Why Can't University of Penn place any students into CalTech Physics PhD Program?

College Search & Lists
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<p>For the past 20 years, the University of Pennsylvania has not placed a single student into CalTech’s physics PhD program, one of the top 3 physics programs in the world. CalTech enrolls about 20-25 PhD students each year for a total of 500 PhDs over the past 20 years. Harvard, UChicago, Princeton, MIT, Stanford all have great placement at CalTech. </p>

<p>For a school that is tied with MIT and Stanford in USNEWS ranking and with a much larger student body, it seems to be very odd. </p>

<p>LACs such as Swarthmore and Reed also have great success placement rate, even the state schools such as U of IL, Univerrsity of Florida, Arizona are very successful in placing their students to top physics programs.</p>

<p>Here is an interesting link.</p>

<p>[Caltech</a> Physics Grad Students](<a href=“http://www.pma.caltech.edu/GSR/gradclasslist.html]Caltech”>http://www.pma.caltech.edu/GSR/gradclasslist.html)</p>

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<p>Who cares about physics … when you have have Goldman Sachs summer internship tote bags like at Duke or Upenn…</p>

<p>Maybe UPenn doesn’t offer undergraduate physics? Instead, it’s called the “Physics of the rising Euro and falling dollar” :smiley: lol</p>

<p>Again, Who cares about PhD physics production? Not that many average joes aspires to become a Feynmann or Gell-mann Nobel Prize winning Caltech physicist.</p>

<p>Maybe a Nobel Prize winning MIT or Stanford physicist, definitely not a Caltech one jk jk. llol</p>

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<p>"For a school that is tied with MIT and Stanford in USNEWS ranking and with a much larger student body, it seems to be very odd. "
what does that tell you about its ranking then?</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>That the OP shouldn’t be focusing on how high Upenn is today (4th). How about 20 years ago?</p>

<p>20 years ago, Upenn was ranked 20th… </p>

<p>Answer to omgitsover9000: it’s ranking probably has been gamed :smiley: How can you jump 16 spots in just 20 years while every one school except WashU has become stagnant in it’s ranking positions.</p>

<p>PS. before someone attacks me… why wouldn’t you game the Us news rankigns if you were the “lowest ranked ivy” 20 years ago.</p>

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<p>

It does. It has a stronger department than JHU and has for quite some time. :)</p>

<p>

  1. A lack of matriculating students does not mean a lack of admitted students. This is fairly obvious, and I should not have to point it out.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>If you look over old commencement lists, you’ll see Penn students represented among astrophysics, biology, chemistry, and engineering at Caltech. I highly doubt Penn students would be universally rejected for physics. </p></li>
<li><p>A quick glance over Penn’s [placement</a> statistics](<a href=“http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/college/majors/phys.html]placement”>http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/college/majors/phys.html) for physics students shows students attending excellent graduate programs – Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago, Cornell, etc.</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>The Department of Physics and Astronomy is among the leading departments nationwide in the recent rankings by Academic Analytics, with Hopkins placing well within the top ten in both the physics and the astronomy - astrophysics rankings. JHU as a whole is also ranked in the top ten. [FSP</a> Index Top Performing Schools](<a href=“http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopSchools.aspx]FSP”>http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopSchools.aspx)</p>

<pre><code>Six of the top nine physics and astrophysics articles most cited in 2005 were authored by researchers now in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, according to the SPIRES database of Stanford University.
</code></pre>

<p>A new study measuring scientific impact places Johns Hopkins University in the top three among US institutions granting Ph.D.s in Physic and Astronomy. [[0811.0311</a>] The Science Impact of Astronomy PhD Granting Departments in the United States](<a href=“System Unavailable”>System Unavailable)</p>

<p>Did I mention when NASA director came to speak at Hopkins, he mentioned that JHU was the number one recipient of NASA grants? Space telescope science institution (where the Hubble Space Telescope is controlled at) is located on JHU’s homewood campus. Hopkins is a world leader in physics and astronomy research…</p>

