| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
12 Feb 2005 01:38:51 AM |
| Object: |
Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
Hi,
Does anyone know of a list of physics graduate schools that do not
require a BA or BS degree?
Thanks,
FA.
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| User: "Uncle Al" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
12 Feb 2005 11:42:10 AM |
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wrote:
Hi,
Does anyone know of a list of physics graduate schools that do not
require a BA or BS degree?
As such as follows:
None worth attending.
At the very least you must pass Comps and Qualifiers, and I doubt any
school worth beans will even invest that much exploratory time in you
unless you present awesome GRE plus Physics sub-exam scores up front.
A few scholarly publications would grease the skids, as would a
fundable research proposal included with your resume.
If you are a *****, spic, queer, addict, AIDS VICTIM!... you merely
walk in with your social advocate and lawyer and demand a full
scholarlship. A military veteran is iffy unless enjoying an
above-the-elbow or -knee amputation, his Congressman's applied
(pecuniary) pressure, and a Liberal photographer. If you wear a
prosthesis to the interview, take care that it is both functional and
mechanically repulsive for the pictures to be splashed across the
Media.
Don't try the preceding paragraph at MIT or Caltech. They don't give
a sparrow's fart about anything except objective qualification - and
they routinely make it stick. OTOH, if you are a magician those are
the first places to apply.
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'.
An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good
as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how
his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain
that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians.
Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark."
Mark Kac
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
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| User: "Isaac Wingfield" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
14 Feb 2005 01:01:48 AM |
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In article <420E3FF2.BBE77B2C@hate.spam.net>,
Uncle Al <UncleAl0@hate.spam.net> wrote:
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'.
An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good
as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how
his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain
that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians.
Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark."
I've always liked that quote. Do you happen to know who he was referring
to as being a "magician"?
Mark Kac
And, how do you pronounce that name? I've been guessing from similar
names I know, that it is like "cats" or "catz".
Isaac
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
13 Feb 2005 01:24:03 AM |
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In lieu of a bachelor's, I'm considering just taking the
qualifying/prelim's of a physics grad school (and submitting GRE
physics scores) and a partial undergrad transcript.
I am currently an undergrad, but I find my grades to not properly
reflect my ability; moreover, I find my undergraduate classes a waste
of time. I've shown improvement in grades from B's and A's to A+'s in
the past 2.5 years or so, but I believe this is due to my change in
study habit and lecture attendance.
I started out as a bright eyed and high-aiming freshman, who attended
almost every single lecture for my upper div/grad courses, ditching
lecture for lower div. Yet, I was dismayed at how it seems that my
learning rate via lecture attendance is dramatically lower than if I
were to just hermit out and study on my own. This is what I have been
doing for the past year or so - instead of attending lecture, I have
been reading multiple textbooks, going to campus only to turn in
homework and take exams, avoiding lecture all together - and from
improvement to my own self-studying ways, I've been able to score my
first A+ letter grade.
Much of the time, the assigned homework is stale, hackneyed,
randomly-selected problems, and feels like busy-work (consider
debugging loops, modules, with's, etc in mathematica). The examinations
for my undergraduate courses, I ace easily without struggle. When I do
struggle, I find that my efforts are wasted in an exam I had wayyy
overestimated.
I guess using the argument based on grades isn't that good of a reason
for me to drop out. But then, I don't care that much about my grades.
Many-a-times, I've had A-'s and A's I could have argued for higher
overall letter grades. (Often, the graduate student instructors make
mistakes in grading... and often in knowledge, too.) I just let them go
by, instead of stressing too much about grades. It seems like I never
really took my undergraduate career seriously..
Here's the most driving reason though: recently, I've found it
increasingly harder for me to focus and discipline myself on "what's
practical, academically." By practical, I mean: if I have a midterm or
major project coming up, I should spend most if not all of my time on
it. My academic courses are boring, and moreover, most of the time, the
extra time I spend on my projects aren't even acknowledged by the
graders (sometimes because they have very limited knowledge).
