Talk:Physics Bachelor of Science

BTW, since people tend to be concerned about credentials. I have a Bachelor in Science from MIT (class of 1991) and a Doctor in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin (1998). When I say that I think it is possible to get a bachelor of science in physics degree through wikiversity (even if the actual degree is issued by someone else), I'm dead serious here.

All of the parts are out there. It's a matter of putting them together.

Roadrunner 07:26, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I've finished a BS in Physics just last June, so I can help check if the curriculum is up-to-date (though other than the availability of a few electives in advanced topics made accessible to undergrads I doubt the curriculum has changed that much for the past half century). --Yosofun 11:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

If you can post what you liked and what you didn't like about your bachelors that would be really useful. One of the interesting things about MIT is that undergraduate teaching is not a high priority, and so you have teachers that are incompetent. However, none were institutionally sadistic the way I've seen in the physics department (although not the astronomy department) at UT Austin. The fact that the teachers at MIT aren't that great at teaching is made of with the fact that you have very strong and supportive student peers and a great research environment.

Part of what I'm interested in is how physics may be taught very differently from school to school. I know that MIT and UT Austin Physics have very different learning cultures. (And physics and astronomy at UT have radically different cultures) Roadrunner 01:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Thomas Edison State / Charter Oak / MIT?

What's with the choice of schools, here...? You're certainly not basing it on NRC rankings, right...? Anyway, imho, I'd suggest that you consult Berkeley and UCSD regarding physics curriculums - other than MIT and possibly UT, they are schools with the most undergrad physics majors. Also, UCSD has a variety of different specializations in addition to the traditional grad-school route, including Biophysics, Materials, Computational and Industry. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The choice of schools is based on the fact that I have first hand experience with the MIT and UT Austin physics degrees. The problem with basing it off UCSD, is since I didn't go to UCSD, I don't have any first hand experience as to how they teach physics. The main issue is that in my experience at MIT only a very, very small fraction of the curriculum is taught through the formal curriculum, and I have no idea what the informal curriculum is like at UCSD. Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Having tutored or corresponded with a couple hundred current or recently graduated physics majors from around the world (GREPhysics.NET), I'd say that there's a common formal curriculum in physics (at least in the past few years). Pretty much every single physics undergrad goes through the usual Mechanics/EM/QM/Thermo/SM and possibly programming in Mathematica or FORTRAN or math methods for formal curriculum. This, in my opinion, is the defining aspect of a physics undergraduate education. The informalities will vary from place to place, but every single physics major will share a common experience in having to deal with the formal curriculum and what it entails -- problem sets that vary from mindlessly easy to arduous to examinations that make one feel gyped for being too easy or foolish beyond comprehension for being so abstruse. However, the point is that whatever informality is derived from the formal curriculum, and that, nowadays, at least, it's rather like an invariant. (Having attended lectures in a couple of different schools and having gone incognito to take exams "for fun," I can also say that students tend to behave similarly everywhere, especially when an exam turns out to be a surprise to them.) That being said, I'd say you're worrying way too much about the informalities and psychological impacts, such as stuff like "brutality," as mentioned on the module page. Instead, you should check out how places like UCSD manages to preserve the conventional subjects of a physics major, while simultaneously managing to create "specializations" -- for example, UCSD has a "Physics BS with Specialization in Astrophysics" degree. Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll get into more of this on the wiki, but my experience has been that very little of the "real" instruction (at least at MIT) actually takes place in the classroom. Most of it takes place in late-night social networks over incomprehensible problem sets. The problem is that because these study sessions are in the middle of the night, they aren't being studied, and most of the undergraduates don't realize that that is were they are learning most of the material from.

I do come from a *very* different perspective (not necessarily better or worse just different) in that I graduated fifteen years ago, went through a Ph.D. graduate program and then ended up in "real life." The important thing in graduate school is not the formal curriculum, but that you picked up the "culture of physics." Also, my wife is working on her Ph.D. in early childhood education, and talking with her about her curriculum (she is a big fan of Vygotsky) made me see my undergraduate experience in a very different light. On the other hand, I don't have a very broad range of experiences, and I really don't know anything about what physics is like for an undergraduate today (i.e. I didn't know anything about REU until you told me).

