Considering PhD in experimental physics and facilities

[flemmyd]

Like many, I'm applying to graduate schools in physics this fall. My interests lie in experimental condensed matter/physical chemistry, although I think this question applies to any field.

As we all know, modern science is big and expensive. I was considering some smaller schools, but was cautious about their facilities. I currently attend a large state school with plenty of NMR, mass spec, electronics, laser, etc etc facilities (and PhD technicians who run them) but am curious about how it compares to smaller schools without the same resources.

Would I be doing lots of prep work and then flying to a national lab/colleague's lab every month because I don't have a fancy quadrupole ion trap mass spec, for example? Or if I want to do semiconductor physics but don't have access to a clean room? (would schools without clean rooms not have professors doing research in this area for this reason?)

And if I my interests were more computational, how does it compare to supercomputer time?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Would I be doing lots of prep work and then flying to a national lab/colleague's lab every month because I don't have a fancy quadrupole ion trap mass spec, for example? Or if I want to do semiconductor physics but don't have access to a clean room? (would schools without clean rooms not have professors doing research in this area for this reason?)

Could be either. Depends on the place and how individual faculty have arranged things.