<p>and it is addressed to Current students/alumni at Georgia Tech. </p>
<p>What can you tell me about the mathematics and physic department at Georgia tech? How is its reputation in the academic world? Is the curriculum flexible? Do the professors care about the students? Are there opportunities for research at the undergraduate level? </p>
<p>Any information that you offer would be helpful.</p>
<p>I’m familiar with the physics department.</p>
<p>As far as reputation goes, it’s on the small side as far as physics departments go (about 35 faculty), and as such only a few areas of physics are really well-represented in research. This will be relevant for you to know because you will certainly want to work in a lab as an undergraduate (there are many, many opportunities to do this). The two areas with highly prominent faculty are condensed matter, which deals with things like the physics of materials (e.g. electronic materials, superconductors), and nonlinear dynamics. I can’t give a succinct definition of what nonlinear dynamics is, but an example might include modeling the movement of a fish through water. This stuff is highly relevant to robotics and designing vehicles. I would say Tech is in the top 5 globally in this latter area.</p>
<p>As for whether professors care about students, it probably varies. There are a few who just care about research, of course, but as a whole they do, and there’s a lot of debate right now about how to change the curriculum so that it best prepares physics students for all kinds of fields, because jobs for a “physicist” tend to be scarce. As such, they’re incorporating things like programming as well as expanding the electronics classes to give students more varied skills.</p>