The main question left unanswered is: what is the OP planning to do in research? It would be ill-advised to apply at UCSD, or UIUC, for something other than condensed matter, whereas UCSC, Arizona State or Case Western may be a better fit for someone interested in astronomy.
As for particles...
Except that internationals are at a disadvantage at UCs (especially UCSB). Hence why I didn't apply at UCD, plus UCD (and also UCLA/SB) was characterized as being a "TA-level Ponzi scheme" by professors at home in that they will admit a lot of kids, but set up a rather large fraction of them to...
Yes, unfortunately.
I know top-10 schools amount to lotteries, yet the DGS once slipped some details about my position in that particular year's applicant pool when I asked about the possibility of returning from a medical leave before said leave started. It turned out that I was on some...
Oh I can assure you that the "extenuating circumstances" of my case made it so that it took months for them to reach that (highly unfortunate) decision. I understand they exhausted all their options before making that decision. Then again, I do not think anything program-specific actually caused...
Let's say that I was given unacceptable conditions for returning from medical leave; basically I had to self-fund at least the following year of a physics PhD. Knowing that doing so would result in a financial disaster, I am definitely withdrawing from the program, with the understanding that...
I know that it's often a conundrum faced when your research is in some theoretical area: sometimes finance seems adviseable, at other times IT (in high-tech industries or not) and finally, high school or community college teaching (a PhD is overkill for high school teaching, even though the...
I have no use for that particular avatar anymore. That said, maybe a stint in the workforce could tell me whether I should try again for a PhD or not.
Nevertheless, I know about all too many stories of PhDs whose research dreams are broken shortly after graduation, or otherwise abandoned...
Due to extenuating circumstances that I am not going into at this point (however, I may provide additional details if necessary), I am considering I have a MS, which I earned prior to dropping out from my PhD. My MS project was on a theoretical project involving topological defects.
Thus far, I...
The soft-hearted professor fantasy usually works best when you have actual grounds for complaining about a miscarriage of justice so that may also be an indictment of the instructor's grading skills (or the TAs') if it actually works. Especially when your miscarriage of justice is about using an...
Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins are probably for you then...
Loop quantum gravity is probably more for the likes of LSU. As for quantum gravity at large, Penn State and Maryland.
I also remember students back home being heavily against the direct-PhD route (wherever the option is available)...
If you think you actually stand a chance at getting a PGS-M, you may also want to look into provincial funding, if any, as well as its stipulations. If you're a Quebec resident...
At least therapy starts but it's never the first session that is the most helpful. I'll have 2-3 more sessions until the semester ends...
However, if I returned (it's never a given that I actually will; the last two people that took a leave of absence from my program never came back and ended...
First off, I am a first-semester physics PhD student at Minnesota. I had latent anxiety issues for years but never did it get to the point where I could give up on that aspiration because of my mental health. The issues became too severe for me to ignore when the midterm grades were returned to...
My grad-level instructors (especially in the courses I dropped) thought that I was one of the most mathematically-inclined students in years, if not their careers as physics professors, since most of the questions I ask in class is about mathematical assumptions and what to do when they aren't...
I am disappointed by my graduate-level classical mechanics course, and especially the treatment of Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics. Now, I scanned my notes and some crazy idea popped into my head, further fueling my discontent towards this course, because all the problems covered in class were...
There has been a few moments of each of the following in my life: "the math made you understand the physics" and "the physics made you understand the math". Admittedly many people that can do physics at a high level will probably have had a combination of these, hence why I ask about how often...
My grad-level instructors claimed, in office hours, that I was too hung up on the mathematical details of the material; however, by the same token, they understood why I wanted to pursue theory on some level.
Perhaps that's an indication of maybe, maybe I could earn a PhD in math (applied math...
I feel as if my understanding of physics require increasingly rigorous mathematical derivations the more advanced the notions get... since I started even high school physics, I lost track of the number of instances where the bulb lighted up in my understanding of physics due to a rigorous...
But you wouldn't get as much for your research money out of a masters student, on a per-dollar, per-unit-of-time basis, compared to a PhD one... and that's precisely why British, Canadian and Russian universities (don't know for Germany or Japan, especially since Japan insists very, very little...
I knew different countries had different approaches to graduate education: there are those countries that provide research masters with only one year of coursework and the other year is dedicated to research (Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia, UK) and also where direct-PhD entry for undergrads...
