<p>What does it mean when a kid (who's applying RD to UCSB) gets a call from a SB Physics professor inviting him to apply to their College of Creative Studies in Physics?</p>
<p>What's RD? I'm a current student. The College of Creative Studies isn't something I'd do for physics. The regular physics program is amazing, though.</p>
<p>^RD= "regular decision" as opposed to Early Decision or Action.</p>
<p>Why not CCS for Physics? Small classes, high expectations, highly motivated peers, lots of privileges - what's the poison apple?</p>
<p>They probably are trying to get more people into the program. My son got in to CCS as a math major and when he went to visit there was only like 2 other people majoring in math.
He ended up not going to UCSB but it was a tough decision, CCS seems like a great program!</p>
<p>CCS is not a traditional science/math program. I consider a traditional education in science and math to be of more value and difficulty. I am a current student and in the college of letters and science, so I may be bias. We have a nobel laureate in physics and it's regarded highly here. As are chemistry and economics. If you're interested in the CCS go for it, I'm just saying as more of a traditionalist, I prefer the standard course route in the L&S. It's more straightforward.</p>
<p>Aronomy, it is very, very difficult to learn anything about CCS, so your comments and anything else you have time to add will be very much appreciated by me and anyone else who's faced with a need to make a choice. Thanks very much.</p>
<p>Do you have friends in CCS Physics who might be seniors and looking at the next step? Any difficulty in getting the Real World to recognize the degree?</p>
<p>I personally find CCS to be more artsy and history oriented, and with a name like "Creative Studies" it takes away from the science aspect. I think a B.Sc. in Physics from the college of letters and science is better in the fact that it is universally recognized as a tough major. CCS is more vague and seems to be, through the name (you have to think about how others view it as well), that it's more liberal studies oriented than a straight B.S. in Physics through L&S. </p>
<p>You should get more opinions on it, because I'm just one student. Maybe contact the CCS and ask them more about it, ask how many regular physics majors there are compared to those in the CCS. </p>
<p>Sorry I can't be of more help, as I know mostly about L&S (honors too, since I'm in that program). </p>
<p>Good luck with your decision, I think UCSB is a FANTASTIC school, and would recommend it for everyone. Not only is it academic, it is incredibly social.</p>
<p>Thanks for the words. The college has such a small population that it's very hard to learn much about it. They apparently are sensitive to the non-science name; there was talk a year ago about changing it; is that still afloat, or did the traditionalists resist?</p>
<p>This seems to be one of the only ccs discussions... so here goes</p>
<p>i visited ucsb 4 years ago and fell in love with ccs, and applied there this year for fall admission as a lower level transfer (there's another story about how i didn't know i was a transfer applicant until last week..)
anyway, i applied to be a literature major, but i want to continue studying french, and i also want to fill requirements for med school. i love ccs for its more focused disciplines, but i'm wondering if anyone knows how well it would work to have two majors. </p>
<p>any thoughts would be appreciated-- it really is hard to find out details about the program.</p>
<p>-Julia</p>
<p>I know as little as you do, but it seems to me that when you get accepted, you'll have more personal attention than almost any other college kid on the planet, helping you understand and make those decisions. In the past they've also held an information event for acceptees, and that would be a good opportunity also. Meanwhile keep your options open.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Aronomy, it is very, very difficult to learn anything about CCS
[/quote]
take a look at College</a> of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara </p>
<p>Page after page of info...</p>
<p>MikeMac, wouldn't you like additional input from sources other than the school's own web pages? For many places, there's arguably an over-abundance of data and opinions. Not so for CCS - being small and eclectic, it's rare to find comments about it (there is a Wikipedia article).</p>