This is perhaps because I chose to do an engineering and physics major
(with a humanities minor). I spent my first 2 years studying upper
level and graduate physics. Now, in my third year, I am focusing more
on my engineering major --- and, I often find myself dismayed at the
lack of knowledge of my engineering graduate student instructors, and
even professor's! (And, in engineering, you often have grad students
who were extremely good at getting good grades as undergrads, but were
not that good at retaining knowledge... for whatever reasons, we dare
not wonder.)
What would I rather do other than busywork? Often, I'd find that in the
middle of reading a particular text, I want to understand a particular
topic in more depth---last spring term, I've wasted 2 good days of
quiet study time over one weekend (thus scoring lowly on a few
impending midterms and homeworks at the time) on a self-taught crash
course in group theory, just because I 'felt like it." It's this
feeling that I should take time out on a particular subject.
Sometimes, something which "I feel like doing," would become drab
quickly enough for me to return to my planned academic busywork. This
is usually because I chose a topic I haven't enough pre-req's for
(dunno enough math for) and the book doesn't give the best of all
introduction. (I horde books in a whole bunch of topics I might find
myself interested in from the school library... If I drop out, access
to the library would perhaps be the only thing I regret..)
At this point, I'm considering the possibilities... would there by dire
consequences to me not completing my undergraduate busywork... say,
were I to take a year out and study physics on my own, unrestricted and
unhampered by the busywork of school... and then coming back to the
"real world" a year later via taking physics gre's and marching into
some grad school and acing their prelim's/qual's?
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
15 Feb 2005 01:25:24 PM |
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wrote:
In lieu of a bachelor's, I'm considering just taking the
qualifying/prelim's of a physics grad school (and submitting GRE
physics scores) and a partial undergrad transcript.
Qualifying exams are normally offered to grad students, usually
after a year of graduate classes. You can't just walk in and
take the exam -- you have to get admitted *first*.
There are certainly plenty of grad schools that will occasionally
admit a student without an undergraduate degree. But you would
need something to make you stand out as exceptional. Good GREs
will help (general as well as subject; your quantitative GRE score
can be particularly important), but they won't be nearly enough
for a good graduate program. Some very strong recommendation
letters would help -- if you have some professors who think you're
extremely good and will explain why, that can count a good deal.
But undergraduate grades aren't just a measure of how much you know;
they're also a stand-in for how hard you're willing to work. Grad
school is hard, and takes a lot of dedication and self-discipline.
If you don't finish your undergraduate degree and don't have a
pretty good explanation, many schools will interpret that as lack
of commitment. Admissions committees don't like dilettantes.
If you don't have an undergraduate degree, what you really need is
something that will demonstrate not just that you're smart and know
basic physics, but that you're willing to work hard and able to
produce results. Find an REU and work on some real experiments;
get your name on a paper or two and convince a supervisor to write
a glowing letter about how much you contributed. Take some graduate
courses as an undergraduate or a part-time student (most universities
have some sort of extension or "open campus" program that allow you
to take courses without enrolling); do well enough on those, and
they'll go a long way toward making up for not having a BA. Get a
job in a physics-related industry for a couple of years, and be good
enough at it that your superviser will write a strong recommendation.
Steve Carlip
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| User: "Ken S. Tucker" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
12 Feb 2005 07:55:48 AM |
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Hi,
You may want to check government or nongovernment
schools.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
13 Feb 2005 11:17:54 PM |
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hi, what do you mean by non government/government schools?
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| User: "Ken S. Tucker" |
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| Title: Re: Physics Graduate School w/o Degree |
15 Feb 2005 01:29:51 AM |
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wrote:
hi, what do you mean by non government/government schools?
Read your essay today. Non government means commercial.
Corporations need smart people, and will train, and in
many specialized cases are far more advanced (10-20
years) than the standard knowledge used in government
regulated schools.
Turn a profit, show some potential, corporations
will pay tuition.
For example, I was much to restless to follow the
usual academic path to *wisdom*, so I took the school
of hard knocks.
Regards
Ken
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