# Physics Bachelor of Science

    Note: Wikiversity does not confer academic degrees/diplomas/certificates etc.
See http://twofish.wordpress.com/the-open-architecture-degree/ for the theory behind this degree
Part of the School of Physics and Astronomy
* Feedback on current degrees
* Getting into physics graduate school
* Todo

### Links

http://www.unisa.ac.za/ South African University w/ Physics degree via mail
https://archive.is/20130630110838/www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1226150-5,00.html
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/373/ - Woodie Flowers on a liberal education for the 21st century
http://www.aau.edu/education/Merkel.pdf - Undergraduate Research
Help wanted: Need comments from the following
* People familar with the Thomas Edison State College or Charter Oak procedures. Anyone who has gone or is going through their program
* People familar with undergraduate physics degrees in other schools. People who are interesting in taking a physics undergraduate degree
* People in graduate physics admission committees and employers
* Students and potential students. Need to find out if this degree plan is attractive to people, and we may need some beta testers that are crazy enough to try to do this.
This page came out of wikimania 2006, and it's my effort to put together a curriculum which will get you an accreditted Bachelor of Science in Physics using free (as in speech) materials. The actual degree will be issued by what I call a "brokerage school" (i.e. someone like Thomas Edison State College) that turns life experience into credits. This will involve a lot of investigation into the little academic details of the schools.
The other thing that is important, is that I'd like to try to see how one could provide the "experience" of getting a Bachelor of Science in Physics. The crucial bit involves working in a research lab or getting an internship. That part is actually more important than the "book work" since getting an internship and letters of recommendation are what really get you into graduate school.
The other crucial part is that I need for this to be a degree that will actually get you into a physics doctoral program. So one thing that I will do is to ask people on graduate admission's committees their opinions on this. Also, something that would be useful is to just get a list of physics schools, and list whether or not they you should even think of applying there with a degree from wikiversity. (Again, the internships are more important than the book work, but we then need to look at the internships to see if they will take you.)
I'll also try to get some input from the professional societies (i.e. AAS, AIP etc.)
It will take me a few months to get this together, but since it is a wiki, feel free to add your contributions. I'll try to put enough of a sketch so that people can fill in material.
Roadrunner 07:23, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Here are the basic links
Here is the degree program for TESC
http://www.tesc.edu/prospective/undergraduate/degree/ba.php
For Charter Oak
http://www.charteroak.edu/Prospective/Programs/Concentrations/Physics.cfm
For Excelsior
https://www.excelsior.edu/portal/page?_pageid=57,55694&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
For MIT
http://web.mit.edu/physics/undergrad/index.html
One thing that is especially interesting for MIT is that they have changed the degree so that the main point is not to get into grad school as was the case in 1991. I'm using "creating a degree that will get you into grad school" as a requirement, because that is what I know. The problem is that what I'm doing is possibly self-defeating. If this works and you have hundreds of thousands of students qualified for physics graduate school and not a massive expansion in physics graduate schools, then this will be bad, which means that after this project is more or less complete, the next step is to figure out how to massively expand graduate education in physics, which gets into social priorities (you see now why I want discussions of getting funding).
This goes with my challenge to MIT. MIT does not scale. The trick reason that I'm doing this is that I think it would be good to be able to provide an MIT quality of undergraduate physics education to millions of people, and not just twenty year olds. The hard part in all of this involves generating the social networks and communities. The "book learning list" is just a skeleton.

### Basic Strategy

The basic strategy is to use the MIT Course 8 curriculum as a template and then match it with the requirements of either Thomas Edison or Charter Oak which will issue the final degree. That's the easy part.
The hard part will be to find proxies for a lot of the expertial learning and social networking that occurs. The expertial learning will require some sort of intership, and possibly a tutorial model. The social networking will require finding communities if they already exist or building communities if they don't.
Roadrunner 07:55, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

### MIT Course 8 Focused Option

Course VIII Focused Option
The Course VIII focused option is designed to provide the best possible preparation for graduate study in physics. Many students have also found this program to be an excellent, broad based preparation for professional work in related fields such as astrophysics, biophysics, geophysics, and many engineering disciplines. The focused option is unusual among pre-professional programs at MIT in that it offers a particularly large amount of elective freedom: as many as six subjects may be chosen as unrestricted electives without exceeding the minimum requirements for an undergraduate degree. The Departmental program for the focused option consists of the following required subjects and restricted electives. The full requirements for the degree, including the General Institute Requirements, may be found in the MIT Bulletin.
Required Subjects
* 8.03 Physics III vibrations and waves
* 18.03 or 18.034 Differential Equations
* 8.033 Relativity
* 8.04 Quantum mechanics I
* 8.044 Statistic mechanics I
* 8.05 Quantum Mechanics II
* 8.06* CI-M Quantum Mechanics III
* 8.13* CI-M Experimental Physics I
* 8.14 Experimental Physics II
* 8.ThU Undergraduate Research Project
Restricted Electives One subject given by the Mathematics Department beyond 18.03 Two additional subjects given by the Physics Department beyond 8.02 including at least one of the following: : * 8.07
    * 8.08 Classical mechanics
    * 8.09