Is anyone else here in astrophysics?

[InquilineKea]

And do most prospective astrophysics/physics PhDs hang out here? Where else do they hang out? It's hard to find any on Physics Forums, College Confidential, astronomy subreddits, or other astro forums (galaxyzoo, bad astronomy). And phdcomics died. There's physicsgre.com, but so few people post in there. Are there any astrophysics IRC channels? There don't seem to be many, judging by the results from http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=site:thegradcafe.com+"program:astronomy"

Anyways - I have lots of questions to ask. My most important questions are these:

1: Are there applicants with *high* PGRE scores who still get rejected by astronomy departments?<br style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">My impression is that astronomy departments tend to tolerate lower PGRE scores (in other words, you don't need as high of a PGRE score to get in) - but I've seen a student with a high PGRE score (850) get into several astro departments (including Wisconsin), even though he had a GPA of around 3.3 and only a summer of biotech research (no recs from astro or physics professors either). So it might be more that the PGRE distributions of astrophysics students are lower.

2: Do astrophysics professors like students who have significant amounts of courses in math, applied math, and computer science? I don't have as many physics courses as most, but I certainly have far more math/applied math/CS courses than most. And it appears that poor programming skills are actually the key bottleneck in astronomy research (http://weareallinthe...my-bottlenecks/).

3: Is anyone familiar with the NRC rankings for astrophysics? And why some departments have a high score on the regression metric and a comparatively low score on the survey metric?

Edited December 24, 2010 by InquilineKea