Physics Interview Dates

[galaxstar]

Has anyone heard about interview dates for Physics departments in the US yet?

It would be quick turnaround time, but it seems that some interview notifications in Neuroscience departments with Dec 15 deadlines have already come through.

 

It would be great to see which schools are already sending out notifications, so I can start crossing things off of my list.

[TakeruK]

One of the most useful parts of GradCafe is the "Results Search". Click on the link in the navigation bar above, or go here: http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php

 

You can just type in "Physics" in the search, but there are a lot of Physics programs! I found it helpful to search something like "Physics Cornell" if you applied to Cornell, for example. By default, the results are sorted by date. I find it helpful to go back and see approximately when applicants heard the good or bad news.

 

For example, if you search "Physics Cornell" and go to page 3, you will see that people first reported results from this program on 2 Feb 2013. There is a big stream of "Accepted" in the first week of Feb 2013 and then a big list of "Rejected" in the second and third weeks of Feb. This gives you a timeline of when to expect to hear results! If you then go back further, you can see what happened in 2012. For this same example, I see the same pattern--acceptances sent out in the first week of Feb, rejections sent out a week or two later. There are exceptions of course, but this means you can probably expect to hear back from Cornell Physics, one way or another, by mid-February.

 

So I would suggest you do this for all the schools you applied to. Be careful that schools might have different spellings, so use wildcards and general terms. For programs with interviews, people tend to put this information up too, so you can get an estimate of when to hear from each program. Finally, please make sure to upload/submit your own information to help others too!!

 

Overall, I don't think many Physics programs have interviews (there may be some Skype meetings though). I mostly applied to Astro and Planetary Science programs in my year and only 1 out of 8 schools conducted interview (and that interview was via Skype). Another resource you can look at is www.physicsgre.com. It seems like most Physics students will post their profiles here and you can really get a good sense of timelines etc. from threads like this: 

 

This year's applicants: http://www.physicsgre.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5203

Last year's applicants: http://www.physicsgre.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4669

Profiles of applicants from 2008-2012: http://www.physicsgre.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5061

 

In the last link, you can follow links to Open House dates of each program in each year if you want to get a sense of when certain schools will be flying students out to visit! 

 

Finally, neuroscience and Physics? That's cool! 

Edited December 23, 2013 by TakeruK

[galaxstar]

Thanks so much for the detailed response! I had no idea that the notification dates were so different. I was just completely surprised by the week long turnaround time on the neuroscience applications, and wanted to check that it was not the same for Physics.

 

Neuroscience and Physics is certainly very cool. It's an especially exciting field right now, with all the advancements in computer science which allow for larger scale modelling. There are some equally interesting applications with collective animal behaviour in biology, working on using statistical mechanics and information theory for the transfer of information in schools of fish, bird flocks and ant colonies (check out the recent work from Princeton's Iain Couzin or William Bialek for more information if you want! One of the recent-ish papers is http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0604)