Facets of Graduate Education

Discussion of graduate curriculum in our department:

• some advanced courses have not been offered in awhile
• cores generally taught by same faculty
• syllabi are now required to be posted by state law
• program of work approved by graduate adviser
• not all previous courses grandfathered in with the new adviser
• no published list of which advanced courses count as out-of-specialty: graduate adviser's position is that this allows for flexibility

Concern: If you have a problem with getting approval from the graduate adviser of your program of work, what do you do?

AAPT-APS Task Force on Graduate Education:

• recommend same sort of plan that we have here
• 1 yr EM, 1 yr QM, 1/2 yr Classical, 1/2 yr Stat Mech (different by a semester in both EM and QM)
• books typically used nationwide: Jackson for EM and Goldstein for Classical
• other recommendations include requiring colloquium, communication and ethics training

Some general questions: what is the purpose of Jackson - is it primarily a weed-out course? Does the undergraduate EM text (often Griffiths) adequately prepare for Jackson?

Incorporating physics ed research into graduate classrooms - brief discussion of a few other universities that are working on this.