Hello! Just starting our college search for our youngest daughter. She is interested in majoring in physics/astronomy looking towards doing research and maybe eventually working as a professor. At least right now. She is looking at some technical schools such as WPI, RPI; some liberal arts schools and some medium to large universities. Just wondering if anyone has any insight over which type of school may serve her best. Or if it really doesn’t matter. Thanks for any insight!
Expect a bunch of helpful but very contradictory opinions. Imo the main thing will be to get the right environment for your daughter. That could be any of: large university with a strong physics program, a more technically focused smaller university or an LAC.
The biggest difference is the access to bigger range / grad level courses at bigger universities. All of the options will have plenty of research opportunities, but she will have to put herself forward for those opportunities at any of them. Most academically competitive LACs will give her enough academically and in research experience to get her wherever she wants to go- their chief weakness seems to be prep for the Physics GRE (but knowing that she can work on it over the summers).
Regardless of which type of college she goes to she should be prepared to spend 10 weeks every summer working full-time in a lab (ideally at a mix of her own college & some REUs)(these should always be paid). Homework into summer research options should start by Thanksgiving of 1st year.
Bona fides: a collegekid who was a physics major at a solid but not-fancy name LAC who is now doing a PhD in Applied Physics in a top program. She loves her grad program, but is very glad that she did not go to that university for undergrad. She toured it when applying to undergrad and wasn’t impressed with any aspect of it - except the building in which she now works 
She feels that her LAC gave her the room to grow into herself (and, frankly, have a happier overall undergrad experience), but she loves her grad school for this stage.
There is also a super group- Undergraduate Women in Physics- which has regional and national conferences.
@collegemom3717 Thank you so much for your help. I do agree that fit is super important. Our first daughter transferred from a small, private LAC (what she thought she wanted) to a large, public university and is much happier. Makes a world of difference. And great info on the internships and grad programs. We have a lot to learn about the science world!
You might want to check out this thread from a couple of months ago: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/2083976-best-undergraduate-physics-schools.html#latest
FWIW, I went to grad school at Berkeley for physics in the 90s (I don’t work in the field any more… left to raise kids and never went back). My cohort included students who had done undergrad at a lot of different schools. The ones that I still remember included Ivy schools (Princeton and Cornell), U of Chicago, plus Berkeley, UCSB, and one of the smartest students in our class had done undergrad at University of Nebraska. I don’t know if the Berkeley people had a bias against the small LACs or if the lack of students from them in my year is just a pure numbers thing (not many graduates from small LACs total compared to the larger universities). Somewhere there’s actually a chart that shows how many phds in science came from which undergrad institutions… I’ll see if I can find and link if someone else hasn’t done it already while I’ve been typing.
Found it - here’s the chart of where phds in science and engineering did their undergrad (not specific to physics, though) - https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
Would you explain that?
@washugrad Thank you for the information and the chart!
Some potentially interesting reading courtesy AIP, eg:
https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/undergrad/bachreport-p-04.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20110419115626/http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/bach2010.pdf
https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/rosters/PhyRost15.3.pdf
@circuitrider, not sure which part needs clarifying, but I’ll try
Physics majors are pretty harmonized across US colleges and universities, and by agreement, all of the essential courses for applying to PhD programs will be covered within the major pretty much everywhere. At most colleges, and particularly reasonably selective colleges the standard will be rigorous enough to provide a strong academic base. However, the lack of grad level courses, and in many case the absence of built-in GRE prep, means that for the LAC students I know extra prep was necessary to get the kind of PGRE scores that strong programs are looking for.
On the research side, most of the reasonably selective LACs have some sort of paid on-campus summer STEM research programs (and often ones that run through the academic year), so that students can get solid research experience that sets them up for the (competitive) REU summer programs (and/or multiple summers of in-depth research at their own college), which is a big part of grad school admissions.
LACs with strong physics departments will often offer a track for prospective physics majors beginning with a first-year sequence that differs from that commonly pursued by premed students and others with less specialized interests. Standardized courses, suitable mostly for sophomores and juniors, then follow. A half dozen or more upper-level electives – in topics such as mathematical physics, general relativity and astrophysics – offer further breadth and variety. Research opportunities may be made straightforward by for-credit courses with an individual research designation. This latter opportunity may be a particularly strength of LACs. In the context of a strong liberal arts college physics program, graduate level offerings would seem to be superfluous.
agree with @merc81 that the level/amount of coursework was fine overall- the difference that grad level courses would have made for my physics collegekid would have been to strengthen some of the areas that are tested in the PGRE. Some self-study sorted that.
Thank you, @collegemom3717 for the clarification. It was the “built-in GRE prep” piece that I didn’t understand. Is that anything like “teaching for the test”?
I think the most important thing, regardless of what kind of school your kid goes to, is to stand out as a curious, strong, interested student who has the chops for the grueling PhD process. LORs will be very important.
Just being a “good student” isn’t enough. Research requires a whole different set of personal qualities, as well as interests, that many “good students” just don’t have. She should figure out if that’s really what she wants while she’s an UG. My daughter did REUs and discovered it was not her cup of tea.
More like straight-out exam prep. Quite a few of the STEM-ier &/or larger institutions build in (optional, but scheduled) PGRE prep classes. The PGRE is a genuinely tough exam, for which there are very limited study materials, and for which learning how to do the problems quickly is essential.
I see. In other words, it’s offered free of charge by the university, but, not “built-in” in the sense that it’s being taught as part of the professor’s syllabus. That was the clarification I needed. It’s something anyone can purchase on their own (as apparently you did), even if it isn’t offered for free at their particular college.
Pretty much. You can’t really purchase it on your own (there is surprisingly little material available, and no courses), but you can self-study. My collegekid would have been happy to have a prof-led study group. In the end her lab supervisor at her summer REU was a newly-minted PhD who helped her prep. Turns out it is a little like the ACT, in that speed counts, and looking for shortcuts to the answer can payoff
@travelfamily I am not sure there is a specific type of university your student should consider, just one where they will have the opportunity to participate in UG research starting early on and can take a solid UG physics sequence (check frequency of course offerings and what is being offered. At the UG level, standard courses are 2 semesters of intro cal-based physics courses, modern, 2 physical mechanics courses (or 1intermediate mechanics), 2 electromag courses, 2 quantum, thermal, and adv lab.)
I have never heard of a school offering PGRE prep. Neither my ds at Bama nor his friends at top schools had that available. They all just self-studied. Fwiw, my ds took multiple grad level courses, but he said the PGRE had a lot of content from the lower level physics content that he had taken in high school and as a freshman that he had to go back and review. (He took physical mechanics in high school and electromagnetic his freshman yr.) Just to offer a different perspective.
Definitely encourage her to apply for REUs. Our ds did on-campus research starting his freshman yr and continued that during that summer. He did REUs sophomore and Jr yr and continued on-campus research his entire UG (approx 18 hrs per week.)
When it comes to applying to grad school, from our ds’s experience, courses taken, GPA, research, LOR, and PGRE scores are what mattered, not where he attended UG. (He is now at a top program for theoretical cosmology and he attended Bama for UG. He told me that a few days ago he just saw one of his friends from his REU his sophomore summer who is now in the same grad program as a 2nd yr. That student went to MIT.)
@travelfamily what state do you live in?