Routes to Berkeley

[nibot]

Whatever the story is about UC Berkeley accepting its own students into graduate school, they don't have any problem hiring their own PhD's as faculty. Of the Physics department faculty, 21 have PhD's from UC Berkeley, 7 from MIT, 4 each from Harvard and Stanford, 3 each from Chicago, Paris, Princeton, and Tokyo; two each from Caltech, Cambridge, and Rome; and one from each of Birmingham, Bonn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Helsinki, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Prague, Rochester, Rutgers, Tel Aviv, UIUC, UM Amherst, Virginia, Wisconsin.

At Rochester, the situation is similar, with Rochester and MIT both contributing 7 faculty members. Then comes Cornell (which is about 2 hours drive from Rochester) with 5, Chicago with 4, Harvard and Princeton with 3; UC Berkeley, Purdue, Washington University, and Yale with 2; and then one each from Bristol, Caltech, Columbia, India, Manchester, Netherlands, Northeastern, Penn State, Stanford, Stony Brook, Syracuse, Tel Aviv, UCSD, UIUC, and Washington.

(Of course, to some extent this just reflects the pure number of PhD's from a place.)

Comments

[heike.livejournal.com]

My dad, after teaching a class in the physics department, told me he wouldn't hire a physics undergrad from the program. He does, however, recommend the grad program, aside from funding issues. He used to call me up and tell me what his students were doing and if I had ever done that in a class.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

My dad, after teaching a class in the physics department, told me he wouldn't hire a physics undergrad from the program.

Why not?

[heike.livejournal.com]

From what I understood, he was really disappointed by the quality of the students in the upper division courses in regards to their ability to rationally problem-solve and go beyond standard text book problems. I remember having some conversations with him regarding how to judge what is a reasonable answer to a problem, and working problems where you aren't given all the needn't information in the statement of the problem.

Since I didn't go to Berkeley, and had been quite adament about not going, I didn't worry about the details of why, it just made an impression that he would say that about the department.