astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

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elliott34
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu May 05, 2011 9:39 am

astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by elliott34 » Fri Jul 08, 2011 9:57 pm

Hey all, my senior year is approaching and I've basically taken all the physics courses in the department and have all the core courses for a phys PHD program, I was wondering if taking an astrophysics course is worth it down the road? I am not interested in it really, and plan on going to grad school for AMO theory/experiment. I realize that there are a lot of things in astrophysics that uses things from every subfield of physics and in that way it's a good way to learn a bunch of physics. But frankly I'm taking topology and writing my thesis and I'm not sure if I care enough to do the Problem sets. The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz...Do you think taking it would have any appreciable impact on what adcoms think of my transcript?

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HappyQuark
Posts: 762
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 2:08 am

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by HappyQuark » Fri Jul 08, 2011 10:22 pm

elliott34 wrote:Hey all, my senior year is approaching and I've basically taken all the physics courses in the department and have all the core courses for a phys PHD program, I was wondering if taking an astrophysics course is worth it down the road? I am not interested in it really, and plan on going to grad school for AMO theory/experiment. I realize that there are a lot of things in astrophysics that uses things from every subfield of physics and in that way it's a good way to learn a bunch of physics. But frankly I'm taking topology and writing my thesis and I'm not sure if I care enough to do the Problem sets. The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz...Do you think taking it would have any appreciable impact on what adcoms think of my transcript?
I wouldn't worry about it. It's not a typical or expected course for most undergraduate physics programs and it's largely unrelated to the types of programs you seem to be applying to.

pqortic
Posts: 398
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 9:24 am

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by pqortic » Fri Jul 08, 2011 10:40 pm

take a graduate course instead if you can.

elliott34
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu May 05, 2011 9:39 am

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by elliott34 » Sat Jul 09, 2011 12:45 pm

cool. yeah i'd rather take something more general relativity based. I'm much more interested in quantum mechanics related topics, and I really don't feel like spending a semester plugging and chugging the radius of planets into my calculator...there is some thermo and mechanics which would be helpful for the gre maybe but nothing I haven't covered in one way or another...

vesperlynd
Posts: 194
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2009 9:28 am

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by vesperlynd » Wed Jul 13, 2011 2:53 pm

elliott34 wrote:The textbook we use is Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Dan Maoz
. We used that for an astro class I took at my school. It's a crappy book, really crappy. My advice: find another class.

elliott34
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu May 05, 2011 9:39 am

Re: astrophysics an essential undergrad course?

Post by elliott34 » Wed Jul 13, 2011 8:40 pm

thats for the advice. that seals the decision. i hate bad textbooks.



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