Homework Statement
Calculate the static structure factor for noninteracting fermions
S(\vec{q})=\frac{1}{N}\langle \phi_0|\hat{n}_{\vec{q}}\hat{n}_{-\vec{q}} | \phi_0\rangle
where \hat{n}_\vec{q}=\sum_{\vec{k},\sigma} a^\dagger_{\vec{k}\sigma}a_{\vec{k}+\vec{q}\sigma} is the particle density...
Suppose that you have N = \left(\frac{\partial U}{\partial \mu}\right)_{S,V} < 0, supposedly the number of particles, even though the actual number of particles is greater than zero. This means that you can have, in a system subjected to a grand canonical ensemble, less than 0 particle for...
This is the very reason why I even suggested Arizona; better have a list that is bottom-heavy rather than top-heavy at the PhD level, when research experience is a little weak. I do not think Arizona is low enough to suffer from Tufts Syndrome in an AMO context.
If the OP is more the kind of...
Canada seems to be more lenient about masters funding but, then again, Canada has cut funding to atmosphere science. If you're interested in climate science (as a subfield of atmosphere science) then stay away from Canada!
European masters offer no funding whatsoever and there is not much...
I'll help you out with the JD part of this.
Any reason why you would want the JD/PhD dual degrees? What's best for the law side of this may not be the best thing for the physics aspect of it. If you think you are cut out for the practice of law, you do realize that employability is a function...
The schools that will consider you for both MS and PhD will usually offer unfunded (or partially funded in the best non-PhD scenario) MS should you fail to get in for the PhD but not rejected outright. However, the list of such schools is pretty short:
Stony Brook
Rochester (or at least used...
I can understand law students getting involved: how their day-to-day jobs are performed (if they're good enough and/or attend a law school prestigious enough to get a job requiring bar passage) will be affected by political decisions.
And, sometimes, anecdotal evidence can spur the search for...
We may well have different answers if you took average Joes and average graduates so, if you have an answer to provide, please list each reference frame separately if it makes a difference.
Now, I don't think it's really an explicit function of the major itself so much than a question of the intellectual dispositions and inclinations of who actually go on to major in physics, and graduate from college with a physics degree (undergrad or advanced).
Perhaps I have the wrong...
More generally, one has
\mathcal{L} = \frac{1}{2}(\partial_\mu\phi)^2-(\phi^2-\epsilon)(\phi^2-1)^2
in which case there is no soliton, since the energy, defined as E=\int_{-\infty}^{+\infty}dx [\frac{\phi'^2}{2}+V(\phi)] is such that
\lim_{t\to +\infty}E(t) = -\infty
for \epsilon\neq 0 and...
Homework Statement
Consider a theory with a \phi^6-scalar potential:
\mathcal{L} = \frac{1}{2}(\partial_\mu\phi)^2-\phi^2(\phi^2-1)^2.
Why is the solution to the equation of motion not a soliton?
Homework Equations
\phi''=\frac{\partial V}{\partial\phi}
The Attempt at a Solution...
I understand that connections, research record will play a major role in landing an interview for a national lab job, even for a staff scientist position, and I wouldn't be opposed to working in a national lab after graduation (and any appropriate postdocs). However, that is not my question.
As...
Hence the professors listed being the reasons why I would attend either school... but this poll was posted with the expectation that I would get in off the waitlist at CMU. A shortlist after a first review of the waitlistees is not looking so good at that point, so I decided to attend Minnesota.
I still didn't get out of the waitlist at CMU even as others got decisions off it, acceptance or rejection, hence losing confidence in Carnegie Mellon. So I will most definitely attend Minnesota at this point.
My professors claimed that the whole purpose of advanced standing and course waivers...
Treating the PhD as a race seems rather prevalent in Europe, especially in Germany.
Perhaps European job markets value time-to-degree more than US job markets...
While I learned quite a bit about both schools during visits, there is still one outstanding question, and a major one at that: which set of potential advisors is the "better" one? Also, what criteria should I use to assess the merits of potential advisors, given their research interests...
Now that I have pretty much given up on Columbia, but still will have somewhere to go, I will try to make the best of what I have. Since Carnegie Mellon actually earmarks spots for waitlistees, rather than using it to fill up the class when too many No's have been recorded (like WUSTL, which I...