Advice on choosing your courses
We will schedule an appointment for you to meet with a faculty adviser to discuss your course of study. We will email the time and place to you the beginning of August. With the information we are providing to you over the web, you will probably be able to make some decisions beforehand about which courses to take in the fall, but the adviser can help you make a definite decision. We strongly advise you to consult the Qual. Archive prior to your arrival as an aid to course selection.
In order to determine your teaching assignment, we ask that you complete and submit the teaching preferences web form before July 15. As soon as you have your meeting with an advisor and know which classes you will be taking, you will also need to fill out your schedule via our web based schedule form. This must be done before 5 pm Friday, August 15, 2008. We will give you further instructions about this when you arrive on campus and meet with an advisor for course planning. Section Assignments for 100-200 level courses will be made a few days before classes begin.
If your junior/senior level courses include a year of classical mechanics, a year of electricity and magnetism, a year of quantum mechanics, and a semester of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, then you are ready to dive into our 500-level graduate courses. A common choice of first semester courses in this case is:
596 (sample from last year) - Grad Orientation Course(required of all incoming students) |
1 hour |
598MMA -- Mathematical Methods |
4 hours |
580 -- Quantum Mechanics I |
4 hours |
3 to 4 hours |
totaling 8 hours. The fourth course could be, for example, one of the breadth courses, or statistical mechanics (504). If you have not had statistical mechanics, 427 is a good choice. If you are interested in condensed matter physics but haven't had an undergraduate course in the subject, then 460 might be a good choice (although it is not a prerequisite to 561). You may also wish to consider a lab course in optics (402) or electronics (405), which do have fairly long class times. Another good course to take is the graduate E&M course 505 .
If you have not completed a year of classical mechanics, a year of electricity and magnetism, a year of quantum mechanics, and/or a semester of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, then you probably should enroll in one or more of our advanced undergraduate courses which are 326, 436, 487 or 427 for graduate credit. Questions on our qualifying exam are at the level of these courses.
If you have already had a graduate quantum course, say in a masters program, you could start with 581(advanced quantum), or the field theory sequence, 582. It is also possible to arrange with a particular faculty member to do Individual Study (597) on a research topic. Most students begin their 597 research in the summer after their first year, or in the fall of their second year.
While there are core subjects with which all physicists should be familiar, it is quite possible for you to take speciality courses in your first year. Our Graduate Studies Committee (faculty and student members) has suggested a list of first-year courses for students who are fairly sure of their research interests and who have completed an undergraduate physics curriculum equivalent to that of the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois.