Jim Thompson wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:09:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:48:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:
Check out these links....
http://tinyurl.com/7lfn7y8
http://tinyurl.com/c5hrbr
One wonders about what those rankings include. At a lot of the most
prestigious schools in the US, the famous professors can't be bothered
with undergraduates. Stanford was an amazing place to be a grad
student, though.
On the other hand, at UBC, where I went, and the University of Toronto,
and UConn (where my #2 daughter and my son go, respectively), the very
best faculty do a lot of teaching undergrads. My third year
electromagnetics class was taught by Prof. Bill Unruh, a leading light
in general relativity, and many of the others were also taught at a very
high level. One of my fourth-year honours astronomy classes was
scheduled to be taught in the prof's office, but there was one more
student than there were chairs, so we moved to a classroom--and that was
at a school with 30k students.
Both my son and my daughter had the dean of the faculty as their
undergraduate advisors. That sure doesn't grow on trees at the Ivies.
So the wisdom is to go to a big teaching school for a bachelor's degree,
and a top research school for graduate work, when possible.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
At MIT, undergrad, I had all the "famous" profs. Sometimes that's not
so good. I had White of White & Woodson, "Electromechanical Energy
Conversion". He was a dud, never prepared and a poor instructor. We
petitioned and got him replaced... by Paul Penfield, then just a
graduate student, but an absolutely great instructor... and he went on
to great fame of his own. (I also tech'd for Woodson in his MHD lab,
so I got some very good first-hand advice from him :-)
Not caring about preparation is one species of "can't be bothered". I
never had that at UBC, and had only one at Stanford--my first-year
graduate quantum prof, who shall remain nameless, except that he was the
one who first calculated the cosmic deuterium abundance from the Big
Bang, and showed that the universe couldn't be closed because there was
too much D.
Nice enough guy, didn't care about teaching.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Quantum profs seem to be like that... we had our chant, "Pless is a
plick"... my "nameless" advantage is that almost all of my profs are
dead ;-)
My other quantum profs were mostly very good, especially Michael Peskin,
who taught graduate statistical mechanics, and Sandy Fetter, who taught
graduate electromagnetics and many body quantum field theory. (I did
fine in many-body, but dropped my one graduate solid state physics
course--unfortunate, but for a very fortunate reason: my #1 daughter was
born the week before the midterm.) It was taught by Walt Harrison, who
was the biggest wildman in all of solid state. Completely buttoned-down
personally, but completely untrammelled in physics. He was the one who
coined the term "muffin-tin orbital".
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net