Looking Forward

In the upcoming academic year, we will focus on several areas of development in our graduate program. These include:

1. an examination of the number of required courses, with the aim of allowing students greater flexibility to take classes outside of physics, while maintaining core educational breadth and depth;
2. organizing a long-term teaching plan for the frequency of offering 500-, 600-, and 700-level courses that provides both graduate students and faculty greater ability to plan, and a more predictable program of advanced study, taking into account the need to offer advanced topics at the cutting edge of physics;
3. helping the graduate student organizations, specifically, the community and the teaching methods groups, to plan and run events with speakers, faculty, and the broader community;
4. examining the Physics Department’s role in the new Materials Science and Engineering program, and considering whether a new effort in Materials Physics and Materials Chemistry would make sense for CAS and the university. Our goal is to facilitate the research component of the PhD program by streamlining the curricular requirements to encourage students to become original thinkers as soon as possible, to help fulfill the mission of the Graduate School.

We will re-examine the graduate curriculum, specifically, the number of required core courses. In the context of other graduate school programs in physics that are considered competitive with ours, the BU program is somewhat anomalous in requiring 10 lecture courses that are basically predetermined. There is some sentiment among the faculty that fewer core requirements would allow students to take additional elective courses more closely related to the area of their PhD research. In some cases, these courses may be outside of the Physics Department. The graduate committee will assemble a list of acceptable non-physics courses, and generally evaluate the core requirements. A recommendation to the faculty for their consideration will take place before any change in the formal requirements is enacted.

The graduate students organize three effective groups. The general physics graduate student organization oversees community interactions and addresses graduate student concerns, like health care, common space, and educational issues. Women in Physics is a group of female graduate students who work to arrange talks, go to conferences, and create awareness and develop supportive ties with similar organizations in Biology and Chemistry, as well as in neighboring institutions. A group devoted to the teaching of physics meets periodically as a discussion group and journal club, examining current pedagogy, articles of interest, and new techniques to improve the teaching of physics. The initiative for the activities of these groups often comes, commendably, from the students themselves, and the faculty serves as mentors. Our goal in the upcoming year is to help these organizations in their endeavors, supply funding for activities, and encourage them to meet regularly and expand and strengthen the physics graduate student community.

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