<p>I've been accepted to Santa Cruz as an astrophysics major, and Davis as a physics major. I've heard that overall the academics at Davis are stronger, but that Santa Cruz has a great astronomy department. While the atmosphere at Santa Cruz seems more interesting to me, I am concerned about my ability to get into a top notch grad school after graduation. Any advice from those who have walked the walk?</p>
<p>Just bumping this one time.</p>
<p>Grad schools will not differentiate between UCSC and UCD. In any case, the introduction from your recommending professor to the professor in the Ph.D. program is much more important than the school you’re graduating from.</p>
<p>Lastly, you said it yourself… UCSC has a tremendous astrophysics dept. Department strength trumps school strength any day, as long as you are relatively sure that’s your area of interest (which is trickier than it may seem to you now).</p>
<p>I can’t really think of anything else that I would want to do. Thanks for the advice.</p>
<p>I went to COSMOS @ UCSC. Astrophysics was one of UCSC’s strongest points. I met so many GREAT profs there. Go to UCSC. It’s an awesome place to study and it’s in a great location.</p>
<p>The 3 things that will get you into a top grad school will be <em>stellar</em> grades, research–meaningful, with respected programs during the summers, especially between soph + jr AND jr+soph, and awesome recommendations from your profs and/or scientists you’ve worked with doing research…the difference between UCSC and UCD is not big enough to make a difference. </p>
<p>This year I have seen people who were rejected to top Astro ph.D. programs who had 4.0 GPA, nearly perfect GRE V, M and physics scores, but no research to speak of. D’s 2 summer research programs were instrumental in guiding her to decide what area she wants to focus in, and really helped her apply what she had learned in college to real-life work environments. She was at a very well-regarded REU program last year…for the first couple of weeks, all the interns were spending their evenings going back to their old textbooks (and swapping textbooks) to get back up to speed on what they needed to know.</p>
<p>Okay, I am starting to lean towards UCSC.</p>