Frequently Asked Questions by students interested in joining the Conrad Neutrino Group...

How should I think about graduate work in this group?

You should think about graduate school at MIT as an apprenticeship. This job is the first step in your long-term career as a particle physicist. If you join us, you should plan to start research right away. You can potentially produce interesting papers as early as in your first year (for example, see this one on the KPipe experiment written by graduate student Spencer Axani in his first year, with help from postdoc Taritree Wongjirad).

What are the research opportunities in this group?

If you become a member of the group, you will be joining one of our research projects described on the research page, here. Your work will be in particle physics, particle astrophysics, and/or nuclear physics, depending on what projects and thesis topic you work on. It will be easy to move between these three subfields at the time of your postdoc. You will also learn some accelerator physics, by attending the US particle accelerator school and also via research within the group on cyclotrons.

Where will I be located?

Once you finish classes at MIT you will move out to the location that is the center of the experiment. For example, for MicroBooNE this is Fermilab and for IceCube this is WIPAC. These are just two examples; you may be based at some other location central to the projects you are working on. This gives you the maximum opportunity to make an impact and be visible, which is essential for your career. Postdocs in our group are posted at the site to which you will move. This is a very important point -- if you join this group, you must be willing to move to the center-of-mass of the experiment!

What types of projects will I work on during my career?

A strong grounding in experimental particle physics comprises work in three major areas: development for future experiments, phenomenology, and data crunching and analysis on an ongoing experiment. Development of future experients (which includes hardware and software development as well as experiment design) will help you hone your skills for when you want to run your own experiment. The phenomenological work will teach you to not wait around for theorists to do calculations for you. Note that your thesis must include analaysis of a data set that addresses particle physics questions. Students in the group will not do theses that are strictly hardware-related or phenomenology-based questions. We have access to plenty of particle physics data for you to study.

Will I have the opportunity to publish papers where I make a unique contribution?

Our group has a high publication rate, and we are most interested in students who like to write. We see reporting our work as essential to doing good science. During your career as a graduate student, you will publish two types of papers. The first are collaborative papers within your experiment. The second are small-author-list papers on particular topics you develop. Your goal should be to publish at least three small-author-list papers to which you have a direct and essential contribution during your career. To get a sense of what you can do within the group, here are some examples of few-author, peer-reviewed papers on which our present or recent graduate students made direct and essential contributions:

Will I be able to give talks at conferences?

You will give at least one talk per year at a conference, averaged throughout your career as a grad student. These will involve traveling to many places in the world. These will be spread across the topics you work on in hardware, software, phenomenology and analysis. In fact, you are likely to end up giving more talks per year. We have no shortage of invitations and it is only a matter of money. In many cases there are travel grants for graduate students to attend conferences, and the more of these you find, the more conferences you can attend. We are looking for students who want to present their work and be very visible.

How does the group interact?

We are a big and very collaborative group. During your career you are likely to work on more than one project, and so will move between the projects. We try to choose the projects so that they coordinate well for your thesis, and also coordinate well with the work of others in the group. We have a full group-meeting two or three times a year so that each member can present their work to all of the others.

How many years will I be a graduate student?

Typically 5 to 6 years. The longest would be 7 years. The shortest is 4 years. This is consistent with the average at MIT, which is 5.6 years. The reduction in the qualifying exam requirements, as of 2015, may shorten this average a bit in the future.

Who are the past graduate students from the group that I may meet in the field?

Past students include: Bonnie Fleming (faculty, Yale), Michel Sorel (faculty, Valencia), Dave Schmitz (faculty, Chicago), Georgia Karagiorgi (faculty, Columbia), Kazu Terao (research scientist, SLAC), Christina Ignarra (postdoc, SLAC), Ben Jones (faculty, UT Arlington), Gabriel Collin (postdoc, MIT Physics/SDSC)

This page was updated July 2018