Four years ago when we began to design a professional master’s in instrumentation and applied physics. I had wanted to learn about the preferences of your graduating physics students. Their input (about 700 completed a short questionnaire) helped us settle on a two-semester, project-centered curriculum rather than a more traditional one of classroom work combined with an industry internship.
About half of our physics majors apply to PhD programs during their senior year. Most of the rest enter the workforce, usually in STEM fields or Education. A few enroll in terminal master’s degree programs. Our new master’s is well aligned with their interests; the same might be true for other graduating seniors.
If you’d like to know more, a good starting point would be the program’s landing page . And I can show our combination classroom/lab space if we talk via Zoom.
We are midway through the first year of the program, and our students have self-organized into four groups, with the members of each group designing, building, debugging, and analyzing their microcontroller-based systems that control suites of sensors. We’ve taught them to design circuits and printed circuit boards, construct and program their devices, debug codes, 3D-print parts as needed, and make sense of the data they collect.
Our primary goal is to prepare graduates for stimulating careers in research and development in industrial, national laboratory, healthcare, and other settings. While the program is not intended as a first step towards acceptance into a university PhD program, even so, about half of our master’s students are applying to PhD programs.