<p>I'm a 4th year student at CCS (a computer science and math major), and I can tell you that as good as the L&S physics program is at UCSB (and it's really good!), the CCS Physics program is even better. Though Aronomy might be right about it not being a "traditional" program, the only difference are the ones already listed. The first two years are very tough and very indepth to get you to learn about every part of physics, and the next two years are for you to explore any upper-division and graduate level classes you find interesting. Aside from what it might seem like, CCS physics students have access and need to take classes from Letters and Sciences, so they're in contact and working with all those world class professors in the world class labs. CCS Physics students generally start working in a lab after their first year and start doing real research, and that's the whole point of "creative." It's not "creative" as in artsy or whatever, it's creative in that all CCS students in every major are expected to add to the body of knowledge in the world, thereby "creating" something new. Finally, you're degree is just as good as any other, it's still coming from UCSB and still says Physics. In total, the perks of the program are too good to pass up if you're a match for the program. And if someone has already contacted you about joining, then I'm fairly sure you're set.</p>
<p>If anyone else has any questions regarding CCS or this matter, please get in touch with me, I'd love to help you all out.</p>
<p>-Matt
<a href="mailto:mshayefar@gmail.com">mshayefar@gmail.com</a></p>
<p>I am in my fourth year at UCSB and have been in the CCS Physics program since I came in freshman year, and let me tell you, it has been one hell of a ride. The first two years of lower division classes are challenging and hard (as they should be). If you are motivated, enjoy physics, and have a good head on your shoulders you will get through it, get a lot out of it, and have a lot of fun in the process. Turns out (unknown to us at the time) some of the harder (and funner) problems on your hw's will actually be from graduate level text books. The goal is that through these difficult but rewarding courses you will develop the problem solving skills and work ethic that will serve you throughout the rest of your physics career. </p>
<p>Your Sophomore year, in addition to your normal course work, you will have sophomore lab (which is cross listed in L&S as the honors physics lab). So far this has been my favorite class in all my time here (and I've taken a LOT of classes averaging about 18 units a quarter compared to 12 for a full time student). In sophomore lab the three quarters have very different goals and material. </p>
<p>Fall Quarter: experimentation and methods. Remember in high school when you would do experiments for a class? They would give you a worksheet with the problem, experiment, and procedure? Probably they would also have some graphs for you to fill out with what they said were the important variables. Well here they would say something along the lines of: You want to find the equation for the period of a pendulum. Here are some weights, here is some string. This is Mathematica and some information on error analysis. Come up with an equation and prove in a journal-quality paper that your model is accurate to within 1% (). HeHeHe THIS is how you should teach a lab class. It was time consuming, but boy was it worth it.</p>
<p>Winter Quarter: LabVIEW and computer/device interfacing. This was also a fun quarter. You learn to write in LabVIEW, a very visual based coding language that will look very strange if you are used to C or Java like I was. Turns out LabVIEW is used in nearly every physics lab on campus, in many startup companies, government labs, and universities across the nation. Why have you never heard of it? Its specialty is talking to several devices at once and coordinating their measurements, control, and behavior according to your code. This is how you automate experiments. If you want to cool something down to 10 Kelvin in the cryostat, move a stage to focus the laser on your sample, then take and store the resulting spectra with the spectrometer, while altering some parameter (such as laser intensity or applied external magnetic field) you already have five devices interacting and LabVIEW is designed to make this potential ball of spaghetti code a simple task to program and debug. At the end of the quarter you will have written and implemented code to raise the temperature of a copper rod to a temperature you define on the control panel you design in LabVIEW. (the experiment I described earlier is what we do in the lab I joined the summer after taking this class :) )</p>
<p>How long are these posts allowed to be? I don't know but on to...
