Skipping Straight to Grad School (don't laugh)

[Mépris]

Victor, let us know how things work out for you. I'm very interested in this.

E_D, perhaps you should consider going to a university which is more concentrated towards your field of interest? If not that, then getting into contact with people who study in that kind of place is a good start.

Taking the rest of this to another thread...

Naaahhh. But I'm just letting the OP know that it's not only about scoring a good GRE and skipping into grad school. Even after studying hard for 4 years as an undergrad I found out very quickly that grad school is a beast.

I see. :)

 

[deRham]

] Universities (in the U.S.) = big joke! nothing intellectually stimulating unless the individual makes it that way even then he / she is surrounded by a campus culture that teaches against him/her pursuing intellectual things

This is not true. The main argument against it is that you can't talk of a university as a whole - some of these have a few thousand or many thousand students. Seriously, you're probably only going to know around 20 people in the academic community very well, and as long as they're really smart and motivated, it's hugely, hugely worth it.

In academia for instance, there are maybe 2-3 people at some universities working on the same thing, but it's still often VERY important to be in their presence and learn what they have to say.

You don't have to be impressed by big names. Try seriously learning what the professors at Harvard, MIT, etc accomplish, and you'll figure out very soon that it's stuff that boggles the minds of brilliant students from all over the world, not just the few scattered at those schools.

 

[deRham]

Success is a personal thing. I consider my father a very successful individual. He doesn't have a college degree.

I also have family which was successful without a college degree. That doesn't mean that good universities don't offer tremendous opportunity themselves.

I would argue there are various definitions of success that can all be pretty valid, and both the academic who advances knowledge by taking advantage of the scholars around a university and the brilliant engineer who somehow makes it big without ever having a college education are successful, and that it's not worth arguing that one of them isn't.

 

[deRham]

Good research? I don't believe that. Good research doesn't only happen at "big name" schools. They just have resources.

There is good research in many places. But at least in the research world, it is quite often that the big names congregate at certain "big name schools" because really, people who are at the highest level in an area of research want to be around each other. That simple.

 

[MissSilvy]

This forum has wonderful people and is full of lots of good information on all sorts of topics but it also has turds that do nothing but spew their emoticons and unfounded pessimism all over the forums and start fights with other people. OP, take everything you read here with a grain of salt. What you are asking is a very unconventional way of doing physics, one that has been successfully done less than a handful of times among thousands of graduating PhD students. If you are serious about physics and this isn't some passing phase, you will find a way to accomplish it.

 

[qspeechc]

Some of the best advice I've seen in this thread has been from MissSilvy, post #28, page2, which seems to have been totally ignored in all this personal bickering.

 

[Liboy597]

Sorry to say it but Edin_Dzeko nailed it perfectly. Higher education is the US is mostly a money making scheme designed to squeeze as much tuition money out of the students as the government will allow. College is mostly a subsidized daycare for 18-22 year olds who would otherwise be inflating the unemployment statistics.

Do you *need* a bachelors degree in physics to get into a grad school? No. In fact, you'll even find on a few grad school pages that a bachelors in *physics* isn't required, only a sufficient knowledge base as evidenced by the PGRE. For the sufficiently motivated student with the right textbooks, you can learn everything you need to do well on the physics GRE without having completed a bachelors. You guys bashing Edin are guilty of projecting your own expectations onto other people. It's not that metaphysical. Most of the people who are members on this forum are very bright, were able to take full advantage of what college had to offer, and were able to get deep insights by interacting with their professors and other like-minded individuals. Your average college student is nothing like this and the limit of their ambition is to simply graduate as painlessly as possible.

The resources and lecture videos needed to learn a standard undergraduate physics curriculum are freely available online; online educational and telecommunication technologies are uprooting the fundamental and tradition based ideals of what learning is. I'm a soon to be graduating senior and did 2 summer internships at a national lab under the mentorship of a Harvard PHD physicist studying nano-electronics. Believe when I tell you that most of the students there had no idea what they were doing. One of the chem students there didn't even know what a Jablonski diagram was even though this basic principle was critical to the research he was no doing. In other words, most learning occurs on one's own after the 60 minute lecture has ended and that those people who are bright enough and intelligent enough to get into a physics grad program could do it without the traditional college degree. Look at this guy who learned MIT's entire 4 year computer science curriculum in 1 year, having bought all the textbooks on his own and having taken and passed all of the class exams that were freely available on MIT's online OCW site, having checked and graded his tests afterwards with the solutions. http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/