Physical Science Seminar


PSCI 703 Seminar in Physical Sciences
Spring 2008

Instructor: John A. Schreifels
Office: S&T I - Room 331
Phone: (703) 993-1082
email: jschreif@gmu.edu

Grading: Seminar attendance and brief reports (see below)
[You can submit your reports to me directly or electronically.]
Home Page:http://mason.gmu.edu/~jschreif/psci703.htm

Course Description

PSCI 703 is a requirement for all PSCI PhD candidates. It carries one credit hour per semester and students must repeat this three times.

Students in this course are required to attend at least 10 seminars during the semester. To promote the interdisciplinary nature of this course, students are encouraged to attend seminars in several different disciplines offered at GMU (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Computational & Data Sciences) or any off campus seminars approved by the instructor (no more than two per semester).

Students are required to submit a brief summary for each seminar they attended to the course instructor.

Representative Seminar Series at GMU

College of Science Seminars

Physics and Astronomy Seminar

Seminar in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Chemistry and Biochemistry Seminar

COLLOQUIA of the Computational Materials Science Center

Krasnow Monday seminar series

Quantum Information Science (QIS) Seminar

Math Colloquium

Astrophysics Journal Club (Up to 2 seminars from this can be applied as long as there are formal speakers for the meeting).

Seminar Attendance Requirements:

For each seminar, submit a brief summary should be submitted. This should be an "executive summary" which should describe what main points the speaker was trying to make; these summaries should be approximately one page long. The first 5 summaries are due on Mar. 15 and the rest on May 6 Summaries can be placed in my mailbox (Rm. 343, S&T 1) or submitted electronically. You should include

1. Title, Speaker, Affiliation and where the seminar was attended. Please include the sponsoring department - Chem, Physics, etc.

2. Major points and conclusions made during the talk.

3. Submit electronic or paper copies.

4. First 5 due by Mar. 15; rest by May 6.

Grading:

The following grading scheme assumes on time submission of satisfactory summaries of the seminars:

A in the course requires attendance of at least 2 seminars outside of his(her) focus discipline.
A- will be given if a student attends only 1 seminar outside of the focus area.
B will be give to students attending all of the 10 seminars in a single discipline or attending 8 seminars and submitting satisfactory summaries..
Lower grades may be given if the above requirements are not met.

Last update: Feb. 1, 2008

Spring 2008