Joining as a graduate student
The most important ability for a successful graduate student is to be an independent problem solver. Your life as a graduate student at the University of Alabama will consist of conducting independent research under the guidance of your advisor, to take classes, and, if funding is through a teaching assistantship, teach undergraduate labs for "intro to geology" courses. The most important part of these two or three responsibilities will be your research, because it will determine whether you get your MS or PhD degree. Each week, you will meet with your adviser for one or several hours to discuss your progress. Your adviser will help you design your research project, guide your research, and help you when you are stuck, but it will be your responsibility to carry out the research.
The main difference between a PhD and a MS degree is that the PhD degree is longer and requires the production of more scientific results. For a MS degree, we typically expect the completion of one publishable research project and you have 2 years. For a PhD, we expect the completion and publication of three research projects and you have 4 years. Please see the Publications page for examples of what publishable research projects are.
Starting grad school is a substantial investment on your part, the part of your adviser, and the university. As a graduate student you will be doing cutting-edge research, discovering things no human has ever known. Because of this, you will need to independently learn skills required to make these discoveries. Such skills will involve working with difficult to interpret data sets, learning to program, adapt, and use scientific software that has no manual, and independently learning physics and math likely beyond the level of your undergraduate education.
Unfortunately, undergraduate grades, application essays, GRE scores, and reference letters are not a good way to evaluate graduate school readiness. To help with figuring out if you would succeed as a graduate student either in our planetary or near-surface geophysics program, I prepared assessment tasks for each discipline. Please complete the assessment task for your field of interest and send the outcome to me. We can then schedule a time and date for a video or phone chat. These tasks will likely require you to go beyond of what you learned in undergrad. That is on purpose, because we need to know if you can problem-solve independently, without having been given a recipe. Do not worry if you can't find a perfect solution. The most important thing is that we can discuss the attempt you made. Most importantly: Do not ask a friend for help! These are meant to be solved independently. If a friend solves these for you and you do get into grad school, you will not have the skills necessary to complete grad school and you may risk losing years of work and not getting a graduate degree.
Students Interested in Planetary Science
Requirements
As a graduate student in planetary geophysics you will need some basic programming skills and some understanding of calculus. If you don't yet have any programming experience, then this doesn't need to mean that you are not suited. It is more important that you can learn quickly and independently. For example, you can install the free programming language Octave and learn using the free textbook An Introduction to MATLAB for Geoscientists
Assessment Exercise
Please complete the
assessment AssessmentPlanetary.pdf
from this
website:
http://alainplattner.net/downloads/assessments/AssessmentPlanetary.pdf
This will require you to download, process, and interpret the data file LonLatBr.txt
Do not worry if you can't perfectly solve all three assessment tasks. Even if you partially solve them, this could already be a helpful indication whether you have the necessary background for joining our geophysics group.
Students Interested in Near-Surface Geophysics
Requirements
As a graduate student in near surface geophysics you will collect your own data in the field using our ground penetrating radar and resistivity/induced polarization equipment. The sites can be difficult to access and a field day can be long, typically from sunrise to sunset. However, the vast majority of your work will be processing, interpreting, and writing up results from the data you collected in the field. Because of this, the assessment focuses on geophysical data processing and interpretation.
Assessment Exercise
Please complete the
assessment AssessmentNearSurface.pdf
from this website:
http://alainplattner.net/downloads/assessments/AssessmentNearSurface.pdf
This will require you to download, process, and interpret the data files GPRprofile.DT1, GPRprofile.HD, and GPRprofileGPS.xyz for ground penetrating radar, and ERTprofile.stg and ERTprofileGPS.csv for electrical resistivity tomography.
Do not worry if you can't perfectly solve all three assessment tasks. Even if you partially solve them, this could already be a helpful indication whether you have the necessary background for joining our geophysics group.