Planning ahead - maybe too far ahead

Catria
Fri, 21 Feb 2014 20:58:32 +0000

How I understood continuing business education: just take one night course or two for a semester or two (that way I could still work full-time; my sister actually does that, so what reason, other than a hectic work schedule with crazy hours, wouldn’t I be able to do so while having a full-time job, by the time I get one such job?) without the need of completing an actual degree program, so that I could acquire some business-related skills. It’s not the same as leaving a full-time job to earn an undergraduate degree in business. Now I understand that I was planning too far ahead.

There is one component missing as far as PhD applications are concerned: the physics GRE, which I didn’t write yet. Since my physical subfields of interest are cosmology and particle physics (my current research project deals with the very early universe, which is the interface between both) it’s going to be more competitive than if I was going, for example, into condensed matter.

I promise to make a separate thread about these PhD plans once I get a PGRE score back, but what I know for sure is that Tulane (IMO quantum chaos does resemble what I currently do, with applications to both subfields), UMinn, W&M, Tufts (non-reaches) and, at the reach end, UPenn, are on my list. I didn’t even apply to Tufts last year, which was the only US school I wanted to attend at that time, because I didn’t have research experience back then, and that I thought it was unreachable without it.