Recent content by Choppy

I'm sorry to hear you're having such a tough go of it. That's got to be frustrating. Yeah, for sure. If you have a pool of applicants with one or more who have specific and successful experience in what they need, it's rare that a hiring committee will give that up to hire someone without it...

That's a challenging situation, and I don't think you're alone. When you put all of that time and energy into a university degree, particularly in a professional field, its natural to want to come out on the other end with a job waiting for you. It's difficult for us to randomly offer...

Yes. For what it's worth professors tend to favour students from their own institutions, but that's not always the case. It's okay to ask. Keep trying.

Ideally you want what you're going to get the most out of, but it's important to recognize that's a multi-objective optimization with many different dimensions. These would include: - the hard skills that you'll develop (coding, hardware, data manipulation, etc.) - soft skills (project...

While I can't offer any specific advice on those schools, I wouldn't worry too much about involvement in a "large" research project at your stage of the game. A lot can change between starting an undergraduate education and entering graduate school. It's important that you have some opportunity...

As a first step, I would recommend contacting the University and it's financial aid department. They'll be in the best position to advise you on your options.

Normally that's a supervisor's job. If you've been out of the field for a while and don't have an academic network, start by contacting your old supervisor and working group. If the work isn't specifically in their field, they might have connections to help you. And if you've never been to...

I think this idea floats around out there... particularly propagated by those who aren't in the game themselves. The average professor will train about 10 PhDs over their career (that's a Fermi estimate, not a precise value). Of those, one will take over when that professor retires. Maybe...

I think your revised assessment is accurate. Outside of academia, the skill sets in demand tend to be quite specific and driven by industry demand. That means, as you've indicated, navigating industrial bureaucracy, safety and compliance with standards, project management, etc. Most physics PhDs...

For what it's worth, admission committees do tend to take into account poor performance due to illness, particularly when there is evidence that outside of that, the student performs at a much higher level. That said, this is a difficult factor to quantify. What you can do is make sure that it's...

For what it's worth in my experience, admission decisions are largely independent from one year to the next. Consider: - large pools of applicants make individual applications difficult to remember (although borderline cases may stand out) - admission committee membership can change from year to...

Some things to consider: Are you actually taking a 4 year degree? Beware that some schools offer 3 year undergraduate degrees that don't actually qualify you for graduate school. Typically these are combined with, education degrees for example, for those interested in teaching. If you are doing...

Well you should always actively look for new papers in your field. You can for example use Google Scholar to set alerts for keywords of interested. Every couple days you get a summary of potential papers of interest. Reading review papers can also help, depending on the field. With respect to...

You're a freshman in high school and you're interested in astronomy... that's awesome. At this stage, this isn't the kind of thing that should be making you anxious. What's important is that you explore the options that are available to you. Read. Join a local astronomy club. Start a journal...

It's going to vary from program to program for sure. Technically anything that's part of the core curriculum from a CAMPEP graduate program is fair game, but it's not a comprehensive exam. Often with technical questions they're trying to assess how well you can explain technical details, or how...