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Physics
Main Office: Physics Building, Room 220
Phone: 410-455-2513
Email: physics@umbc.edu
Department Website: http://physics.umbc.edu/
Department Head: Dr. L. Michael Hayden
| Sample Resumés: | Physics |
Introduction
Physics students are trained to see and to understand nature in an especially profound way. They learn how to dissect a problem into its essential components, to understand the interrelation of the parts, and to apply mathematical and computational techniques to produce a solution. This kind of training is obviously advantageous in many professions besides physics, so physics graduates are found in professions as diverse as patent law, medicine and finance.
UMBC's Department of Physics offers a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and a new Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics Education. Either track can be taken as a terminal degree.
The Bachelor of Science degree qualifies a student for immediate professional employment or can be used as a basis for entrance into graduate school. The Bachelor of Arts degree is specifically designed for those students planning a career in high school teaching, and it is coordinated with the UMBC education department. This allows students to obtain a degree in physics education that includes certification for teaching high school physics in a four-year program. This method fulfills the Maryland requirement for new high school teachers that they major in the subject area they teach.
A special feature of both degree tracks is the opportunity for undergraduates to participate in the faculty’s research programs. Many students doing this research are co-authors with their research mentors on papers at technical conferences and in research journals. To help support undergraduate research, the department presents the Langenburg Student Research Award each year to a junior or senior physics major. This cash award is to support the student during the semester he or she is performing research. The departmental honors program requires the course Senior Research (PHYS 499), but this course can be taken as an elective by any student with consent of his or her academic advisor and a faculty research mentor. It is important for all students to work closely with their departmental academic advisor to take full advantage of the elective courses offered, especially once a particular career path has been chosen.
The department offers minors in both physics and in astronomy. The astronomy minor is aimed especially at those students interested in pursuing careers in astronomy or astrophysics.
The department also offers a combined B.S./M.S. program for highly qualified students. In 2000, the department moved into a new, 72,000-square-foot Physics Building, which includes many outstanding facilities for undergraduates. There is a tutorial center, a study room, a resource room containing a large number of texts and other books, and a computer laboratory with PCs configured for both Windows and Linux applications.
The department recently has purchased nearly $6 million worth of new equipment, including a 0.8 meter astronomical telescope, which is housed in a dome on the roof of the Physics Building. Other special facilities in the building include: a class-100 clean room, in which state-of-the-art photonic and electronic devices can be fabricated, and a microscopy facility containing a scanning electron microscope with special characterization attachments and an atomic force microscope. These facilities are used by students in optics courses, in the advanced laboratory course and in undergraduate research projects.
Typically about half the graduating seniors go on to graduate school. Recent graduates have been accepted at MIT, Harvard, The Johns Hopkins University and the universities of California at Berkeley, Illinois and Michigan, among others.