Brutality is a big concern because of my experience as a teaching assistant at University of Texas at Austin. One selection effect if you look at the people who took the physics GRE's is that you only see the people who somehow made it through the system, and not all of the people who got washed out as freshman and sophomores. One of the nice things about MIT circa 1990, was that there was not this weed out system in place. Personally, I thought that the weed-out system was disgusting. Brutality was also a major issue in my own undergraduate education.

Roadrunner 13:44, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Do you know for a fact that Charter Oak will accredit (for free)? I just checked their site; they're almost as bad as Devry, charging a grand just for an online (read: worthless) degree.

A regionally accreditted degree isn't worthless, it may not be what you need for a job, but it will let you put the degree down on your resume. Roadrunner 13:38, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

What's the point of it then--or, rather, how will it help your resume (and is there anything else it's good for)? Would backelors-degree-requiring grad schools even accept such a BS? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

A regionally accreditted degree is one of the "must have" marks for admission to physics graduate schools, but getting Charter Oak to rubber stamp the degree will pass that criteria. The big thing that graduate schools look for is research experience, letters of recommendation, GRE scores, and these are more or less independent of what school you do to. If you have those, then a degree from anywhere is sufficient to get you in the system. (This is based on personal observation of how grad school committees behave. Once there is some more meat on it, I can and will actually ask people on the grad school admission committees to evaluate the degree plan.) Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Something that graduate committees do look for is personal initiative. OK, you didn't have to take this hard course, but did you do it anyway? In some ways putting too many requirements defeats the purpose of the degree. If everything is required, it's hard to tell if the student really has personal initiative. Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Charter Oak won't accredit for free. The goal of this is to create a degree that is free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer. I don't think that it is possible to create a free as in beer degree, although a free as in speech degree should cause the costs to go way down. Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Not sure what the difference between the two are. Why would we need a free-as-in-in-speech physics degree? Are you proposing to offer the prospective students some sort of radically-revolutionalized remake of the current standard physics undergrad education? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely. My ulterior motive is that a radically redone undergraduate education will create a demand for free lance tutors which gets me back into academia. Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Might you consider working with other universities in accredation; perhaps even your alma mater MIT? I know as a fact that UCSD Sixth College is desperate for a decent Internet-org-affiliation; however, I would strongly advise that you work around the college's notorious liberal arts "core program" that is the usual requirement of their traditional degree. (Do not mention you heard it from me.) --Yosofun 11:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

If people from MIT and UCSD want to collaborate, they can edit the degree plan just like everyone else. I'm going to be travelling up to MIT to generate some interest in this, and I really want to go to Thomas Edison and Charter Oak since I don't have any direct experience in their bureaucracies. However, I will simply refuse to sit in a committee meeting that spends months issuing a report that means nothing. Life is too short and I have too much to do. 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

The trouble is that unless MIT is going to radically expand enrollments, this is going to be problematic. Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

You also have to realize that it does take some time (hmm) and a degree of effort (no pun intended) to achieve a physics degree. Even if a free-as-in-beer physics degree were offered, not all 7 billion people (or whatever number the world population is right now) will come flocking for this free degree. Most people will, as they'd like to put it, have better stuff to do. So, in the end, MIT will probably not end up radically expanding enrollment. Moreover, the point is not enrollment but accreditation, as in getting a degree. Only students who have completed the equally-arduous Wikiversity Physics curriculum would be of numerical matter to MIT... and like I mentioned earlier, only those who truly put in the time will get to complete this degree, and there won't be so many of them, so MIT won't even experience a big jump in the number of graduates. Other than a bit of administrative triviality, can you think of something that would be truly problematic with getting MIT to endorse this? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

MIT graduates about 70 physics students each year. There are *far* more than 70 physics students that would be interested in this. The model that I have in the my head is that fifteen to twenty years from now, MIT will offer intensive two week courses/seminars/conferences for undergraduates from other universities, that open courseware will be packaged specifically for use by other universities, that the current on-campus population will turn into something akin to guinea pigs in a laboratory school, and that even they will get a fairly large fraction of their coursework from outside of MIT. It's something that can be doable in small steps, with buy-in from small numbers of people at MIT.

