Johns Hopkins versus Stony Brook

[holographic universe]

My objective after my PhD (after a visiting professorship or postdoc likely) is to land a position at a small liberal arts college so I can engage undergrads in research and focus of teaching.

My main area of interest is high energy theory (HEP-th), holography specifically but also more formal math aspects. I think I would be open to trying out condensed matter theory (CMT) as well, and in the case of Stony Brook, nuclear theory (NUC-th) or RHIC/Brookhaven QCD/QGP work.

Background:

Johns Hopkins has name recognition around the globe, and even in physics they are ranked above Stony Brook (#17 over #23 according to US NEWS). I think JHU is ranked higher because of their astro prestige. (They are in charge of the Space Telescope Science Institute.)

But Stony Brook is easily one of the top ten HEP-th places (maybe top 20 depending on how formally you define HEP-th) in the country. Around 2008 Jim Simons (previously an academic mathematician, 1/2 of Chern-Simons theory for those in the field, who left academia to become a billionaire hedge fund guy) donated $60 million to create the Simons Centers of Geometry and Physics — basically IAS in Princeton but at Stony Brook and for only math and theoretical physics. And Brookhaven National Lab is 10 minutes down the road. This makes them top 3 for Nuclear (which includes QCD and Nuc-th!) in the country.

This exemplifies the main difference between the two schools. Which I start the next section with below.

 

Differences:

 

1) Amount of research opportunities

 

Not taking into account 2 professors I know no longer take on new PhD students, there are 17 PIs at Stony Brook/Simons Center and 11 PIs at Brookhaven/RIKEN doing work in HEP-th, QCD, CMT, NUC-th, etc. that I might be interested in. That is an insane number!

At Johns Hopkins there are 2 HEP-th PIs (one of which is shifting NEARLY ENTIRELY to theoretical machine learning. he is a rock star of holography/CFT/etc. but he is now paid very well by a Google-esque company and he said he is roughly 80% ML and 20% HEP-th). More on the other HEP-th PI in the next section, I love him. There are 2 CMT PIs, one of which is willing to explore super mathy stuff that I would be into, and also collaborate with the HEP-th professor that I love.

 

2) Likelihood of getting an advisor

 

2.1) Stony Brook

As you would expect from the number of PIs mentioned above, there are an enormous # of students at Stony Brook. Roughly 50 first years and 250 total. As such, (at least in the HEP-th area as this is the only field that the current PhDs I've gotten in touch with are in, so this way not be the case for CMT! knock on wood) the competition is fierce! From what I've gathered so far, competition manifests itself in several ways:

-you need to do well on your qualifying exams/quals (more on this below)

-you need to do well in the advanced courses pertinent to your intended field (more on that later)

-you need to succeed in some trial projects a prospective advisor gives you in your first summer or during your 2nd year

Now, some background on me. Small liberal arts school --> not a great test taker, no graduate courses, no rigorous upper level physics courses like relativistic quantum mechanics or anything (although thankfully I'm doing courses like these right now during my year abroad in the Netherlands through the Fulbright between my bachelors and my PhD).

Thus it is VERY unlikely that I will be able to pass the quals at the level necessary to skip the core courses. Moreover, even through taking the core courses (after having looked at their archive of recent years past quals) I anticipate myself struggling A LOT with passing them.

All of this is contributing to the feeling that, regardless of all the research opportunities mentioned in section 1, if I can't complete all the steps listed above, I'll just be forced to leave with a Masters or something after failing the quals and not get a chance to explore research with the awesome PIs there.

2.2) Johns Hopkins

This is in STARK contrast to Johns Hopkins.

There are NO QUALS. This would be such a stress relief you have no idea. These old exams from Stony Brook look impossible.

And because (sans astro maybe) they are a small department, when I Skyped with the second HEP-th PI I mentioned in section 1, he had the ability (and did) say that if I come there he can without a doubt supervise me. This is very different from Stony Brook, where (while I've only talked to PhDs so far and haven't Skyped with PIs there yet) I don't think they would ever be able to tell a prospective student, "yes I can without a doubt be your PhD advisor if you come here." We would have to prove ourselves first.

You start "research" from day 1 at Johns Hopkins (in the sense that you choose an advisor to do reading course/etc. under immediately). You can either rotate through several of these advisors or stick with one that works out. pretty cool system.

 

3) Classes in advanced topics

Because of the amount of student interested in pursuing HEP-th at Stony Brook there are a TON of extensive QFT, GR, strings courses. According to the PhDs these are incredible as well, since they have 3 magnates in the field who teach them consistently. There are also advanced stat mech courses covering things like entanglement entropy, and mathy CMT courses.

At Johns Hopkins there are just much less.

 

4) Living in a city or living on Long Island (biking or buying a car)

 

Living in the Netherlands has led me to fall in love with biking.

And so not having to buy a car (which is apparently almost absolutely necessary on Long Island) and being able to ride a racing bike around Baltimore sounds heavenly!

 

_______________________

 

So.

Do you think this discrepancy in number of research opportunities makes Stony Brook a clear winner? Or is the education/personal attention/more research time/no quals at JHU as big a factor as I think it is?

One of my previous mentor and her PhD student (both in HEP-th) think the amount of opportunities at Stony Brook make it the best choice.

My previous (longest, has known me all of college) advisor hating the insane competitiveness of Princeton and left after a year for a very small Physics PhD program and flourished.

My current Fulbright mentor here (and a huge name in HEP-th) is a big proponent of "being the head of a mouse and not the tale of an elephant" hahhaha! I.e. he thinks going somewhere small and getting a ton of adviser attention, and being the best there did him well in his career and that going somewhere competitive may have messed him up.

 

Thank you immensely for the advice!

[northern1905]

so which school did you finally decide on?