Recent content by EricVT

I'm guessing this info is too late but no harm responding. Columbia as a school has a great reputation but their medical physics program is not a standout (from a reputation perspective). That doesn't mean it is bad, just that they aren't really doing anything that differentiates them from...

Where I work all of the requests for student observation are routed through our department manager and that person organizes confidentiality training and the dates for shadowing. If someone wants to shadow a medical physicist (pretty rare!) the manager will come ask us for a few dates that work...

What are your career goals? What do you envision your daily job functions in medical physics to be? Your original post seems to imply that you are looking for PhD options, presumably because you have an interest in doing research. Vanderbilt is a very competitive (and very good) program that...

Currently there are 50 CAMPEP accredited graduate programs in total and 47 of them offer M.S. degrees. Of those 47 programs, 32 also offer a Ph.D. track. The requirements for entry into a program do not appreciably depend on which degree you are initially admitted for. And Vanderbilt (your...

Unfortunately not! There are so many competing forces that dictate the direction that medical physics salaries might go that short of a crystal ball I'm not sure how anyone could know for sure. Before I say anything else I will admit that I am relatively ignorant of any driving forces outside of...

This is correct. I attended the University of Kentucky for Medical Physics and look back on my time there very fondly. I would be happy to answer any questions about the program either here or in private. Choppy is correct that there are many very strong programs out there to consider and they...

The typical applicant for medical physics graduate programs has an undergraduate degree in physics. Most programs do not make that a hard requirement and some may allow for the equivalent of a minor in physics with a closely related major. At a minimum most institutions will want to see: (1)...

According to the May/June 2015 AAPM Newsletter the residency match statistics do not show significant favoritism toward certificate or Ph.D. holders compared to M.S. holders. The match rate is in the ballpark of 55 - 60% for both M.S.and Ph.D. applicants, and a little above 60% for...

Regarding (4), you should be aware that the coursework component of a medical physics M.S. program and a traditional physics Ph.D. program will have essentially zero overlap. You may find admission to a traditional Ph.D. program but don't expect your M.S. in medical physics to help expedite...

In addition to providing treatment planning consults medical physicists can also perform quite a bit of treatment planning directly. At my facility the medical physics group performs all of the stereotactic radiosurgery planning (where a large amount of highly focused radiation is delivered in...

It's an interesting position to take not wanting to hear about something that you believe you "already know". There have been many times where I picked up on new viewpoints or details about a broader topic just by letting someone explain to me what I thought I already knew.

What you are feeling is completely normal. I remember the first time I got my feet wet in experimental research. I was taken into a professor's lab and sat in front of a wall of electronics/circuits/logic boards with a big box of cables and hardware documentation and a low strength positron...

I took a few easier courses during the 4-week summer semester (sociology, philosophy, etc.) and found the time requirement for lecture each day to be pretty grueling. The material wasn't dense but it became a real chore to sit through those multi-hour lectures five days per week...not to mention...

Many programs keep track of these sorts of statistics, though they are not always shared publicly. One example is MD Anderson, who accepts students for both M.S. and Ph.D. tracks and keeps applicant statistics for both. Another is UW-Madison, though they only publish acceptance rates and not...

Any time I make deliberate changes to the scale of presented data in a graph I specify the changes in the figure captions. For example "Range of ordinate axis set to 0.5 to 0.7 to emphasize variations in measurement results." or something along those lines. I don't think there is anything...