts about the topic.
- Unsolicited Advice: Choosing a Grad School
- On Choosing a Grad School: A Dialogue
- Unsolicited Advice: Choosing an Undergraduate School
Not too much to add to the discussion there, but here’s an opportunity to chat about the process. My own strong feeling is that how successful you are in school (grad or undergrad) is much more up to you than up to the institution. Most places have more good opportunities than anyone can hope to take advantage of in a limited period of time. Take the initiative, don’t wait for good things to come to you, and have fun!
Thanks to you guys for the list of resources.
I’m actually getting ready to start making these kinds of decisions (junior in undergrad). At the moment I’m trying to figure out if I want to go to grad school at all. I guess as time has gone on I’m realizing more and more that I don’t want to end up in academia, but I’m not sure that the career opportunities are there for someone with just a BS degree in physics who wants to work in astronomy/aerospace (and maybe others can correct me if I’m wrong). Is it common to just assume that those who go to grad school are aiming to end up in academia somewhere afterwards? From those previous discussions it sounds like most people didn’t stay there, but what was the motivation?
I guess we’ll see. I’ve got a few months left to decide before the fall, but I just find it difficult to imagine myself considering my life well spent if I never get out of the academic world.
A few of the grad schools that accepted me offered a rotation program, allowing grad students to try out different advisors before committing. This sort of thing wasn’t mentioned in any of the previous discussion, so I wonder how much it changes things.
The rotations make me feel like I can focus more on the school and department itself, rather than worrying about specific advisors. I spent some time talking to professors, but mostly with the goal of picking a specialization rather than picking a research group.
Justin, I would recommend contacting some people in the fields you’re interested in, and asking them about qualifications. You might start at the AAS non-academic career site.
“I just find it difficult to imagine myself considering my life well spent if I never get out of the academic world.”
I wouldn’t recommend a PhD, then. No, it wouldn’t last your whole life, but it would feel like it. You might consider a masters program. That will be much shorter, and is often what industry is interested in anyway (and would give you a head start if you decided you did want to continue to a PhD).
Miller, I think most grad schools give you an informal rotation option, if not a formal one. That is, it’s common to do research with two or three professors before picking a thesis advisor. Indeed, I think it’s almost de rigueur in theory, because most grad students don’t start with a solid knowledge of QFT, so if they do research their first year, it’s in experiment. (Although note that I’m basing this just on observations of colleagues, not being a theorist myself.)
In fact, often you can’t know if you want someone to be your advisor until you’ve worked with them for a while. The interaction of both your personalities is as important as their research interests.
Just wanted to throw out my 2c. I had offers from Cornell and Caltech in physics. As I come from Australia, there really wasn’t the chance to visit either university (at least, not without large expenditures on my part). I ended up browsing the school and departmental websites, and looking at Wikipedia for the locations. One of the big contributing factors to my decision to go to Cornell? It snows there 🙂
Yeaah. I have a 3.6 gpa in a masters program, research experience, publication, conference presentations, mid 700’s pgre scores. Got rejected by everyone. I know a decent amount of qft, gr and comp. programming. Anyone have any advice?
Justin, My son-in-law, BS Caltech (where he met my daughter) went to grad school at Stanford dreaming to become a physics professor. He just finished his PhD but along the way met some other guys, had ideas, formed a startup, got venture funding and a whole new direction opened up. You can’t plan your life (you know, chaos theory and all), you make your best decisions then ride the hurricane as it happens. I’d say go for the PhD.
“One of the big contributing factors to my decision to go to Cornell [rather than Caltech]? It snows there :)”
Interestingly, this is the reason Feynman decided to leave Cornell for Caltech. 🙂
Feynman ftw!
yeah,
Based on QFT and GR, it sounds like you want to do theory. Very few schools will take you in theory with mid 700 physics GRE scores and a 3.6 GPA. I’d suggest looking into another line of work.
No US citizen I knew (late 90s/early 2000s) who went into grad school wanting to do GR ended up getting an academic job in the end. It took them forever to get their Ph.D.’s (6-9 years), and they went into finance, consulting, or the tech industry in the end. QFT wasn’t a whole lot better.
I’d suggest just skipping right to the tech industry.
Isn’t that kind of… depressing? I mean, I’m not a theorist, but I know a lot of folks who are much better at theory than me and just can’t break through; it feels like the choice between whether one does or doesn’t get the spot is basically a coin-flip with no really good rationale behind it. Is the physics GRE so absolutely reflective of one’s ability to be a good theorist that a mid-700s score (which, really, is pretty damn good!) is not good enough to be considered?
Jerry said “Is the physics GRE so absolutely reflective of one’s ability to be a good theorist that a mid-700s score (which, really, is pretty damn good!) is not good enough to be considered?”
I think of the GRE as a mildly valuable contra-indicator. A 900 doesn’t mean that you will be good at anything, but a 700 indicates you likely won’t make it in theory. I don’t put much stock in the GRE as an indicator of anything. Sadly, many of my colleagues think it’s a great metric, even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary. Of course, research experience and good letters matter the most.
Also, for anyone who may have taken the physics GRE more than a few years ago, the scoring has changed. (I’m not sure when this happened exactly.) In the past, a 750 meant you scored in the 75th percentile. Today a 750 is mid-60’s in percentile (apparently it changes a bit from year to year)
How awkward is it to transfer grad schools? I ended up choosing a much lower-ranked school over some top 10 schools I got into, since the lower-ranked school felt like a better research fit (some top-of-their-field faculty doing exactly what I’m interested in), but now that I’m finishing up my first year, I feel like I made the wrong decision. (Not terribly impressed with the other students in my year, and initially I thought a small department would be a good thing for me, but now I just feel claustrophobic.)
Is it harder to transfer to top schools now that I’ve already spent some time here? (Or maybe it’s easier? O:-)) Will faculty be a little reluctant to write recommendation letters for me (and will the feeling be a little awkward, since I guess I’ll probably be spending the next academic year here since I’d be re-applying in the fall)?
I’m actually a graduate student in theoretical computer science, by the way, not sure if things are different between fields.
Transferring isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. You just have to apply and see what happens. You’ll probably need at least one letter from someone at your current school, to testify that you’re choosing to leave rather than being gently nudged out.
I have a friend who applied as theory, got a 700 on the pgre with no publications and is going to a top five school. “Yeah,” don’t be discouraged!
I think the gre does test some kind of intelligence, but it seems to me that the skills required are very different than the thinking required to do research (month long vs. 50 second problems). I disagree with AOJ; I think that if you have very good gre scores and high gpa and everything good, then you will most likely be a very good theoretical physicist. For people who are less than perfect in any of these categories, it is more unpredictable, but you may also be just as good a researcher. It is kind of like a one-way arrow (good => good researcher, bad neq bad researcher).