last (pre-) grad school post

[nibot]

I found another graduate school ranker. It's based on a survey distributed to current grad students.

It says I should go to Rochester. Just ranking over "overall satisfaction," Rochester comes in second, after UC Santa Cruz and tied with Cornell. UNC is lumped in the third quartile. CMU did not respond.

I suspect this survey has a huge amount of self-selective bias in it, though. We should all sign up to take part in next year's incarnation. (There were 32 responses for Rochester and 28 for UNC — far more than for most departments, so the results should be statistically significant. Rochester has 135 physics PhD students, and UNC has 64.)

But I liked UNC so much!

Comments

[probablevacancy.livejournal.com]

The survey takers ranked Houston as an A- climate and Berkeley as a B climate.

If that doesn't completely obliterate this ranking system, I don't know what would.

[heike.livejournal.com]

That's program climate, not geographic. I almost fell for that myself, then I realized they decided we could decide for ourselves what climate and geographic locations suited us best.