Investigating the Requirements of a Physics Ph.D.

Physics graduate education is a well established institution; traditionally requiring higher understanding of content knowledge, more intense research skills, and allowing students to transition into a more serious researcher role. It is not well understood how universal graduate education is. In the interest of examining the relatively unknown state of graduate education more critically, we are interested in the current landscape of requirements that graduate programs have for their students. To get a sense of the potentially varied practices, we conducted a landscape study of the physics graduate programs across the country. We collected the graduate handbook and websites for each program, documenting the listed requirements that each program has for their PhD students. These requirements included written examinations, courses, and timeline to graduation. From the 182 institutions investigated, we determined that there are: no universal core courses, a wide range of ways for students to reach candidacy, and minimal information concerning the writing of a dissertation. With these results we provide a foundation towards advancing more critical investigations into physics graduate education.