Hello, i've been looking into going to Villanova for Physics.

[DougD720]

Hello, I've been looking into going to villanova. Does anyone know how the physics program there is? It looks pretty good from what i can see, but i was just wondering if anyone has had any experience or more knowledge of it.

And what about graduate schools to get your Ph.D. What are some of those (in the Philadelphia Area).

Thanks!

 

[imastud]

i don't know anything about villanova, but I can say that since it is a smaller school you should check out the research being done by the faculty and see if you would want to work with any of them because undergrad research is pretty key for getting into grad school and there less choice of what kind of research you can do at smaller schools. as far as grad schools in philly the only one that comes to mind is upenn, penn state is good too, and just up I-95 (columbia, nyu, rutgers) or just down I-95 (hopkins, UMD) there are also some good schools.

 

[gravenewworld]

'Nova grad here. For a smaller sized school, 'Nova is pretty damn good. Nova gets some pretty bright professors who have been trained from the big name schools because 1.) the area around Villanova is extremely wealthy 2.) the public schools for their children in the area are some of the best in the country. The physics department is very small. Physics definitely has the least number of majors in the sciences, probably about 10 per class. I took only physics I and II and the professors I had were pretty good.

Just remebmer though 'Nova prides itself on having a very strong liberal arts program, you will be REQUIRED to take the following:

-1 yr. theology, intro and advanced
-1 yr. philosphy, intro and advanced
-1 yr. language, at the intermediate level and above
-1.5 yr. social sciences, intro and advaned and it must cover 2 different social science subjects
-0.5 yr. ethics
-0.5 yr. fine arts
-1 yr. history intro and advanced
-1 yr. english intro and advanced
-1 yr. humanities intro and advanced

those courses must also be spread out upon 4 writing enriched classes (which is a class where you write 10+ pgs per semester), and 4 writing intensive classes (20+pgs per semester, and 2 courses on diversity (i.e. women's studies, african american history etc.) All that might seem like a pain and completely worthless, but now after I have graduated and have applied to professional schools, they all seemed to be very impressed with the amount of liberal arts courses I took. I feel that you definitely take many more liberal arts classes than most students at other colleges.BTW Villanova has also been ranked #1 most wired campus in the US, so if you have any special computer needs you won't have a problem at all.