How important is the quality of your undergraduate school for physics?

I’m a junior in high school right now, and I’m interested in mathematical physics. I’ve seen a lot of ratings and I have a pretty good idea of what schools are considered good for physics, but I was curious about how much the quality of the institution matters at the undergraduate level. Does anyone have any advice about this?

“Matters” in what sense? How much you’ll learn? How good the research opportunities will be? How interesting and fun it will be to be major there? Likelihood of getting into a good grad program?

If I were a bright kid wanting to study physics in college and eventually pursue a graduate degree, I’d be looking for a place with excellent, engaged teaching; a decent number of smart, motivated fellow majors; and good undergraduate research opportunities. If you’ve got those things and you do well, good grad school programs will naturally follow. If I were in your shoes (and once upon a time I was, actually), those things would matter to me.

I don’t know what kind of ratings you’re looking at, but if they’re only showing big research universities, I think you’re missing out. I think you’re at least as likely, and perhaps more so, to find the things I listed above at a good liberal arts college with a strong physics program.

You do want to find a school where the physics department is large enough to offer the usual physics major courses on a regular basis. These junior/senior level courses include:

  • intermediate/advanced mechanics
  • statistical and thermal physics
  • electromagnetism (often 2 semesters)
  • quantum mechanics (often 2 semesters)
  • intermediate/advanced physics lab

Of course, there can be additional electives like astrophysics, plasma physics, etc… A good math department is also highly useful, of course.

I suppose I was not completely sure what I meant by that question… but I believe what I want to know is whether or not there’s a large difference in the likelihoods of entering a good graduate program for a student from MIT or Caltech vs a student from Reed or UW Madison.

Don’t have a definitive answer, but I doubt it. I don’t think there’s exactly a ton of kids pounding at the gates to get a graduate degree in physics. Rock your classes, do some research, rock your GRE’s, and I expect you’ll be fine.

Reed (for example) does pretty well at prepping for PhDs. http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html

Some schools’ students have been recognized for undergraduate research in physics as Apker Award recipients. Your potential at any of these colleges would appear to be unlimited.

Unfortunately, the question of “what is a good undergraduate school for [major] to get into good PhD program for [major]?” is not one where there a lot of accessible good information for high school seniors. Academia is often school-prestige-conscious, but it is not just a matter of looking at school rankings, since it is likely that PhD programs are looking more at what they perceive as undergraduate quality in the major, as it relates to producing good PhD students. Publicly available rankings of majors/departments generally do not include non-PhD-granting schools, and different PhD program departments also have different preferences of what undergraduate schools they like and dislike.

A few schools have career surveys where post-graduation destinations are listed by major, including whether a student went on to a PhD program in a given subject at a given school (there is another thread about CPSLO/UCB/UCLA for physics; two of the schools have detailed career surveys). But, unless the undergraduate schools you are considering have such career survey results available, that may not help you.

These specific schools (three research universities with high reputations in physics and a LAC with, as near as I can tell, a high reputation in physics) are probably less likely to hold you back (MIT does have a career survey listing graduate school destinations).

@xraymancs is a good person to ask here - he’s a professor of physics and gives really good advice about graduate admissions in the field.

Generally speaking, the quality of your undergrad school can matter somewhat - both directly and indirectly. Directly in the sense that going to a school well-known for having a good physics department - and having recommendations from well-known people in the field - can increase your competitiveness at the point of application. Indirectly in that a school that has a good physics department can also provide good opportunities to prepare you for graduate study: better courses, better faculty, more research opportunities, more library holdings, better resources, better funding, etc.

But when we say “well-known” there are lots of schools in that atmosphere, not at all limited to MIT or Caltech. Reed is actually very well-known for sending lots of kids to PhD programs, and UW-Madison is an excellent research university (with a top 20ish doctoral program in physics, it seems). Making comparisons between schools that are all in the same general area - elite LACs, top research universities - you’re not likely to find many differences.

And let’s even say you went to UW-Eau Claire or St. Lawrence University - you could still go to a top physics PhD program from there if you did what you needed to do.

A good friend our ours is a professor of Space Physics. Where you get your undergraduate degree is less important than what you know. He has noted time and time again that American Ph.D. applicants are far less qualified in advanced mathematics than their foreign peers. You will need to go well beyond the typical minimums and have a very solid theoretical grasp of both math and physics.

On the plus side, an American applicant who is extremely well qualified can go just about anywhere.

All these comments are accurate. My experience is that having a complete, rigorous curriculum with legitimate research opportunities is the best for graduate school preparation. This does not preclude smaller schools without a graduate program since they also have good research opportunities. The advice @ucbalumnus gives in post #2 is really important. Having a solid foundation of undergraduate classes helps you do well in your graduate courses and on the qualifying examination. If you are short on these upper division courses, you may struggle and have to take them as a graduate student.

One good reason to be at a school which has a graduate program is related to this. I have noticed that our best physics majors at Illinois Tech, who go on to do well in selective graduate programs, typically take a few graduate courses as electives. Not to get credit for them in a graduate program but to have seen the material once and be prepared to do it well in a graduate program. This would argue that you might have a slight benefit from attending a research university. A second benefit might be to be able to work alongside graduate students on a project and thereby get a taste of what it would be like. However, many successful Ph.D. physicists come from LACs so, as I said the benefit is marginal.

Whatever your choice, you can do well. Try to figure out whether you will be more comfortable in a large research university, a smaller research university or an LAC. Having a good fit and not burdening yourself with loans will be the best way to do well in your academics.