How to select the best u̶n̶i̶c̶o̶r̶n̶s̶ physics students

Now entering one of busiest weeks of the year for me when I do university admissions interviews. Once this is done I will get a break over the Christmas period and hopefully find time to write some fun stuff. For now I wrote a post on my Particle Gadgeteering blog about this business: How to select the best physics students. This might interest fans of The Brightest and the Best. It gives some background to that story.

 

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Ahh. So, the first requisite is to have more people inquire than there are places available.

Unlike the one I managed to get on because they were desperate for the minimum number of entries registered to get funding for the whole course.

Pity I couldnt work through the actual course due to family things. So much fun in double nonlinear polymeric fluid flows, trying to solve the continous equations by application of variable speed of propagation and quantised limit of auto decimation. Especially as it turns out to be so useful in other fields as well. Aerodynamics, high stress cosmology etc.

At least being in a group meant not being able to remain focused on a single problem, wasnt as much a problem, as someone else in the group would have something else to work at for a short while till neurons tired.

I think my biggest problem was that in so called learning, at school, I couldnt get hold of the next years university texts in order to learn how to solve a problem except by throwing everything at it, and being inteligent enough to realise when you actually reached a path to the answer, if not the answer itself.

[RQK]

As a physics student currently applying to grad school, this is super relevant to my interests. Thanks for writing it!

[horizon]

It bugs me more than it should that the strikethrough lines in the Unicode strikethrough'd characters don't line up.

[Walabio]

Outreach is good because we cannot afford to waste talent. In my country, we have a group called the Alt Reich (previously known as Teabagging Birthers, and before that as Nazis, the 3rd Reich, and the Ku Klux Klan). They believe that western europeans are the master race, which is, on average, more intelligent than other races. I say to them:

“Let us suppose that you are right about western europeans being smarter, on average, than other races. I shall, for the sake of argument, give you that. ¿Would you rather have Donald Trump, who is a western european with dementia, who stares at the Sun like a drooling moron* for President? or ¿the brilliant Astrophysicist and host of Cosmos 2014, Doctor Neil DeGrasse Tyson?”

For some reason, they get mad. We cannot afford to waste our best minds just because they are born in the wrong class, sex, caste, race, religion, et cetera

* img.purch.com/w/660/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA5NC83OTMvb3JpZ2luYWwvdHJ1bXAtZWNsaXNwZQ==