I spent the last two weeks of the semester doing exit interviews with our graduating seniors. It’s a great opportunity to hear about their plans and also to get feedback on our programs. The students really have amazing insight, and if we listen to their suggestions, it will be easy to improve the program.
I’ll write later about what they’ll be doing after they graduate, but in this post I want to talk about what they said we do well. I asked each student,
“If you were doing an advertisement for Illinois Physics, what would be your selling point?”
I was actually surprised at the uniformity of the answers. Some form of the following answer was given in most of the interviews:
“The faculty are very knowledgeable, and very willing to help students. They take teaching seriously and make themselves available to help us.”
It’s really great that this answer appeared so frequently, because it’s one of the most important things that we do. And although I can tell you that we take teaching and education seriously, there’s nothing like hearing it from our students. A few more quotes:
“The PHYS 496/499 ‘Senior Thesis’ sequence is great. When I was visiting graduate schools and talking to other students, none of them had any kind of experience like it.”
“It’s great how approachable the professors are. Knock on a door and it’s ok.”
“I like it that you guys are doing things to provide information about careers in physics.”
“I loved the lab courses. Modern Physics lab was awesome.”
“The Undergrad Lounge. It’s really cool that you give the students a place to hang out.”
No, I’m not trying to pretend that every piece of feedback was positive. In a later post, I’ll tell you what they said we could better.
If you have questions about the Physics Illinois Undergraduate Program, contact the Undergraduate Office, 217.333.4361.
If you have any feedback or suggestions for this blog, please contact Kevin Pitts.
Undergraduates
