Recent content by djh101

Yes, I have received admissions decisions, visited the schools, and am now making the inevitable school choice before the fast-approaching acceptance deadline. It is my understanding that most graduate students do pass the qualifying exam, so that's not something I'm particularly worried about...

Therein lies the problem- the school that has the most variety is the school that I'd least like to attend (with respect to location). Of course, going back to my original question, depending on how detached from your adviser's research you can get with your own, variety may or may not matter as...

It's not so much the issue of how far am I willing to go as it is how far can my adviser's research be from me without me having to sacrifice my interests. If I had my heart set on quantum error correction, optimally I'd like to find an adviser doing quantum error correction. I could probably...

It's almost April 15 and I am currently choosing between schools that seem to have a perfect inverse correlation between a) correlation between my research interests and the schools (though I am still somewhat undecided at the moment) and b) niceness of location. I can see how a potential...

Too hot for me. Yes, the city is better than a lot of the county since it's close to the coast, but still pretty warm. And yes, I have looked into all the schools (with respect to LA, I don't live in the city but I do live in the county and have all my life). Some of them have their downsides...

The last place amongst the schools I've applied to would be a more accurate way to put it; I suppose I would rather live in LA than Phoenix, New York, or a handful of other places. Pasadena is nice enough (although still pretty hot, one of the main things I dislike about LA), I was referring...

But of course. I'm riding on my GRE score and letters of recommendation more than my GPA which was good but not superb. Drive I have, but my confidence takes a little bit of a hit whenever I try to read through research papers (this can be a fairly frustrating task sometimes). Anyway, the...

Indeed. I guess I'm just being impatient. And thank you. I'll try to get all these applications done by today.

Thank you all for the replies. I suppose, then, I shall just finish up my applications, wait, and see what happens. My interest is still pretty broad at the moment (I'm applying to Boulder for ions, USC for error correction and decoherence and whatnot, etc.). MIT seems to fit my interests, I'm...

Hello, Physics Forums. I am currently working through my graduate school applications and am now finishing up my statements of purpose for MIT, Caltech, and Michigan. While working on the MIT application, I came upon a thought that I'm sure most people have- am I even good enough to succeed at...

Interesting. I've been envisioning a sort of open-source-type academic journal.

True, that's why I'm going for a different model and hoping to cater to the "I would like to be paid for my work" crowd. Additionally, Wikipedia is pretty static and I would like to eventually go for a more dynamic approach (highlighting, notes, glossaries, offline access, perhaps dynamically...

Indeed, although Wikipedia certainly defies that (of course, I'm not certain what their user-to-author ratio is). Even so, if I ended up being the only contributor but managed to contribute a few pages that a lot of people ended up using, I'd consider the effort worthwhile.

Hello, Physics Forums. I've been working on a sort of open textbook website since the beginning of this year and am almost finished. I have certainly enjoyed building it, but it has come to the point where I would like to hear a little bit about what other people think. So, as science-minded...

I prefer old editions, myself. If you buy two editions old on Amazon, the price will usually be under $5. As for graded homework problems, I usually just did them in the library using their copy while keeping my old edition at home for reading and additional practice. You can also find free...