The worrying is over! Your stress relief is here.

[mhazelm]

De-stress while waiting on graduate application results: design a physics reality show! (I had part of this in another thread, but I think it's funny, so I'm putting it here for you to appreciate).

Here are my thoughts so far:

"American Physicist" (auditions with Maxwell's equations, perturbation theory and special relativity derivations)
"Are you as smart as a physics graduate student?" (teeheehee)
"Extreme Math Makeover" (replace all those vectors with tensors, and use Einstein summation convention!! and let's do contour integrals! )
"Who wants to be a theoretical physicist?" (prize is a research grant instead of $1 million)

and the best of all, ETS's new GRE offering:

"FearFactor, ETS Edition". You have to sit in a claustrophobia inducing box covered with spiders while answering 100 rapid-fire physics GRE questions in under 1.7 minutes each. If you win, you get into graduate school.

[FNR]

How about this one:

"The Amazing Race - Grad Schools" (in which teams of two or four race against other teams to the grad schools around the world as designated checkpoints, with the first-place team winning $1,000,000 in form of fellowships and future research grants. I imagine the Pit Stops at Harvard, MIT, McGill, Cambridge, Max Planck Institute, Indian Institute of Technology, National University of Singapore, Tokyo University, etc.)


I am to watch this!

[evilclaw2321]

So how about this one ( I'm into food network shows)

Chopped: Physics Edition

four contestants are given a basket with three random pieces of equipment and your given a half hour to build and design an experiment. Worst and least effective one gets chopped. 3 rounds each with different themes, astro, e&m, mechanics, CMP, etc The final one left standing wins a research grant.

[FNR]

"The Grad is Right", all about four physics undergrads bidding on expensive grad school applications, trying to obtain a bid closest to the school's actual application fees without going over that price. After a set round of bids, the undergrads whose bid was closest to the correct value of the fees (without going over) would have the fee waived.

Kinda ironic, isn't it?

[twistor]

"The Apprentice: Physics Edition"

Prospective Ph.d. seekers compete to have a world-renowned Nobel laureate as their thesis advisor.

[dsperka]

This already exists

[PoincareSection]

This already exists

One guy on that show was a grad student at Princeton in astrophysics. He left with a Master's.
http://www.realitytvworld.com/news/inte ... k-6108.php

[FNR]

"So You Think You Can Do Jackson"

Straight to the point! Need more explanation?

[twistor]

I thought this was interesting:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/29 ... rican-idol

[quizivex]

I've got a great game show idea! It's based on the professional billiards tournaments I've seen on ESPN. (The format is a 2-player match: One guy attempts to perform a trick shot of his choice, and if he makes it, the other player must repeat it. If he can't repeat it, the first guy gets a point. They take turns like this for X number of rounds and the leader wins at the end.)

Recall the joke:
"You enter a classroom and see a lab experiment set up...
What subject is it for?
If it wiggles, it's biology.
If it blows up, it's chemistry.
If it doesn't work, it's physics."

So we could do the same thing but with a twist for physics undergrads, based on how notoriously inaccurate undergrad labs are and how bad the equipment usually is. One player performs an undergraduate lab of his choice, attempting to get within a particular %-error (also of his choice) of whatever parameter he intends to measure/calculate/graph etc... If he achieves this precision, the opponent must repeat it to the same precision or better .

[PhysicsPdx]

You know that scene from Real Genius, where the kid is studying and then goes off of the deep end?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNFMPhKIZXg

Seriously. This waiting is killing me! I turned in my application for Columbia's Applied Math program on December 1st, NYU Physics was in on the 12th. Arghhh!!!! I just want to know.

At least it's giving my family and friends some amusement. It's making me so one dimensional though, it's all I seem to talk about anymore. Ugh, I need a break from all of this graduate school crap.

Sorry, I had to vent. AAaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!