Considering that minorities are overrepresented in the lower income brackets as compared to their overall percentage in the population, we may be hitting on one reason that they are underrepresented in physics. Your advice is great for the middle class, which was definately overrepresented in all my college experiences. What can people who don’t have that advantage do?

Many places will use freshman and sophomore courses in physics and math as their “weedout” courses, where their intent is to flunk out and eliminate as many engineering and science majors as possible. (I suppose most majors will have their own set of “weedout” courses). I’ve known many physics and math majors who really hated freshman physics and math courses, for this very reason.

This is contrary to the evidence I see as faculty at an STS: Many of our best graduate students, and many of our best recent graduates, did not have access to grad courses as undergrads. They take a few extra courses at the beginning, get a good research program going; life goes on. The lack of grad courses in their undergrad years is completely irrelevant.

In my day very basic physics such as quantum field theory and general relativity were only available in graduate courses. A huge fraction of my course load during my junior and senior years were grad courses.

Because there is no benefit in arriving at a decent grad school without this basic knowledge, I would rule out any undergrad schools (typically LACs and the more bureaucratic LSSs) that don’t offer grad courses.

Would be really helpful to some of us I’m sure.

http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area33.html

Of course, what you care about is what life is like as an undergrad, not how good the research is; but that’s much harder to quantify. You really have to visit the schools and see for yourself. Talking to other students is by far the best gauge, but you need to talk to several and average over the individual inclinations (or, even better, find someone whose inclinations match with yours).

That said, schools with the top physics grad programs can be relied on to prepare undergraduates for their own grad programs. For liberal arts colleges, look at the size of the physics faculty and the number of physics majors. There is a feedback loop, where liberal arts faculty send their best undergrads to and hire new faculty from their own graduate alma maters. So check where the faculty got their graduate degrees from.

The top part of the top tier of physics graduate programs are, roughly in geographic order: Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Illinois, Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, MIT. Also in the top tier are UCLA, UCSB, Texas, Michigan, Maryland and probably a few others depending on one’s criteria.

“Are you a TA now?

One thing that is a universal truth : when you are teaching, the things that the students don’t know how to do would have been inexcuasable when you were a student.

I’m a prof now, and I’m always surprised by the things that the beginning grad students don’t know how to do.

-Rob”

Actually I was referring to my colleagues, i.e. postdocs and grad students…
and professors… who cannot critically analyze data or understand what a p-value is, or understand what error bars are for, or how to calculate standard error, etc. Undergrads are probably taught that at some point at MIT. When I TAed I wasn’t frustrated by their lack of understanding in any topic - they’re here to learn, and I bonded with a lot of them. But a few were spoiled brats who wanted answers spoonfed to them.

But if you want to go into physics, or other sciences I imagine, you will want to avoid the lesser state schools and the lower-tier private universities. They simply don’t attract enough talented students to offer a curriculum sufficient to prepare you for grad school, or at least a top-tier grad school. My grad school (which, depending on the ranking scheme, is usually in the top half of the top ten physics grad schools, at least for condensed matter physics) was, I believe, more generous than its peer schools in offering admission to promising graduates of lower-tier colleges. These students, on average, did not do very well. It’s no fun to arrive at grad school and find yourself significantly less prepared than your classmates.

In college, nobody cares where you went to high school; in grad school, nobody cares where you went to college. However, if you decide in college not to pursue physics, or anything academic, your choice of college matters tremendously. I do know that many of the firms offering the most elite ‘real-world’ jobs–investment banking and management consulting, for example–recruit strictly from elite universities. That’s not to say that graduating from an elite school is sufficient to get an elite job, but it is necessary.

Are you a TA now?

One thing that is a universal truth : when you are teaching, the things that the students don’t know how to do would have been inexcuasable when you were a student.

I’m a prof now, and I’m always surprised by the things that the beginning grad students don’t know how to do.

-Rob

NM

Despite its tiny size, I wonder how much attention undergrads really get at a place like Caltech.

It was pretty easy to become involved in research there an undergrad. In fact, it was much easier than doing so as a grad student at an LSS. When I graduated from Tech, I had my name on two papers. [I could have been on more, but I was a bit of a slacker.]

At my LSS grad school I had to be the single author on all of my papers. It was pretty much an every-grad-student-for-himself situation with an uncaring faculty. The sole purpose of the grad students there, it seemed to me, was to provide the faculty with employment as teachers in accordance with state regulations.

Good advising both at the High School and undergrad level go a long way in helping enthusiastic students make the most of college, avoiding common pitfalls. Sadly, the advising process often turns into a hurried 10 minute appointment geared towards making sure the student abides by some prefabricated checklist.

I imagine MIT is about the same.”

I don’t think so. I realize something is lost in the undergrad-to-grad translation (i.e. I can’t compare directly my undergrad experience at Caltech to my grad experience at MIT), but I was surprised how different the two schools are.
Mostly I like that MIT is bigger and there are more non-science activities available. I guess it’s that stage of my life where I care about those things.

But I miss the science environment at Caltech. I felt like (almost) everyone there was excited about science, and wanted to explore things in a geeky way, and it was fun (though painful at times). But I feel like at MIT, people are not interested in the science so much as they are interested in stardom or flashy papers. Again, this is only at the grad level and based on my interactions with postdocs, other grad students, and faculty here.

Also I can’t stand that people here (at MIT) don’t all know how to use error bars. I think that would have been inexcusable at Caltech no matter what your major was.

The other thing I miss about Caltech is how easy it is to form inter-departmental (divisional) collaborations, because professors in different departments go to lunch together. In my undergrad lab, there were developmental biologists working side by side with chemists (who developed some of the reagents we used) and electrical engineers and physicists (who built some of the microscopes we used). It was freakin’ awesome. Though there is that potential there, it just doesn’t happen as easily at MIT.

I would disagree with this. From grad school onward, if you’re a University professor you will spend your life utterly and completely focused on your area of research.

College is the last chance you’re going to have to sample the diversity of academia and of human intellectual exploration. Take advantage of it then!

(I skipped the advanced astrophysics class (after taking the earlier one, which is more like the advanced one at some other places) becuase it conflicted with a Renaissance Literature course I wanted to take. This was my Senior year; I figured I’d be taking a lot more astrophysics in coming years, but would never again have the opportunity to take something like that Renaissance Literature class.) (I did the same thing in high school; I didn’t take AP Computer Science because it conflicted with Chorus.)

-Rob