Top school to become a physicist?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is pretty neurotic and a high scorer on exams but simply lacks extracurriculars. She aspires to be a physicist and in her free time, she’s president of the Quantum physics and robotics team. I’m concerned that without going to a top 20 university, she won’t be able to ever achieve her dream. Looking through the assistant professor page at Princeton, every one of them has a degree from MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua, and IIT, so what chance does she have getting into the professsion?

So many questions:

What school has a Quantum physics and robotics team? Sounds weird.
Why don't you look at the full professors, not the assistant professors?
Stony Brook is very good and getting better in the sciences, particularly physics. State school but not huge. Though many of them get cherry picked to Wall Street
Lots of random large state schools are great at scientific research. Iowa State, Illinois, Colorado.

It seems like your child got her neurosis from you.

Assistant professors are recent talent. Tenured professors are at least 50-60 years old, many endowed chairs are decades past social security.

Also the physics to Wall Street pipeline is extremely overstated and a very small sliver of physicists.

Nope. Just in my small social circle (and I don't normally hang out with physics PhD's) I know several physics PhD's who work on Wall Street or Wall Street adjacent. It is more than a small sliver. Quant and/or risk departments on Wall Street are crawling with them. Nice way to cash in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is pretty neurotic and a high scorer on exams but simply lacks extracurriculars. She aspires to be a physicist and in her free time, she’s president of the Quantum physics and robotics team. I’m concerned that without going to a top 20 university, she won’t be able to ever achieve her dream. Looking through the assistant professor page at Princeton, every one of them has a degree from MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua, and IIT, so what chance does she have getting into the professsion?

So many questions:

What school has a Quantum physics and robotics team? Sounds weird.
Why don't you look at the full professors, not the assistant professors?
Stony Brook is very good and getting better in the sciences, particularly physics. State school but not huge. Though many of them get cherry picked to Wall Street
Lots of random large state schools are great at scientific research. Iowa State, Illinois, Colorado.

It seems like your child got her neurosis from you.

Assistant professors are recent talent. Tenured professors are at least 50-60 years old, many endowed chairs are decades past social security.

Also the physics to Wall Street pipeline is extremely overstated and a very small sliver of physicists.

Nope. Just in my small social circle (and I don't normally hang out with physics PhD's) I know several physics PhD's who work on Wall Street or Wall Street adjacent. It is more than a small sliver. Quant and/or risk departments on Wall Street are crawling with them. Nice way to cash in.

And I love that you can provide anecdotes but you are wrong. Less than 5% of physics PhDs go into Finance. It is not the most conventional usage of a physicist's skills.

[Anonymous]

To concisely answer your question OP, no you do not need to go to a top school to become a physicist. It will be difficult to become a physicist from a top institution if you didn't attend one, but there are many programs out there with great placement records in industry.

If your daughter is interested in becoming a faculty member, I'd say A) wait until you start working through physics curriculum and B) understand that getting a tenure track position in academia these days is more about "right place, right time" luck than it is skills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.highereddatastories.com/2024/12/doctoral-recipients-by-undergraduate.html

You can do your own research with this. Top undergraduate schools for producing PhDs. Select Physics and look at the past 10 years and don't forget to take undergraduate enrollment into consideration.

Just note that those are total numbers, not per capita. But at least they show different sorts of institutions in different colors, so you can easily see that Harvey Mudd (915 students) has produced this same number of Physics and Astronomy Ph.D.s as UC-San Diego (almost 34,000 students).

The per capita chart (available here: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs#physics) provides that additional insight.

[Anonymous]

DS is a physics major at Davidson. Great program — the faculty are superb as are the research opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DS is a physics major at Davidson. Great program — the faculty are superb as are the research opportunities.

