I'm currently in the final year of a four-year physics (UCAS F303) course, and will be going into theoretical physics after this year. I would like to add that taking the straight physics course doesn't necessarily limit you too much, as part of the four year course I had to do a two-year...
A good basic overview of graphene physics can be found in "The Rise of Graphene" by Geim and Novoselov in Nature Materials 6, 183 (2007).
The introductory chapter for "Physical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes" by Saito, Dresselhaus and Dresselhaus is relatively good at introducing the...
This is definitely not accurate. I am currently at the end of my 3rd year of a 4 year undergraduate course in the UK, and am doing my degree project in theoretical physics (specifically graphene condensed matter physics). I do no programming at all, and work in analytical theoretical physics...
The number of flakes sounds pretty average from my experience. There usually is a lot of dirt on the samples, a lot of which is removed during the annealing process. (I'm a graphene theorist, working in department with experimentalists).