"Education"

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

True that! You have amazing scores.

[Alpaca]

Rice is on "the list," Dee Dee, although music ain't gonna be a major, I don't think - it'll stay a hobby.

Viva physics!

For the record, here's the list now:

• Berkeley
• Cal Tech
• Carleton College (probably not)
• Carnegie Mellon
• Case Western
• Chicago
• Cornell
• Harvey Mudd
• Johns Hopkins
• MIT - Don't wanna do undergrad there. Too impersonal.
• New College of Florida - Hell no. Wanna get out of this damn state.
• Chapel Hill
• Rensselaer - Safety school
• Rice
• Stanford
• Worcester Polytechnic - Safety school

The whole "safety school" thing gets me, too, by the way. I either want to go to a college or I don't.

[Sibling Chatty]

RICE!!

Dang, all the people I used to know there are long retired.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

Stanford is fantastic! I'm planning to apply there next fall. I live a couple of hours from there.

[Alpaca]

Really liked it when I visited. Beautiful campus, IMHO.

[ivor]

Get out of Florida, unless you're good at football. 

[goat starer]

Come to england and study at a proper university 

and get out of that nasty private funded school you terrible capitalist imperialist american borgeois lacky of the corporate State! 

on the basis of political bias you could go to the peoples republic of Berkley

[Griffin NoName]

Come to england and study at a proper university 

Glad to see the usual post A-level results arguments about standards have broken out as usual. (lets have an A+*++ grade so the universities wont even need to interview; whatever you do, do not change the start of the A band so it's harder to get an A at all).

[Alpaca]

When I was in London a few summers ago, one day took a trip to Cambridge. Gorgeous.

[beagle]

Here's my education problem: I've never been challenged. The only effort I've seriously had to expend that challenged me was whenever I was assigned busywork. (Yes, there are a few notable exceptions in some of the better teachers I've had.)

That is a bit surprising if you go to a private school. When I went to college I mixed with people from the top UK schools  (Winchester, St. Pauls etc) for the first time, and they had already done half the first year's syllabus while still at school.  Or have you already reached that point and are still challenge-less? 

I suppose there's nothing to stop you getting hold of university level texts and reading ahead yourself. These days quite a lot of good degree course tutorial material is available free online. This'll be good practice for when you have to set your own workload and get you used to situations where you can't do all the questions.
I don't know if you've seen the Stephen Hawking biography film "Brief History of Time", but that captures the dismay of Hawking's fellow students in finding he could answer more questions correctly in an hour than they could do combined in a week.  You're about to enter an environment where the sky (or the spacetime metric, or something) is the limit.

When I was in London a few summers ago, one day took a trip to Cambridge. Gorgeous.

Not bad for physics with theatre as an outside interest either. Though you wouldn't get much time off from the course to do any serious acting.  Be careful to avoid its Thames Valley rival though. Terrible place

 

[Alpaca]

I still go to high school. One more year before college, so I haven't gotten there yet.

I take AP-level classes. Dunno if you're familiar with that program - think it's an American thing. The idea is to offer college-level classes to high school students so they can move onto the more advanced stuff in college right away.

Those ain't challenging either. You do make a good point about university texts, though. I might have to look at some.

[The Meromorph]

t's my understanding that, to a large extent, Amercian undergraduate degrees overlap with '6th form in High school' in the UK. An American Batchelors degree is only a little above 'A' levels in the UK. (An american official rating service certified my 'S' level GCE's as equivalent to an American BSc, for the US Government.) The correspondence is close for Masters and PhDs but an American Masters takes several years, a UK Masters often only one.
This may explain a lot of Alpaca's frustration, to our UK members. 

[Griffin NoName]

So an American Masters covers a batchelors here in UK and then overtakes it? Or where does the "gap" get filled?

[beagle]

Ah, right.

There used to be a really cool book of outre physics problems called "Cavendish Problems in Classical Physics" which I could pretty much guarantee would be challenging, but unfortunately it's out of print.
It had questions to do with calculating when a plane's wheels would stop skidding on landing, and other lateral thinking questions like that which got away from the traditional "weightless pulley, frictionless plane" artificial questions of school.

[The Meromorph]

So an American Masters covers a batchelors here in UK and then overtakes it? Or where does the "gap" get filled?

That's about it. I think American Masters covers the last two years of a UK Batchelors and the UK Masters.
A Masters or a Phd in either country  is strictly equivalent...