Good job telling us no information. "Great program" how? "The faculty are superb" at what? "the research opportunities [are superb]" how?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DD is pretty neurotic and a high scorer on exams but simply lacks extracurriculars. She aspires to be a physicist and in her free time, she’s president of the Quantum physics and robotics team. I’m concerned that without going to a top 20 university, she won’t be able to ever achieve her dream. Looking through the assistant professor page at Princeton, every one of them has a degree from MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua, and IIT, so what chance does she have getting into the professsion?

If physics is her strength, she should be doing things like USAPhO, and programs like SPINWIP. Has she? If not, why not? Does she study university level physics in her spare time, and if so, which textbooks has she completed? Are you in VA? Which year of school is she in?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm an academic whose kid applied widely this past year with this very aim: physics major, then physics PhD, then research career in physics.

Posters have already made most of the necessary points:

(1) Undergrad really doesn't matter at all if you can get into a good PhD program, which students from middling schools often do. My own middling university sends some of its physics majors to top physics graduate programs nearly every year.

(2) LACs can be great. Judging by Apker awardees over the past three decades (including recently), the best undergrad physicists in the US are at Mudd and Williams (more Apker awardees there than at MIT, Caltech, and other research universities).

(3) CU Boulder is an easy admit but looks excellent for physics. Based on our experiences, the school seems serious about recruiting good students. CU is also very strong in my own field (in the humanities). We don't know what to make of the CU's general non-exclusivity; it probably wouldn't actually matter at all.

(4) Egad, don't use the CVs of junior faculty at Princeton as a measure of anything! Anyway, as I think someone already pointed out, academics usually don't even list their undergraduate degree on their webpage: you're probably looking at their graduate degrees.

(5) Our kid is going abroad. Future scientists in general will be going abroad. As we visited US schools this past spring and considered our kid's acceptances and offers, every one of these physics departments was seeing its research funding cut -- even the LACs. The brain drain is happening, even at the level of undergrad admissions.

Re: 2 - the Apker level students at LACs do research aided by the professor on and win the award, while Apker-level students at Caltech and MIT take graduate courses to prepare for the greater theoretical rigor of top PhD programs, and they assist on high-value research (the type to get accepted to PRL) rather than do their own mostly independent undergrad-level research.

Also half of Apker awards are reserved for non-PhD granting institutions, so of course LACs do well. It's a bit of an unfair advantage considering a minority of physics majors are at non-PhD granting institutions.

[Anonymous]

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Williams, Hamilton, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Reed.[/quote]
Very unlikely op’s daughter is getting into any of these. [/quote] Reed might be possible - their acceptance rate is surprisingly high considering the rigor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an academic whose kid applied widely this past year with this very aim: physics major, then physics PhD, then research career in physics.

Posters have already made most of the necessary points:

(1) Undergrad really doesn't matter at all if you can get into a good PhD program, which students from middling schools often do. My own middling university sends some of its physics majors to top physics graduate programs nearly every year.

(2) LACs can be great. Judging by Apker awardees over the past three decades (including recently), the best undergrad physicists in the US are at Mudd and Williams (more Apker awardees there than at MIT, Caltech, and other research universities).

(3) CU Boulder is an easy admit but looks excellent for physics. Based on our experiences, the school seems serious about recruiting good students. CU is also very strong in my own field (in the humanities). We don't know what to make of the CU's general non-exclusivity; it probably wouldn't actually matter at all.

(4) Egad, don't use the CVs of junior faculty at Princeton as a measure of anything! Anyway, as I think someone already pointed out, academics usually don't even list their undergraduate degree on their webpage: you're probably looking at their graduate degrees.

(5) Our kid is going abroad. Future scientists in general will be going abroad. As we visited US schools this past spring and considered our kid's acceptances and offers, every one of these physics departments was seeing its research funding cut -- even the LACs. The brain drain is happening, even at the level of undergrad admissions.

Re: 2 - the Apker level students at LACs do research aided by the professor on and win the award, while Apker-level students at Caltech and MIT take graduate courses to prepare for the greater theoretical rigor of top PhD programs, and they assist on high-value research (the type to get accepted to PRL) rather than do their own mostly independent undergrad-level research.

