 Modernizing the Graduate Program The graduate program has been the cornerstone of our department for the past 50 years. More physics students have graduated from UT with masters and Ph.D. degrees than with bachelor's degrees. The majority of our many alumni who receive this newsletter have graduated with advanced degrees, so the structure and well being of the graduate program must be of special importance to you. Over the past year a task force headed by the graduate program director, Marianne Breinig, has carefully studied our program and programs at other institutions. Over the summer the task force developed a proposal for changes to our graduate program, which has now been approved by the faculty. But before I describe this new graduate program, I will briefly discuss some of the current problems in graduate physics programs throughout the United States.
The U.S. has a severe shortage of Ph.D.s in the sciences and engineering. Both the Bush administration and Congress recently articulated this in connection with the efforts to combat terrorism. The rest of us have known it for a long time. The unemployment rate among physics Ph.D.s is less than 1%. But despite this great need, fewer and fewer American students are pursuing a graduate degree in physics. According to the American Institute of Physics (AIP Pub. R-151.36) the number of first-year U.S. students in physics has declined from ~2000 in 1991 to ~1200 in 1999. The number of first-year foreign graduate students has stayed approximately constant at ~1200. There is not a clear consensus as to the reasons for this decline, but based on interviews with graduating undergraduate students it seems like the prospect of having to spend six-to-eight years at or below the poverty line as a graduate student, learning skills that do not necessarily enhance your marketability in industry, keeps a lot of U.S. students away. Another problem is the decreasing quality of foreign students. Unfortunately it is now quite common for foreign students to enroll in American physics departments but leave after one or two semesters, choosing instead to transfer to computer science or simply leave the university in order to get a job in industry.
Here at the University of Tennessee we cannot change these trends all by ourselves, but we can do our best to make our graduate program as relevant and attractive as possible. With this in mind the graduate task force started looking for ways to improve the curriculum and shorten the time students spend in our program without compromising the quality of the education. Summarizing the work of the task force in a few paragraphs is probably not possible, so let me focus on two particular problems that were identified and how the task force suggested solving them.
Many of our graduate students have spent three-to-four years before they finally passed or failed the qualifying exam. During this period they often would not focus seriously on research or even on some of their courses, which were not relevant for the qualifying exams. The qualifying exam has also been focused on a strong knowledge of core theoretical physics, whereas other areas important for success as a Ph.D. were not tested. In the new graduate program all students have to pass two exams in order to enter the doctoral program: a) the qualifying exam after one year of study and b) the comprehensive examination, which has to be taken before the end of the third year. The qualifying exam will require students to demonstrate a strong knowledge of the undergraduate physics curriculum, whereas the comprehensive exam consists of an oral defense of a 10-to-15-page proposal of the research that will lead to their Ph.D.
The emphasis in the graduate curriculum has also shifted somewhat from the core courses in Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics and Electricity & Magnetism at the 500 level to the topical courses at the 600 level in Solid State Physics, Atomic Physics, Nuclear Physics, Elementary Particle Physics and Astrophysics & Cosmology. In a sense these changes are forcing the students to learn more about the physics developed over the past 50 years, which forms the basis for most academic and industrial research today.
The task force proposal has been approved with a large majority of faculty votes. We will now start the difficult transition period. The first qualifying exam according to the new rules will be offered in August 2002 and all students entering our graduate program at that time will follow the new rules. Anybody interested in the details of the changes is encouraged to visit our Web site.
Will this new graduate program suddenly result in dramatic improvements in the enrollment and quality of graduate students? Probably not, even if I of course hope so. But if we had not modernized our program, I know for sure that we would have been left behind in competition with other physics departments. Physics education is a dynamic process and we have to constantly look for ways to improve, if we want to stay competitive.
Cross Sections, Fall/Winter 2001 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on December 21, 2001. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |