High overall Rank school with a low physics rank

[SchwarzF]

I am currently study physics at a top 20 us school with, however, a pretty weak physics department. I am in my sophomore year and almost finished all the major course. Till now, I am still not very into doing REU in my home school, because I feel I should learn more graduate level physics and math course before starting. But it seems the graduate education here is no better and most graduateS are "solid B" student. I am very worried about if I can get a good PhD and thus is considering about transfer to more prestigious physics school, or, save some time, just start REU at home school anyway, or study as many math and cs courses as possible now and apply for a master program before applying for phd. Any advice?

 

[jasonRF]

If you want to go to graduate school then my advice is to start undergraduate research as soon as possible - you do not need graduate coursework to do this. Demonstration of research capability and the associated recommendations from the professors you worked for is worth a lot on a graduate application. It will also let you experience what research is like to see if it is something you actually enjoy. If you do research at your home institution then it can be year-round, and the longer-term time investment is more likely to produce publishable results than a one-and-done summer REU at a "better" institution.

I cannot advise you regarding transferring schools. I have a PhD but never worked in academia so have never been on a graduate admissions committee. However, if you have great grades, gre, and research experience with the associated recommendations from a top-20 school then I suspect you would be in very good shape for graduate admissions, even if the graduate physics program doesn't happen to have the absolute strongest overall reputation. An anecdote: I went to a top-20 graduate school (in electrical engineering) and we certainly had grad students from a wide variety of schools; one student in my research group was from a small non-elite liberal arts college I had never even heard of before. I think almost everyone had undergraduate research experience of some kind, though, and the fellow from the obscure school had fantastic experience in our exact research area.

jason