Also half of Apker awards are reserved for non-PhD granting institutions, so of course LACs do well. It's a bit of an unfair advantage considering a minority of physics majors are at non-PhD granting institutions.

Can’t really do much when your institution doesn’t have a graduate program. Physics grads from these top lacs are obviously still successful, so maybe all the hyper drive push for students to do graduate coursework before senior year is simply…bunk.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an academic whose kid applied widely this past year with this very aim: physics major, then physics PhD, then research career in physics.

Posters have already made most of the necessary points:

(1) Undergrad really doesn't matter at all if you can get into a good PhD program, which students from middling schools often do. My own middling university sends some of its physics majors to top physics graduate programs nearly every year.

(2) LACs can be great. Judging by Apker awardees over the past three decades (including recently), the best undergrad physicists in the US are at Mudd and Williams (more Apker awardees there than at MIT, Caltech, and other research universities).

(3) CU Boulder is an easy admit but looks excellent for physics. Based on our experiences, the school seems serious about recruiting good students. CU is also very strong in my own field (in the humanities). We don't know what to make of the CU's general non-exclusivity; it probably wouldn't actually matter at all.

(4) Egad, don't use the CVs of junior faculty at Princeton as a measure of anything! Anyway, as I think someone already pointed out, academics usually don't even list their undergraduate degree on their webpage: you're probably looking at their graduate degrees.

(5) Our kid is going abroad. Future scientists in general will be going abroad. As we visited US schools this past spring and considered our kid's acceptances and offers, every one of these physics departments was seeing its research funding cut -- even the LACs. The brain drain is happening, even at the level of undergrad admissions.

Re: 2 - the Apker level students at LACs do research aided by the professor on and win the award, while Apker-level students at Caltech and MIT take graduate courses to prepare for the greater theoretical rigor of top PhD programs, and they assist on high-value research (the type to get accepted to PRL) rather than do their own mostly independent undergrad-level research.

Also half of Apker awards are reserved for non-PhD granting institutions, so of course LACs do well. It's a bit of an unfair advantage considering a minority of physics majors are at non-PhD granting institutions.

The above has not always been the case. In its early years, the Apker was awarded in an entirely open field. During this era, four liberal arts colleges produced recipients: Hamilton, Reed, Macalester and Amherst. And, of historical interest for those who follow the award, two of the first three Apker recipients in this open era had attended liberal arts colleges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an academic whose kid applied widely this past year with this very aim: physics major, then physics PhD, then research career in physics.

Posters have already made most of the necessary points:

(1) Undergrad really doesn't matter at all if you can get into a good PhD program, which students from middling schools often do. My own middling university sends some of its physics majors to top physics graduate programs nearly every year.

(2) LACs can be great. Judging by Apker awardees over the past three decades (including recently), the best undergrad physicists in the US are at Mudd and Williams (more Apker awardees there than at MIT, Caltech, and other research universities).

(3) CU Boulder is an easy admit but looks excellent for physics. Based on our experiences, the school seems serious about recruiting good students. CU is also very strong in my own field (in the humanities). We don't know what to make of the CU's general non-exclusivity; it probably wouldn't actually matter at all.

(4) Egad, don't use the CVs of junior faculty at Princeton as a measure of anything! Anyway, as I think someone already pointed out, academics usually don't even list their undergraduate degree on their webpage: you're probably looking at their graduate degrees.

(5) Our kid is going abroad. Future scientists in general will be going abroad. As we visited US schools this past spring and considered our kid's acceptances and offers, every one of these physics departments was seeing its research funding cut -- even the LACs. The brain drain is happening, even at the level of undergrad admissions.

Re: 2 - the Apker level students at LACs do research aided by the professor on and win the award, while Apker-level students at Caltech and MIT take graduate courses to prepare for the greater theoretical rigor of top PhD programs, and they assist on high-value research (the type to get accepted to PRL) rather than do their own mostly independent undergrad-level research.

Also half of Apker awards are reserved for non-PhD granting institutions, so of course LACs do well. It's a bit of an unfair advantage considering a minority of physics majors are at non-PhD granting institutions.

Can’t really do much when your institution doesn’t have a graduate program. Physics grads from these top lacs are obviously still successful, so maybe all the hyper drive push for students to do graduate coursework before senior year is simply…bunk.

This is not your child’s middle school math progression. There’s nothing “bunk” about taking graduate level classes if you have the familiarity with the subject matter and intellectual capacity to do so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm an academic whose kid applied widely this past year with this very aim: physics major, then physics PhD, then research career in physics.

Posters have already made most of the necessary points:

(1) Undergrad really doesn't matter at all if you can get into a good PhD program, which students from middling schools often do. My own middling university sends some of its physics majors to top physics graduate programs nearly every year.

(2) LACs can be great. Judging by Apker awardees over the past three decades (including recently), the best undergrad physicists in the US are at Mudd and Williams (more Apker awardees there than at MIT, Caltech, and other research universities).

(3) CU Boulder is an easy admit but looks excellent for physics. Based on our experiences, the school seems serious about recruiting good students. CU is also very strong in my own field (in the humanities). We don't know what to make of the CU's general non-exclusivity; it probably wouldn't actually matter at all.

(4) Egad, don't use the CVs of junior faculty at Princeton as a measure of anything! Anyway, as I think someone already pointed out, academics usually don't even list their undergraduate degree on their webpage: you're probably looking at their graduate degrees.

(5) Our kid is going abroad. Future scientists in general will be going abroad. As we visited US schools this past spring and considered our kid's acceptances and offers, every one of these physics departments was seeing its research funding cut -- even the LACs. The brain drain is happening, even at the level of undergrad admissions.

Re: 2 - the Apker level students at LACs do research aided by the professor on and win the award, while Apker-level students at Caltech and MIT take graduate courses to prepare for the greater theoretical rigor of top PhD programs, and they assist on high-value research (the type to get accepted to PRL) rather than do their own mostly independent undergrad-level research.

Also half of Apker awards are reserved for non-PhD granting institutions, so of course LACs do well. It's a bit of an unfair advantage considering a minority of physics majors are at non-PhD granting institutions.

Can’t really do much when your institution doesn’t have a graduate program. Physics grads from these top lacs are obviously still successful, so maybe all the hyper drive push for students to do graduate coursework before senior year is simply…bunk.

This is not your child’s middle school math progression. There’s nothing “bunk” about taking graduate level classes if you have the familiarity with the subject matter and intellectual capacity to do so.

There’s no proof of that exposure changing graduate school outcomes or creating better resources. This is also not the time to belittle researchers, but here you are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is pretty neurotic and a high scorer on exams but simply lacks extracurriculars. She aspires to be a physicist and in her free time, she’s president of the Quantum physics and robotics team. I’m concerned that without going to a top 20 university, she won’t be able to ever achieve her dream. Looking through the assistant professor page at Princeton, every one of them has a degree from MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua, and IIT, so what chance does she have getting into the professsion?

If physics is her strength, she should be doing things like USAPhO, and programs like SPINWIP. Has she? If not, why not? Does she study university level physics in her spare time, and if so, which textbooks has she completed? Are you in VA? Which year of school is she in?

To this point, the better metric would be seeing where kids who do well in the USA Physics Olympiad (and some go onto the international one) go. These are the top ones.

That being said, I still find it very hard to believe that a kid who sounds like a current junior in HS has been exposed to enough physics to be obsessed with it. This screams of a snowflake tiger mom who thinks their child is the greatest thing since sliced bread humble bragging in a public forum.

[Anonymous]

Fun fact: there is a weird intersection of physicists and rock climbers (google it). The vast majority of physicists are not rock climbers, but there is a surprisingly large percentage that are. So perhaps your child should take up rock climbing. The physical activity would likely be good for her and it might give her something to talk about with the physicists that would differentiate her.