Getting MIT to endorse this is less difficult than it might seem, there is a sense of crisis at MIT and a fear that it is going to be made obsolete by new technology. This leaves it far more open to new ideas than places that don't have this sense of crisis. (And this remarkable openness to new thinking is one reason I love that place.) 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Penn State has their course requirements and descriptions online here, and the homepage of their online degree program here. I'm currently going through the 'weeding out' process as an Astrophysics major there. RyanJSuto 15:42, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

GRE Physics Prep

I created GREPhysics.NET last November in order to force myself to work through all the GRE Physics problems (it's a lot more fun if I have an audience to please), and to see if I can still create a complete CMS with LaTeX features in a weekend in the middle of midterms week. I've been meaning to write a GRE Physics textbooks (probably to-be-called The GRE Physics Textbook), whose the stable version will be hosted on GREPhysics.NET, and whose extended version I might crowdsource out in wiki somewhere. (However, since it is related to a very dog-eat-dog-exam, vandalism is quite suspect... so I'm not sure if that will be wise or prudent.) But, either way, that bit can also help with the grad-school prep of this Wikiversity project. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Post everything you have on the wiki. We can worry about editing it later.

Something that I think is the case is that the dog-eat-dog you are seeing is a consequence of how physics is taught. The interesting thing about MIT (as compared to UT Austin physics) is how little inter-student competition there was, and people were very supportive of each other. This I think is directly related to the fact that MIT has no weed out classes (everyone has to take physics and the pass rate is >90%). Because everyone is likely to pass, there is a lot of incentive for student to help each other, which is important since undergraduate teaching is a secondary priority for the faculty.

There are also small but important things like the fact that every single test and problem set at MIT is hand graded. Also all of the living groups had extensive libraries of "bibles" worked out problems from years past. There was only one tiny multiple choice scanner and that was used for course evaluations.

I'm curious how physics is taught at a small liberal arts college.

Roadrunner 01:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Grad courses

I've taken a bunch of grad courses as an undergrad, and as you might guess, I'm interested in extending the Wikiversity BS to possibly a PhD? Lol... I can totally imagine myself emeritus at Oxford, with Wikiversity listed as my PhD school.... lmfao... that is, if i ever return to academia, again... hm. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

As I mentioned elsewhere, in some ways it is easier to create an online Ph.D. in physics than it is to create a Bachelor degree. If you have five respected physicists on your committee and a very respected dissertation advisor willing to sign your dissertation, *NO ONE* in the physics community is going to care what school issues it. (People outside the physics community might care, but that's a different story.) Roadrunner 03:35, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Undergrads care quite a bit about where they go to grad school, but I admit I don't know the exact state of how tenured academia, in general, regards the place where one receives the Ph.D from -- though it is curious that on university webpages, the prof's tend to be listed with "name | phd school" and a photo and a brief list of recent papers. (Incidentally, that's one of the reasons why a site supplying solutions to released GRE Physics exams cannot be made into a wiki... the kids'd all attempt to fool each other into believing in a wrong solution in order to beat their peers on the exam day... wikiality at its worse.) My question is would you mind linking me to more information on how no one cares about which school issues your physics phd?

I don't know if there are any formal web pages on this, but this is direct experience in being part of the physics club. What matters is your advisor, dissertation committee, and publication record. In the field of type II supernova research, University of Arizona and Florida Atlantic University are "big-name" schools because there happen to be faculty there who are very well regarded in the field. If the faculty were to move, the prestige in the community would move with them. People in supernova research tend to refer to people as being with "so-and-so's group" or "so-and-so's student" rather than the university. Also, once you start publishing papers, then the reputation goes from the faculty to the school rather than the other way.

The "prof | Ph.D." tends to be very misleading because in the 1960's and 1970's, there was this massive expansion in science universities as people with Harvard degrees went to state schools in the West and then built programs, which were modelled after Harvard. These programs are now very competitive, but the Ph.D's they generate are going into industry.

