Top school to become a physicist?

Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: - how does a HS kid know which such certainty that they want to have a career in physics research? This is not something they typically have exposure to with enough regularity to know. What experiences allowed your DC to decide this path?


Exactly. I don't know why we are all wasting our time responding to this thread. This person has no clue.

The same way literally any other child has a career idea in mind. People like you are so useless and add nothing to these threads


This. And it is usual that HS students applying to Engineering have already chosen their specific major within Engineering, and often their specialty within that major. Totally believable to me that a HS student would have xhiaen their field already.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:What does the Quantum Physics team do? Are there competitions?


There are and there aren't.

No way to know for sure until you try to watch one.

Welcome, Mr. Schrödinger.


Spoiler alert: the cat died.
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?

Im not sure why everyone is recommending $90k/yr SLACs for undergrad. UMD is one of the leaders in quantum physics if that's where her interest lies.
https://www.umdphysics.umd.edu/research/research-areas/quantum.html



I was also going to recommend UMD. It’s very strong in this area.
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?

Im not sure why everyone is recommending $90k/yr SLACs for undergrad. UMD is one of the leaders in quantum physics if that's where her interest lies.
https://www.umdphysics.umd.edu/research/research-areas/quantum.html



I was also going to recommend UMD. It’s very strong in this area.

At the graduate level.
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?
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.


I promise you as the mother of a physics undergraduate who wants to go to grad school and who has loved physics since hs that these types of kids exist. It is really not a parental flex. Nobody is jealous at a cocktail party when I share my kid is becoming a physicist. Most common response is the socially appropriate “how nice”. Most heartfelt response is “why”.
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?
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.


I promise you as the mother of a physics undergraduate who wants to go to grad school and who has loved physics since hs that these types of kids exist. It is really not a parental flex. Nobody is jealous at a cocktail party when I share my kid is becoming a physicist. Most common response is the socially appropriate “how nice”. Most heartfelt response is “why”.

+1, it's not even like physicists are going to tell you to become physicist. It isn't exactly the most exciting career. Flashier careers like consulting, software engineering, and quant are what I think of in terms of trying to "flex." Physics is just nerdy (in the good way).
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:It doesn't matter where you do your undergrad but where you do your PhD and what your research is.


Well, yes, but the undergrad does have to be good enough that top PhD programs will consider you, and you have access to profs doing enough research that you can get involved in it as an undergrad. Lots of good non-top-20 schools were mentioned here for that.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
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.


Lol as if the point of taking these classes is graduate school outcomes and not, ya know, learning at a level that is appropriately challenging. Some of you just can’t help but see the admissions game in everything.

And I didn’t belittle any researchers, not sure what you’re smoking.
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