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<p>

<em>snorts</em></p>

<p>Who takes those seriously? Those are the rankings that put UCSB and Hawaii above UCSD for oceanography, Harvard and Penn above NYU for art history, Arizona and UNC above UCLA for linguistics, and (my personal favorite) Hopkins and Washington above Berkeley for Classics. They’re completely laughable.</p>

<p>NRC (under the auspices of NSF, NAE, NAS)
Penn #17
JHU #28</p>

<p>USNWR
Penn #13
JHU #20</p>

<p>(Note: My point is not to bash JHU. It’s to point out that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.)</p>

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<p>Oops, Hopkins is top ten for “Astronomy/Astrophysics” research. Not for “Physics” itself. LOL</p>

<p>Whatever, NASA likes Hopkins and is among the top 3 for ‘Astronomy/astrophysics’ research (based off a study that evaluated NRC rankings) within the ‘Department of Physics and Astronomy’ (I was confused about the physics part my bad)</p>

<p>(PS. I was joking when I said “Maybe Penn doesn’t have undergraduate physics”. Maybe some ppl shouldn’t take things so seriously.</p>

<p>Did you get the joke about the “Physics of rising Euro and falling dollar” in place of an actual physics department :slight_smile: </p>

<p>Penn students generally are more pre professional in nature. Ppl go to Chicago if they want to major in math or physics lol. I would say less so for Penn.)</p>

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<p>I see three Swarthmore, three Williams, one Amherst, over the past ten years. That’s neat.</p>

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<p>University of Arizona/Drexel and no UPenn? LOL</p>

<p>Sorry its clear that Penn is overrated. No doubt its a good university, but come on. Number 4? Thats ridiculous.</p>

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<p>^ Penn’s overall reputation has never been based on its physics department–although that department IS generally ranked in the top 20 in the nation (not bad for one of it’s weaker departments).</p>

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<p>I understand one of the top people in charge of rankings at USNWR is a Penn alum.</p>

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<p>^ I’d like to see Alexandre’s evidence in support of that, and in support of his apparent allegation that said Penn alum (if he or she even exists) somehow has manipulated the rankings in Penn’s favor for the last 13 years.</p>

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<p>I’m pretty sure Prof. Borodin in the Caltech math department, a full professor less than five years after his PhD (including a stint as a Clay math fellow at IAS) received his PhD at Penn.</p>

<p>Ahmed Zewail, the sole Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1999, a Chemistry professor at Caltech, is also a Penn PhD.</p>

<p>so I guess Penn isn’t too shabby…</p>

<p>oh yeah, Borodin’s advisor was Alexandre Kirillov, prof. at Moscow State and then UPenn; whose other advisees include Igor Pak (MIT), Victor Ginzburg (Chicago) and Fields medalist Andrei Okounkov (Berkeley now Princeton, visiting Columbia).</p>

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<p>Class entering 1991 there’s a Penn student</p>

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<p>Penn traditionally was top 20ish school in early 1990s.</p>

<p>The person who has been in charge of US News ranking, Robert Morse, is a Wharton grad.</p>

<p>Profs at CalTech or people who really know which school produce top students seem not think that highly of Penn. Penn’s data on its placement of its physics/astrophysics students cover many years. A community college or state University such as the U of New Mexico could send a couple of grads to Harvard or CalTech physics PhD progrm once in while. </p>

<p>Can someone do a tally to see how many Harvard, UChicago, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, or some of the LACs students went to CalTech over the years? It would be interesting to see. You will be amazed by the results.</p>

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<p>^ And your statements are based on what, exactly? You know such an extensive number of Caltech professors that you can speak on their behalf and strongly argue they don’t regard Penn as a stellar academic institution? </p>

