University of California at Santa Cruz (MS/PhD - Physics)

[CA]

University of California at Santa Cruz (MS/PhD - Physics)
http://physics.ucsc.edu
Santa Cruz, CA

[Grant]

I'll start out the physics profiles by adding a brief little bit about the graduate school I went to.

UC Santa Cruz is nestled among large redwood trees. I lived in Graduate school housing for the two years I attended UCSC and frequently reminisce about the enjoyable walk from graduate student housing to the physics department.

There were no letter grades when I attended just a pass or no pass with a written evaluation from the professors. However, I found the coursework to be quite a bit more difficult than I anticipated.

I received my masters from coursework and qualifier exams and so I can't do any justice commenting on research, but there was a lot of it going on. I worked for a summer on GLAST and one of the highlights was when I was put on the night shift to monitor part of an experiment utilizing the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

As a general rule of thumb I have found that at most campuses the physics people are the strange ones. However, at UCSC I found the physics people to be only beacon of normalcy on the entire campus. It was quite a liberal campus with lots of dreadlocks and people not wearing any shoes.

[bosem]

Everyone tells me that UCSC astronomy program is among the top 5 or 10. However how is there astrophysics program compared to others? Especially theoretical cosmology? How does other people view their department?

[___]

I'm a first year grad student at UCSC trying to study theoretical cosmology, so I can give you my very biased opinion. Keep in mind that I'm kind of in my own little bubble as a first year, and I lack both a reasonable basis for comparison with other schools and the broader perspective of my own school that, say, a fifth-year might have.

That said, I think we have a really good cosmology group here. Joel Primack seems to be kind of a Big Shot. If you're willing to sit and listen, he'll be more than happy to tell you about how he was intimately involved in at least half of the ground-breaking discoveries in cosmology in the last 30 years. He has an absurdly high number of students that later go off and get faculty positions (something like 90%). He mostly does physical cosmology though, along with a bunch of people in the astro department (Piero Madau probably being the most prominent) and a few other physicists. On the more early universe side, there's a small group of theorists in the physics department that seems to be quite strong. Anthony Aguirre works on things like eternal inflation and colliding universes, Stefano Profumo works on the nature of dark matter, and Michael Dine seems to do a variety of stuff on the border of cosmology and high energy theory. There's also Tom Banks, but he seems to be more of a pure high-energy theorist instead of a cosmologist. I suppose it doesn't seem like that big of a group when you count it out, but then again theoretical early-universe cosmology is a pretty niche subject. You should check out the TASC webpage for more of a broad overview of theoretical astrophysics here.

I think that one of the things that Santa Cruz really has going for it is that all of the professors here are very friendly and approachable, and I haven't met anyone here that I wouldn't want to work with based on a personality conflict. Of course, your impression may be different.

Hope that helps.

[doguden]

what about condensed matter in ucsc compared to other universities?
and can somebody give me a link which shows the deadline for application and the application requirements?
third and the last: what is the ratio of international students in the department?
thx for any help

[grae313]

and can somebody give me a link which shows the deadline for application and the application requirements?

Are you serious? Here you go.

[doguden]

seriously, I couldnt find the necessary information in the web page of the department

[grae313]

seriously, I couldnt find the necessary information in the web page of the department

Fail. http://physics.ucsc.edu/documents/ucsc_ ... _flyer.pdf

I went to the department website, clicked on "graduate" clicked on "Physics at Santa Cruz"

Click on the first link and it takes you here: http://graddiv.ucsc.edu/prospective/index.php

[doguden]

thank you,
Another thing I want to ask is about is the non resident tutuion
here it shows that many financial aids dont include non resident tutuion:
http://graddiv.ucsc.edu/aid/
and the expected cost of a student:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/fin-aid/gradbudget0910.shtml
isnt there a solution for this non resident tutuion?

[nathan12343]

As a UCSC grad student (in astronomy) I can tell you that the department will cover the non-resident tuition until you pass your qualifier at which point you will be able to pay in-state tuition. This means you might have to TA more than the US citizens in the department will need to.