The minimum requirements for a Physics major are 16 credits in the Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Departments as follows:
Ten Courses in Physics:
Four Courses in Mathematics:
Two Courses in Chemistry:
General Physics I, II (201, 202), Atomic and Nuclear Physics (305)
Two more Physics courses at a level of 160 and above.
All Physics majors are required to complete a Senior Thesis. Ideally a student in the spring of the their junior year will identify a thesis advisor and identify a topic of interest, so that by the start of their senior year they can begin research. Students are required to write a thesis paper and present their findings at an open forum. Recent projects have included: measure the temperature dependence of the efficiency of solar panels, computational studies of chaos in electrical circuits, Monte Carlo calculations of gamma rays travelling through a medium, programming a FPGA to be oscilloscope, programming a computer cluster out of Raspbery Pi computers, measuring the quantized conductance of gold nanowires, building nickel foam batteries, and building induction heaters.