<p>“People who really know which school produce top students seem not think that highly of Penn.” What on earth does that mean? Who are these special “people”? The unjustified, uninformed claims people constantly make on this site are really embarrassing. More than one source ranks Penn’s physics department in the top 20. I don’t see why placement in Caltech’s graduate physics program should be considered the gold standard in determining the quality of school’s undergraduate physics program. Yes, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, etc. are typically more attractive for top physics students than Penn and they produce more students who get PhDs from top physics programs than Penn does. And? That doesn’t mean people don’t “think that highly of Penn.” People need to stop equating their own skewed, biased perceptions of what are amazinglygoodomgthebestever schools to the opinions of people in academia (or whatever ridiculously vague blanket term you care to use, like “people who know these things”), whom most of the people on this site I’m sure have no connection to or knowledge of in the first place.</p>

<p>Also, people keep bringing up this argument that the head of US News went to Penn, which is responsible for its high ranking. Someone made a post a while ago citing numerous head honchos at US News and the various schools they all went to–and guess what, most were NOT from Penn! Once this “head of US News went to Penn, that’s why it’s ranked so high” argument got out everybody has taken it as the word of God and throw it around every chance they get without bothering to consider its legitimacy.</p>

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<p>

Uh, and in the early 1800s, Cornell wasn’t even around yet. What’s your point? </p>

<p>

</p>

<h1>5 Biomedical Engineering</h1>

<h1>5 French</h1>

<h1>5 Linguistics</h1>

<h1>6 Anthropology</h1>

<h1>6 Spanish</h1>

<h1>7 Musicology</h1>

<h1>8 Economics</h1>

<h1>8 English</h1>

<h1>8 Psychology</h1>

<h1>9 Art History</h1>

<h1>10 Materials Science</h1>

<h1>10 Neuroscience</h1>

<h1>10 Religion</h1>

<h1>11 Chemical Engineering</h1>

<h1>11 Literature</h1>

<h1>11 Sociology</h1>

<h1>12 History</h1>

<h1>13 Classics</h1>

<h1>14 Ecology/Evolution</h1>

<h1>16 Biochemistry</h1>

<h1>16 German</h1>

<h1>17 Physics</h1>

<h1>22 Mathematics</h1>

<h1>24 Computer Science</h1>

<h1>25 Chemistry</h1>

<h1>25 Statistics</h1>

<h1>26 Philosophy</h1>

<h1>3 Medicine</h1>

<h1>3 Nursing</h1>

<h1>8 Law</h1>

<h1>13 Education</h1>

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<p>Actually, there were two Penn grads in the class entering 1991, but that was it. It it interesting to see the overall numbers. Obviously, Caltech had the most, but the following schools each had more than 3 students enter Caltech’s Physics PhD program in the last 20 years:</p>

<p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 24
Harvard University: 23
University of California-Berkeley: 18
Princeton University: 16
Cornell University: 15
Stanford University: 11
University of Chicago: 10
Columbia University: 7
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor: 7
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign: 5
University of Maryland-College Park: 5
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 5
Carnegie Mellon University: 4
Duke University: 4
Yale University: 4</p>

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<p>^US News has UPenn at 13th in Physics and 18th in Mathematics.</p>

<p>wow Alexandre, that’s a ton of work- but now we know I guess haha…</p>

<p>so Yale had 4 and Penn had 2, not that bad… and I didn’t know Caltech PhD physics admissions were the last word on what is a “good” college-</p>

<p>outside of Wharton, no question the admissions standards in CAS have dramatically improved since the early 1990s- that said, pre-professionalism hasn’t; perhaps the allure of Goldman Sachs offering $100,000 your first year out of college derailed some bright physics and math grads who may have been talented enough to go on for a PhD… </p>

<p>to the OP, not sure exactly what your axe to grind with Penn is- I agree it is not as intellectual as a Chicago or Columbia, but it is tough to deny Penn grads get some of most plum private sector jobs and professional school placements (MDs, JDs, MBAs) </p>

<p>also, FWIW, Penn was probably the first ivy to embrace the “Asian invasion”, accepting a large number of Asian and Asian-American applicants in the late 1980s/early 1990s when other ivies like Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth tried to cap their admissions…</p>