The department is cutting down its intake of students primarily because people here take far too much time to finish their degrees (I heard one guy took 14 years) and the graduate population has bloated substantially over the years to nearly 300 although you probably couldn't have known by just poking around in the department. A great number of grad students don't work in physics proper but in materials science, multi-disciplinary stuff, ECE, chemistry, etc. We're probably one of the biggest departments in the country - 'big' like Jabba the Hut though.
As a result, one unintended side effect is that the department is actually becoming more selective. They admitted 50 new grad students out of 500 applicants. In terms of GRE subject scores, the average score for the entering class was pretty competitive at 873. That, incidentally, is higher than the scores for Stanford or Chicago. I can't understand why all those high-scoring idiots would come to a place like this. Perhaps, they feel some affinity for corn.
As a result, one unintended side effect is that the department is actually becoming more selective. They admitted 50 new grad students out of 500 applicants. In terms of GRE subject scores, the average score for the entering class was pretty competitive at 873. That, incidentally, is higher than the scores for Stanford or Chicago. I can't understand why all those high-scoring idiots would come to a place like this. Perhaps, they feel some affinity for corn.
5 comments:
You are studying at UIUC??
What do you think? ;)
Hehe, corn fields. Eh, can I have your msn contact please? Wanna ask you something.
Heh... I know someone who was accepted to physics grad school at Harvard, MIT, Caltech, etc, and was rejected by Illinois, Wisconsin, etc. His GRE scores and GPA are... let's say, if he was Singaporean, he wouldn't qualify for the A-star scholarship.
I passed through Chambana two months ago... as well as Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska. Cornfields all the way.
It's not all cornfields. A lot of soy too...
Admission to grad school is really a hit and miss business. GRE's and GPA's aren't really a good predictor of success in grad school. Of course, they are important for getting in, especially for non-US students but they aren't everything. You would think that adcoms would be better able to judge who has a better chance to succeed in grad school but the folks from Buona Vista think they know better.
Anyway, only crazy people who love corn would come to this place. Fox had no choice since stupid Fox got only into two schools. It was either Corn-hell or Cornland university.
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