I do understand the concern that undergraduates have because I went through the exact same thing. I basically thought that my academic career was over when I ended up at UTexas Austin instead of Harvard or MIT. It was, but Harvard and MIT Ph.D's are finding it only slightly easier to find faculty positions than UTexas Austin.

Roadrunner 13:27, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Lab courses?

A typical experimental physics lab course requires thousands of dollar's worth of equipment. (Of course, the hobo can always scavange in your local large university dumpster for the thousands of oscilloscopes they throw out daily... lol... actually I meant there's often a cheaper soluion -- in this case, skip the scope, just purchase the cables to hook it up to your computer) How exactly will physics lab courses be done -- again, partnership with local univerisities would be helpful? Perhaps the universities can be convinced of the benefit of either donating lab time to Wikiversity students or of some reciprocity relation? --Yosofun 12:04, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Thousands of dollars isn't that much money for an institution, and we can include instructions for a community college to be able to set up a physics lab, or having overnight courier ship in a experiment. Roadrunner 01:07, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I think learning how to scrounge for parts, or at least set up a lab. I think a good part of experimental science or engineering is finding parts, putting them together, nad figuring out how to get something to work. While traditional universities may not teach this, it is vital if you want to do anything practical.

I don't know if this will help, but the website [1] is an online group meeting scheduler that has built in features for enrolling in local meetings with like-minded groups. Myself, I'm part of the NYC Math Meetup group, which holds meetings at a bookstore in Union Square. If one can get local professors or labs to lend some time (or have participants pay to register time) to conducting a lab, this site can help organize those meetings. You really can't understand physics without hands-on lab work (actually doing physics). Ron 14:51, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Is Wikiversity free?

I think the answer is no. That would suck. Free is possible, but, a lot of connections'd have to be made. --Yosofun 12:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

My intention is to make the degree free as in speech. It probably won't be free as in beer, but I do think it will be a lot cheaper than tuition to MIT Roadrunner 03:38, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Even if it is free-as-in-speech, some sort of reciprocity relation with local universities will have to be worked out. The one thing that an online physics education won't get you (at least not easily) is lab experience (were this a degree in mathematics, we wouldn't be having this problem). Unless you want to give up the whole free-education-material idea in deference to the WV student lapsing out $ for lab equipment, Wikiversity will have to hook up with local universities to allow for lab experience.

It would be interesting to see how Open University does this. 14:11, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Isn't 'Free', in every sense, one of the basic foundations of WikiMedia? In Fact, I couldn't imagine such a site every charging money for anything such as education. This basic premise that education should be available to ALL, irrespective of monetary status. In fact, to utilize WikiMedia, one doesn't even need to own a computer, for they could utilize a public library. This philosophy is the beauty of it all. RyanJSuto 15:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

The trouble is that people have to eat. Things become very different once you have kids and have to have a job to support them. 24.206.109.229 05:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup?

To my mind, what would be nice here is:

1. Use of Degree planning templates; on this page, the Degree plan one, and the others used on subpages
2. A fair amount of material on the main page actually seems to belong on the talk page

TimNelson 02:51, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikki Wonder

I find this "Degree Plan" quite interesting. I would be willing to enroll in this program. After all, there is only one way to determine if this idea can actually be a success.

64.252.35.167 02:11, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

The thing that I really need to get in contact with are people who are *already* studying physics through things like open university, TESC, or Charter Oak, since they would serve as a core student population to make this things work. I've been trying to get in touch with TESC, but haven't had much success.

24.206.109.229 05:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity to grant accredited degrees?

Please join the discussion: Wikiversity:Creation of Free Online University. The Jade Knight 03:20, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Side note: I have no need for a degree in Physics, but I'd be willing to be a guinea pig student for this program if the Department/School/Wikiversity could issue some sort of formal certificate of completion. I understand that that may be a long time coming. The Jade Knight 02:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm willing to do some open course work and file my contributions hoping that sometime in the near future I can bring my work to an accredited university and gain degree credit. I don't know if these are reasonable goals or not, but it beats doing coursework and having nothing to show for it.RichMac 08:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)