Help us choose a good college for Astrophysics

goldbug
Sun, 11 Feb 2024 01:09:48 +0000

My brother-in-law is a theoretical astrophysicist. I think he took a lot of high-level math and CS classes in undergrad and didn’t specialize until grad school. His research does seem very data/CS-heavy – they use machine learning to study galaxy formation.

Of course there are all kinds of other branches, both experimental and theoretical. Has your daughter looked at the research in the different departments and figured out which faculty she might be drawn to? If she’s interested in grad school and research, that seems like an important next step. In general (and I say this as an English major who married into a family of physicists), I’d go with the options that limit your daughter the least at this juncture (and probably the physics instead of engineering programs.)