I find it harder and harder to take poly drama seriously

[KrazyHorse]

Graduate schools base decisions on 3 factors:

GPA
Undergrad research (gives letters of recommendation)
Physics GRE

3.5/4.0 GPA, 1-2 summers of research (with good impressions from profs) and a 80+ percentile score in the GRE will get him into a top 10 school. 2/3 of those (assuming the missing element is not horrendously bad) will get him into top 20. Outside the top 20 things start to go rapidly downhill in terms of post-PhD career (either academic or nonacademic).

As an example, my undergrad GPA was ~3.3 (admittedly, in a more difficult than average degree for physicists), GRE was 91st percentile and I had decent to good undergrad research. Ended up at a school that's currently 10th-15th in my estimate.

[KrazyHorse]

Okay. That's pretty good. Undergrad coding is always good. I had none, and it hurt me my first year or two. They should pay for him to go there. He shouldn't have to cover the cost of flight or accommodations.

[PLATO]

Graduate schools base decisions on 3 factors:

GPA
Undergrad research (gives letters of recommendation)
Physics GRE

3.5/4.0 GPA, 1-2 summers of research (with good impressions from profs) and a 80+ percentile score in the GRE will get him into a top 10 school. 2/3 of those (assuming the missing element is not horrendously bad) will get him into top 20. Outside the top 20 things start to go rapidly downhill in terms of post-PhD career (either academic or nonacademic).

As an example, my undergrad GPA was ~3.3 (admittedly, in a more difficult than average degree for physicists), GRE was 91st percentile and I had decent to good undergrad research. Ended up at a school that's currently 10th-15th in my estimate.

I guess I can see that (the 20 school thing). At UTK, there are 26,000 students and 83 of them are undergrad physics. Not really a whole lot of people persuing this I would imagine. Still....20 schools seems awful few...

[ShaneWalter]

Graduate schools base decisions on 3 factors:

GPA
Undergrad research (gives letters of recommendation)
Physics GRE

3.5/4.0 GPA, 1-2 summers of research (with good impressions from profs) and a 80+ percentile score in the GRE will get him into a top 10 school. 2/3 of those (assuming the missing element is not horrendously bad) will get him into top 20. Outside the top 20 things start to go rapidly downhill in terms of post-PhD career (either academic or nonacademic).

As an example, my undergrad GPA was ~3.3 (admittedly, in a more difficult than average degree for physicists), GRE was 91st percentile and I had decent to good undergrad research. Ended up at a school that's currently 10th-15th in my estimate.

This is kind of my curiosity more than anything, but I've wondered, would a student that doesn't go to a top school ever have any chance of getting to the same position career wise (either academically or non-academically) as a student who went to the top school?

For example, do you have any co-workers that didn't go to a top school?

[KrazyHorse]

Top 20 schools is ~350 physics PhDs per year (this is US only, but rest of world contributes slightly less than this to the top of talent pool). All physics PhDs total is ~1500 per year in the US

Every year in the US 150 faculty positions open up. 130 of those go to PhDs from top 20 schools. Top 10 might take 90 of those.

Anybody who has any ambitions of a faculty job basically needs to go to top 20, and in order to have a better than even chance, needs to go top 10 and preferably top 5.

Also, at top 20 schools something like 60% of the graduate students are non-US. But graduation rate is only 65% or so, so 350 PhDs means that there are ~300 slots open for US undergrads.

EDIT: fixed numbers

[notyoueither]

This is kind of my curiosity more than anything, but I've wondered, would a student that doesn't go to a top school ever have any chance of getting to the same position career wise (either academically or non-academically) as a student who went to the top school?

For example, do you have any co-workers that didn't go to a top school?

He doesn't have coworkers. He has coconspirators.

[Guynemer]

Cool. Mind paying off my credit card debt?

**** that noise. I got student loan debt out my perfectly-shaped ass.

[Asher]

Just default on those and BUY GOLD.

[Guynemer]

[Kuciwalker]

Urg. Up to there should be covered in 2.5 semesters, and no more.

Multi-variate calc is a joke. Can be taught in less than a week. Vector cal is more serious, and should also include Lagrange multipliers and perhaps some intro to calculus of variations.

That should cover 3 full semesters, followed by a semester of complex analysis. After that, there should be a full year of diffeq, starting with ODEs, integral transforms etc, followed by PDEs, integral equations, series sol'ns, Green's functions/fundamental solutions (this is assuming the student has already learned a decent amount of linear algebra)

After that, the only thing left is numerical methods. Finite differencing, Monte Carlo, the suitability and optimization of these techniques under various conditions.

That pretty much covers all the math an undergrad will ever need to know, and some of what a grad student might need. Specialized or abstract math classes might or might not be required depending on the area of research interest.

Where the hell did group theory go?

[chequita guevara]

Enjoy it will it lasts.

[KrazyHorse]

This is kind of my curiosity more than anything, but I've wondered, would a student that doesn't go to a top school ever have any chance of getting to the same position career wise (either academically or non-academically) as a student who went to the top school?

For example, do you have any co-workers that didn't go to a top school?

The lowest-ranked school of anybody I met at Goldman was USC. There was also a UCLA grad. The rest were Ivies (and not the **** Ivies, either....Dartmouth, Brown and Penn, I'm looking at you) + Berkeley, Stanford, UC, UIUC etc.

Hopkins was on the lower end.

For faculty members, the great majority are also from the aforementioned schools. Some are not, but are from top 20. Virtually nobody outside the top 20.

[KrazyHorse]

Where the hell did group theory go?

Specialized/abstract math that will not be used until graduate school, if at all.

[KrazyHorse]

Actually, the only thing I missed, thinking more on it, is tensor analysis (assuming the undergrad takes a GR course).

[notyoueither]

What mark will you stamp on the side of your desk when one of your schemes bankrupts a grandmother?