It’s college admissions season, which means a steady influx of high-school seniors thinking about coming here next year, making campus visits. Most of these students sit in on at least one class, to get an idea of what it’s like. Which occasionally leads to odd things, but nothing stranger than what just happened: a prospective student just sat in on my junior\/senior level elective class on quantum mechanics in the state-vector formalism. I suspect he didn’t get a whole lot out of today’s lecture, on changing state vectors and operators from one basis to another. In fact, I suspect this might be in the running for the Worst Campus Visit EVER.<\/p>\n
(Due to the way first-year classes are scheduled, we don’t offer any of the intro classes in the 9:15 MWF class block. Apparently, he started to go to the pre-med physics class downstairs, but they told him it was aimed at life-science majors, and sent him upstairs to look for the engineering physics class. But my class is the only physics class offered in that time slot, so he ended up hearing more than I suspect he ever wanted to know about matrix representations and basis rotations…)<\/p>\n
I’m never entirely sure that students get much useful information out of these visits, anyway. Thinking back on my own experience, I’m not sure the physics classes I went to told me anything I didn’t already know. 100-level physics classes tend to be taught in giant lecture halls, maybe with some demos, and were all more or less the same, over a wide range of institutions (Williams, MIT, Cornell).<\/p>\n
Really, the highlight of my college visits in terms of classes attended was at Swarthmore, where one of my student hosts insisted that I HAD to go to a Psych 101 class taught by a particular professor. Which wound up being the most fun of any of the classes– I remember the professor going on at length about how Freud was a pretty whacked-out dude, and I think they also showed a short movie about the infamous Milgram experiment<\/a>. That’s the only psychology class I ever attended anywhere, but it was a good time, and probably at least as informative as any of the more relevant classes I attended.<\/p>\n I suspect that, when the time comes for SteelyKid to do the college search thing, circa 2026, that’ll be my advice to her: if you do the overnight visit thing, ask your student hosts to recommend the best professor\/class combination on the list of open classes. If you know what you plan to major in, you should definitely make a point of visiting the relevant department(s), and talking to whatever faculty and students they have available to talk to prospective students, but I’m not sure that sitting in on one class selected more or less at random from the intro offerings is going to tell you all that much. So find something fun, and go to that.<\/p>\n What’s your best (or worst) college visit story?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s college admissions season, which means a steady influx of high-school seniors thinking about coming here next year, making campus visits. Most of these students sit in on at least one class, to get an idea of what it’s like. Which occasionally leads to odd things, but nothing stranger than what just happened: a prospective… Continue reading Great Moments in Campus Visits<\/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":[8,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5504","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=5504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}