Visiting highly ranked schools

  • This has become our largest and most active forum because the physics GRE is just one aspect of getting accepted into a graduate physics program.
  • There are applications, personal statements, letters of recommendation, visiting schools, anxiety of waiting for acceptances, deciding between schools, finding out where others are going, etc.

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sirjetpackbob
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:21 am

Visiting highly ranked schools

Post by sirjetpackbob » Mon Jul 30, 2007 1:59 pm

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Last edited by sirjetpackbob on Tue Jan 29, 2008 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

schmit.paul
Posts: 161
Joined: Sat Nov 04, 2006 7:48 pm

Post by schmit.paul » Tue Jul 31, 2007 11:31 pm

Nothing wrong with visiting, and if you just want to take a tour you don't need to bug a professor to get a tour of campus (go to the Frist campus center and they have something called "orange key" tours). If you want to meet with a physics prof, make sure you email ahead of time and sell your case without overdoing it and see if you luck out. Profs are always busy, Princeton's profs are certainly no exception, but some profs are very nurturing people and love to interact with young talent (and some are definitely not). Throw some spaghetti and see what sticks to the wall. If you've got an extensive research background and solid credentials, you might even get noticed this early in the game, but this is definitely a place where talent is certainly not hard to find. And if you don't luck out with any profs, it's still worth checking out the campus. First couple times I saw the buildings and trees here i was awestruck, coming from a big city in the desert that is barely adolescent compared to this historical place.

Bufalay
Posts: 51
Joined: Sun Jul 04, 2004 5:05 am

Post by Bufalay » Wed Aug 01, 2007 3:23 am

I'd say if you really want to find out more about the school then its worth it. I visited Harvard, Columbia and Cornell the summer after my junior year and emailed profs at each school a couple weeks before the trip basically telling them that I would be applying there and that I was interested in their work. I didn't really mention anything about myself, but there were profs at each school that were willing to meet with me. This really impressed me because for all they knew, I could've been some construction worker pretending to be a physics major.

stardust
Posts: 109
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2007 8:15 pm

Post by stardust » Mon Sep 24, 2007 2:08 am

There might be a lot of physics in construction work :)



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