  Over the past decade our department has made remarkable improvements to all aspects of our academic programs. Such changes continue as an ongoing process. This year a task force has taken a careful look at our graduate program to find ways of improving and modernizing our curriculum to attract more and stronger students to our Ph.D. and master’s programs. You will read more about this effort in coming newsletters.
Here however, I will focus on our undergraduate program, which brings the most students by far into contact with our department. The improvements here have included the scope of our curriculum, the teaching methods and the labs.
During the past couple of years the undergraduate curriculum committee has introduced two new concentrations for students who wish to pursue careers other than going to graduate school in physics. The general concentration will attract students interested in teaching physics at the K-12 level (most current physics teachers in Tennessee have an engineering background) or applying their physics degree to graduate studies in medicine, law, business, journalism etc. Our applied concentration is focused on students who prefer to go into industry after finishing a bachelor’s degree in physics. These changes have added breadth and flexibility to our program without compromising our academic concentration, which still focuses on students aiming for a graduate degree in physics.
Electronically enhanced teaching is now an integral part of many of our courses. Mike Guidry has introduced a very popular Web-based course in astronomy while Marianne Breinig has created a similar course in introductory physics for physical science and mathematics majors. We now have a funded interdepartmental research center in electronically enhanced education where these two faculty members play a leading role.
Most of our instructional labs have been overhauled and modernized under the careful supervision of Bob Deserio early on, and more recently, by Jim Parks. Bob introduced DOS-based computers to the introductory physics labs, incorporating a homegrown data acquisition system earlier than most other departments. These early machines are long gone, having been replaced by Windows-run computers with commercial DAQ systems. Even our non-physics majors now tackle technically advanced experiments like the photoelectric effect and radioactive half-life. The electronics lab has very fast oscilloscopes directly linked to computer systems. The modern physics lab includes experiments adapted from UT/ORNL research labs, for example, the temperature dependent fluorescence lifetime measurement originally developed by Steve Allison and his group at ORNL. This allows the undergraduates in our instructional labs to take full advantage of the research strength in our geographical area. Next year Marianne Breinig and Jim Parks will completely overhaul both our undergraduate and graduate optics labs in recognition of the increased importance of optics in research and industry. In particular we will introduce several new experiments in interferometry and fiber optics.
With such a strong undergraduate program one could naively expect that our enrollment would have increased, or at least kept constant. Unfortunately this has not been the case. A decade ago we had approximately 60 undergraduate majors. That number has now dropped to 30-40. This decrease is due in part to a national trend of fewer students getting bachelor’s degrees in physics, with an even more dramatic decrease seen for Ph.D.-granting institutions like ours. But we are not satisfied to just accept this fact without trying to do something about it.
Through the leadership of Jon Levin we have established a vigorous undergraduate recruiting effort. However, a great program alone is not enough to recruit the best and brightest high school students. Some time ago I asked former Oak Ridge High School physics teacher Jackie Jacoby how we could attract more students from this academically strong local high school. Her reply (slightly paraphrased) was: “You need three things: scholarships, scholarships, and scholarships.” Today students and their parents choose schools where they can receive substantial scholarships to cover tuition and living expenses. In the physics department we currently have a little more than $100,000 in endowments thanks to donations from many of our alumni, friends and collaborators. This endowment generates around $7,000 annually for undergraduate and graduate scholarships, for which we are very grateful. Most of these scholarships are handed out during our annual Honors Days ceremony (see page two) and I hope many of you will attend this event in the future, as it is a great way to see how important these scholarships are to the students. But while we are very grateful for our current endowment, it is much smaller than most other physics departments and even many other departments at UT. The chemistry department, for example, has an endowment of more than $3 million, surpassing us by a factor of 30. One of the most important aspects of my new job as department head will be to dramatically increase our endowments.
A few years ago the department created the Bill Bugg Scholarship Fund with the intention of making this a powerful general scholarship fund for undergraduate physics majors. It is my sincere hope that many of you who received your degree from this department during Bill’s many years here will contribute to this fund, thereby honoring his great contributions to our department and helping us attract new and academically strong physics students in the future. But this scholarship fund is just one example of how donations can help us. Any contribution to the department will always be highly appreciated and will find good use in our quest to continue the strong traditions of the UT Department of Physics.
Cross Sections, Spring/Summer 2001 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on June 20, 2001. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |