As noted in a previous post, I’m teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I’ll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that’s one of the options, whether people think it’s a good idea or not.<\/p>\n
These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly<\/cite> just came out with a new version of theirs<\/a>, for example), but very few people provide what’s really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let’s see what we can come up with (below the fold)…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I’m not half stupid enough to try to do a detailed ordered ranking of grad programs here. I’m looking for something more general, based on advice I was given when I was applying, lo these many years ago. The basic picture my advisor laid out was of two rough tiers of schools that are worth applying to.<\/p>\n The top tier is a set of schools that are good regardless of field. Pick any subfield you’re interested in, and they’ll have somebody on the faculty who works in that field, and they’ll be among the best in the world. <\/p>\n The exact composition of the second tier varies depending on subfield. These are schools that don’t have the kind of across-the-board excellence you see at the very top places, but are extremely strong in one sub-field or another. They may not have anybody on staff who does string theory, for example, but if you want to study experimental low-energy physics, they’ve got two or three very strong groups. These schools are somewhat easier to get into than the very top places, but if you work in the right field, your degree will be every bit as good as a degree from a better-known school.<\/p>\n The top tier is easy to construct, because everybody knows about those schools, more or less by definition. A rough list would be (in no particular order):<\/p>\n MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n (Chicago gets an asterisk because they have a reputation for being very theory-oriented, and not as strong for experimental physics… I’m not sure how justified that is, I’m just saying that’s their reputation.)<\/p>\n The second tier is a little trickier, and the list can be different for different fields. I can construct a rough list for AMO physics, which would look something like this (again, in no particular order):<\/p>\n Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Penn State, Rochester, Rice, UConn, Arizona<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n A couple of those hover on the edge of moving into the top tier (and a couple have only recently leapt onto this list), but I’m not that knowledgeable about their non-AMO programs. I can back most of these up with the names of a few specific research groups that I would match against anyone at the bigger-name schools. (Almsot anyone, anyway…)<\/p>\n So, here’s the audience participation part: What am I missing? Are there schools that ought to be in the top tier that I’ve left out? Schools I listed on the top level that don’t belong? Solid AMO programs I’m slighting? And who belongs on the second tier for other sub-fields (please be specific)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As noted in a previous post, I’m teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I’ll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that’s one of the options, whether people think it’s a… Continue reading Audience Participation Friday: Rate Graduate Schools<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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