Spring Quarter: You are now familiar with getting good and accurate data, and how to program LabVIEW to run your experiments. This quarter you learn to use the machine shop and will work on a large class project. You and your class will design, build, and program an experiment apparatus to be used in one of the labs on campus. This was so cool!!! Our year the project was a device for taking pictures through a microscope of large areas of roots to determine the rate of root growth and find if the roots could detect a moisture gradient in the soil. The device was dubbed S.M.O.R.T. (Scanning Microscope for Observing Roots Tunneling) and is now after some of our class stayed on to work in the lab over a few summers (easy way to get into a research lab) the machine is now up and working beautifully.</p>
<p>After your first two years, you are in upper division classes with the L&S students (though to be strictly honest you've been in upper division courses since Sophomore year, so it's not that big a deal). You are in a lab by now if you wanted to be and tried to find one. If research isn't your thing, independent study is fun too. </p>
<p>Graduating with a degree from CCS Physics is not a problem for career advancement in the slightest. CCS has been around long enough that gradschools know whats up and CCS has a positive reputation among them. Not to mention with your lower division courses under your belt, your upper division will seem easy by comparison and you will not get the same challenge until you start taking graduate level courses. I've taken two grad courses now and they are the closest thing I've had to the intro CCS classes since I was in my second year. They dont call CCS The graduate school for undergraduates for nothing.</p>
<p>Moral of the story: CCS Physics is fun, challenging, and a lot of hard work. If you like physics and want to have difficult problems to solve you will be welcome. If you have any questions feel free to email me at <a href="mailto:myharmonica55@umail.ucsb.edu">myharmonica55@umail.ucsb.edu</a></p>
<p>-Ian Mc.</p>
<p>I graduated as a CCS physics major from UCSB. It was probably the best undergraduate educational experience that you could ever experience. Together with incredibly personalized advising as well as the smallest introductory physics courses you'll see anywhere, CCS provides an incredibly rich and rewarding undergraduate experience. As a sophomore I took upper division physics courses in the UCSB physics department and as a junior and senior I took graduate level courses. I was also very involved in research by the time I was a sophomore. When I graduated I was an author on more than ten research articles. This put me in an excellent position for graduate school. I had no problem getting into the top graduate schools in the country and neither did my CCS classmates. We went to places like Harvard, Caltech, and Johns Hopkins. We literally had our choice of where we wanted to go. Now I am a professor at a research one university with my own thriving research program. My classmates have also done very well - for example one is a faculty member working on cutting edge astronomy and another has starting his own company working on high-end laser technology.</p>
<p>CCS is truely a unique experience - unique in the most positive aspects. I'm unsure what others mean by a "traditional" education. Regardless you WILL get the best physics education from CCS at UCSB (and I think in the country).</p>
<p>I am a current CCS physics junior. It's a bit earlier in the morning, and I'm sitting at my desk at my research job. I got a call from a CCS physics professor three years ago, telling me I should apply to the program. I had good math scores, AP physics, and wanted to be a physics major. I ended up choosing CCS physics over several far more prestigious programs and have not regretted that decision. </p>
<p>The best part about CCS physics for me is the people. First, the professors: that they care enough to make a phone call to students who they think might like the program says a lot. Once you get here, they still care. We are REQUIRED to meet with our advisors once a quarter. Several administrators in L&S have been shocked when I told them this-- it's not normal. My professor from my freshman year intro course (of about 25) was amazing. Lectures were fun and interactive, and we learned a lot. Office hours turned into talking about particle physics and discussions of hyper cubes. </p>
<p>I have also met most of my best friends through CCS physics and the rest of the college. The physics majors in my year and I spend a lot of time working on problems sets together, and have been close since the beginning of our time here. CCS as a college holds a barbeque at the beginning of term, coffee hour every Wednesday, and has it's own dorm (Pendola house, which has about 40 freshman and sophmore CCS students). It's a very personal, friendly environment, and the best I could ask for in which to learn physics.</p>
<p>I am a senior in CCS, Biology, and simply put: CCS is great for the sciences, too.<br>
First off, you get 1 on 1 time with a counselor in your area every quarter to decide what's best for you: INVALUABLE. There are also other perks, but this is one of my most valued parts.
If you are a highly motivated or focused individual, and feel that some typically required classes (parts of your major that arent your focus, or pre-reqs that you dont feel you need) would not benefit you, you may opt to take classes that you and your counselor feel WOULD be good for you. It is designed to let those who know what they want to do, do it (though there are still a few diversity requirements).
The comment on "traditional education" and the "nobel laureate" are misguided for the following reasons:
1) You can be in CCS and take EXACTLY the same set of classes, if you desired
2) For this reason, you have the same access to the professors as would someone in the other colleges.</p>
<p>To sum up: CCS is great for motivated / focused individuals who with to peruse a degree that is hand-tailored to their needs. This is NOT IN ANY WAY limited to social sciences. I can not stress this enough. As a matter of fact, I believe I was able to get more out of it as a science major, being able to work in a lab more readily.
(I have actually been in the college of engineering AND letters and science as well)</p>
<p>Does anyone have any experience/opinion regarding the Art concenrtration at CCS?</p>
<p>Are you asking how CCS divides its attention between arts and sciences? If so, as far as I can tell (I’m a parent) each of their majors is equally important to them.</p>
<p>If I were to major in Comp Sci in the college of Engineering, could I do a minor in math through the CCS program?</p>