I am from Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Minnesota.  I came to UCI in part because there's no snow here!  I also enjoy being right next door to Newport Beach and the vacation lifestyle it has to offer.

"I am currently a third-year grad student, working in X-Ray Astrophysics with Professor David Buote.  Specifically, I am looking at the distribution of the morphologies, or shape and lumpiness, of clusters of galaxies throughout the Universe, and using what I find to put constraints on cosmological parameters.

"The first-year classes here are thorough, and cover everything you need to pass the Quals.  The professors have office hours and are very willing to take questions from grad students on problems. 

"The Department also holds several very interesting seminars and Colloquium each week.  Some recent Colloquia have been on the Shuttle "Columbia" disaster, to the latest results about the nature of dark energy, the force that is pushing the Universe apart at an accelerating rate.  Other seminars include the latest results in high-energy particle physics, condensed matter, and biophysics.

"UCI is a growing school, with new buildings going up all around, and new faculty being hired even now.  Working at UCI offers a very dynamic environment which still retains a sense of community and scholarship.

My research area is in condensed matter. I studied spatial-temporal chaos by observing electroconvection of liquid crystal cells. My advisor was Prof. Michael Dennin. He is one of the youngest and one of the most energetic faculty members in the Physics Department. I think that the Department is a very friendly environment. The faculty here seemed to be very approachable and helpful. 

It seems that graduate students also had a very good relationship with each other regardless of what year they were in. It will be very helpful if you already know what your research interests are (although I wasn't sure in the beginning what my interests were....).

I am an observational astronomer and I worked under the supervision of Dr. Tammy Smecker-Hane. 

I have found the faculty here to be very supportive and helpful. The department encourages getting to know the professors. There is a departmental coffee break every afternoon where we could hang out and chat.

Most students at UCI start doing research their first or second year once they have taken the majority of their classes. I started toward the end of my first year. I didn't even know what field of physics I wanted to go into when I came here to UCI. Irvine has a wide array of research projects in numerous fields, which was a big selling point for me when I decided to go here. I decided to join my research group after a department "pizza talk".   These informal talks are a great way to meet the faculty and learn what each of them are interested in over weekly pizza lunches. Most of the students I know decided on their research group by meeting faculty at these talks.

I eventually decided to work in experimental condensed matter. My research involves working with thin magnetic film that is only a few atomic layers thick. I suppose I could have found a good research project and good faculty anywhere but it would have been impossible to beat UCI's location. Irvine is fifteen minutes from the beach, and an hour and a half from local skiing, Without traffic it is forty-five minutes to LA, and an hour and a half to San Diego.

I grew up in Southern California. For some of my undergraduate years I went to Boston University and then I came back and attended UCI for the last 2 years of my undergraduate study. My research interests lie in the area of laboratory astrophysics and the atomic physics of plasmas.  

UCI is a first tier school in Physics and Astronomy. The professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy have outstanding reputations for excellence in scientific research. The curriculum is challenging, engaging, and sometimes entertaining. Don't expect easy classes - they are all challenging.

UCI has been expanding its capabilities to include several new science and engineering buildings, an industrial research park, and recruiting new staff. The campus sports one of the largest Science and Engineering Libraries in the World. Irvine itself is a safe community with many high tech industrial and commercial businesses.

UCI is within 10 minutes of the beach and has a beautiful campus. One feature that is unique is its collection of trees. It's been claimed that there are more trees of different varieties on the campus than anywhere else west of the Mississippi. Another attractive feature is the ethnic diversity on the campus.

As you can see, I am very happy I chose UCI as a graduate school.

I graduated from UCI in 2000 and I liked it so much I came back for graduate school.

UC Irvine's location is hard to beat. We are 10 to 15 minutes from three beaches: Laguna Beach, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. They are all nice but my favorite is Laguna. And we're about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles if you like sporting or cultural events. The campus itself is the most beautiful campus of any I have seen. The campus is centered around a 21-acre park that is kept up beautifully.

Irvine's physics department is strong and will become much stronger in the next few years. As of now our department consists of plasma, particle, bio and medical physics, condensed matter, chemical and materials physics (ChaMP), and astrophysics.

I'm currently working on AMANDA (Antartic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array), which is a neutrino detector located at the South Pole; it's pretty interesting.

First year classes at UCI are kind of intense, but I don't think they were impossibly hard. I found all the professors to be very approachable and always happy to help with problems. I also found the next year students to be very friendly and approachable, they were always willing to offer good advice. A lot of mixing goes on between years. When the first year class starts up, it's the second year's job to show them around. I had a lot of fun with people from the year ahead of me and year behind me.

One of the high spots of the first year was the free food. Yeah, free food! Each week you get a pizza lunch where a different professor tells you about his research and everyday at about 2:45 there's coffee, tea and cookies. Tea and cookies is a fun, informal way of hanging out with the professors. My favorite was the time we got our Classical Mechanics professor to do his "normal modes" dance during teatime. But the real advantage of the pizza lunch is the professors talking about their research. For instance, Professor Taborek in solid state is doing some pretty groovy stuff with superfluid helium.

The city of Irvine can be pretty expensive, but on campus housing is very affordable. I have enjoyed my schooling at UCI. The campus is pretty, the weather is nice, and the work is fun and challenging.