Welcome to the UCSC Astronomy and Astrophysics ``prospective'' graduate student WWW pages. These pages are designed to give information about our program to students trying to choose a school to attend for graduate studies.

If you found this page, then you have also found the more general Department WWW pages. There you will find listed the faculty along with a description of their research interests. This page also has links to the UCSC WWW pages and some Santa Cruz area links.

How does the application process work?

Each year we get between 70 and 85 applications. Of these we accept 10 to 15 applicants into our program and extend offers of financial support.

What counts in your application? The majority of successful applicants have an undergraduate degree in physics with a good GPA. Most applicants have GRE scores (for the three ``standard'' sections) in the 85th percentile or above. We give quite a bit of weight to the Physics GRE Subject exam scores. A score above 80th percentile is very good; we generally look for scores above the 60th percentile.

A research background in A&A is very helpful, though research experience in related fields is also valuable. We look for strong letters of recommendation, and read the "statement of purpose" quite carefully. Our goal is to identify enthusiastic students who are well prepared to thrive in an exciting research environment, making use of the particular strengths and opportunities in the UCSC department.

Acceptance into the program and financial offers.

If you are accepted into the program, you will also receive an offer of financial support. The University provides fellowship support for a limited number of first year students, who are selected on a variety of criteria; these fellowships have no service requirements. Most students will receive offers of teaching assistantships, which include some duties assisting one of the A&A faculty with teaching an undergraduate class. Typically, an offer might include a mix, with one or two quarters as a teaching assistant and the others on fellowship. The department considers teaching experience to be an integral part of the training of a professional astronomer; all graduate students are required to teach at least one quarter during their time at UCSC. In rare cases, a student might be offered support as a graduate research assistant, funded from one of the faculty's research grants. Usually, students move to research grant funding during their first summer term. There are graduate program ``fees'' ($1700/quarter) for all students and, for non-California residents, graduate ``tuition'' ($3415/quarter). Part of the support offer will also be fee and tuition fellowships to completely cover these costs. In subsequent years the fees will be paid for as part of teaching assistant remission or paid for from the research grant from which the student's graduate research fellowship is paid. We ask US citizens to become CA residents during their first year here; the tuition then goes away. Tuition for foreign students in the second and later years will be paid from research grants.

We have a very long string of 100% support for our students. The current situation is that we have so much research support that we have a hard time filling available teaching assistant slots with astronomy graduate students.

Visits

We encourage prospective students to visit and can help to defray costs. For students accepted with support we reimburse travel expenses up to $200/student. During the visit, prospective students are (graciously) hosted by current graduate students which includes putting the visitors up (at no expense to visitors). If prospectives combine visits (and travel reimbursements) from other west-coast schools they can usually cover the full travel costs of their fact-finding mission.

Why Choose Santa Cruz?

We are usually in competition with some very strong programs for the best students. Why choose UCSC? There are several reasons:

The principal reason may be that we have a very strong and diverse faculty. This fact was recognized by the National Research Council in ranking our program in their 1996 report as 6th in the US in ``overall'' ranking and 4th in ``Graduate program effectiveness''. We have recently been ranked #1 among A&A programs in ``Research Impact'' as indicated by average citation numbers per paper. (citations link) We also had the largest number of total publications. Peruse the Department WWW pages and you will see that the range of expertise here is quite large and there are several areas where Santa Cruz is at the very forefront: Supernova theory, gamma-ray bursts, the large-z Universe, the detection of extra-solar planets and the theory of planetary system formation, globular cluster systems near and far, and building state-of-the-art instrumentation.
The facilities available to members of the Department are absolutely first-rate. We have University of California access to the two Keck 10m telescopes and to the 3m and 1m telescopes located at Mt Hamilton a two-hour drive from Santa Cruz. Members of the faculty have also competed very successfully for time on the Hubble Space Telescope and are experienced and active users of other national facilities such as KPNO, CTIO, the VLA and Arecibo. We are the site of the new NSF Center for Adaptive Optics and UCO/Lick Observatory is one of the premier astronomical instrument facilities in the world.
Closely related to the previous item, is there is a culture in the Department of involving students very completely into faculty members' research. The majority of the theses of the observationally oriented students in the past decade have been based on Keck or HST data.

How have recent graduates from UCSC fared in the job market?

100% of the graduates from our program in the past five years have gone on to postdoctoral positions including some of the most prestigious ones available to observers and theorists. Specifically, we have had two Hubble Fellows, two Carnegie Fellows, a Chandra Fellow, A CIT Prize Fellow, Dominion Astrophysical Observatory RA, 3-year position at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Spitzer Fellow at Princeton and a CfA Fellow at Harvard. Two of our graduates from the last five years have already gone on to junior faculty positions.

Other sources of information

The Department home page has links to individual home pages of UCSC faculty, postdocs and graduate students. A link that describes the graduate program requirements (exams, classes and the like) is here

A note about the organization of the A&A group here. UCSC is the headquarters for the University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory. Some of the faculty here, predominantly the observational astronomers, have ``80/20'' positions. This means they are 80% UCO/Lick faculty and 20% Department of A&A faculty. The 80/20 faculty have reduced teaching responsibilities, their positions are more research oriented and they have responsibilities related to running the Lick Observatory and Keck Observatory facilities.

What this means for graduate students is the student/faculty ratio is smaller here than at most institutions. Currently we have 25 graduate students and 22 faculty.