3.1 Recruitment

Please direct comments to Janis McKenna.

We have attracted many excellent students in the past, and recent sizable top-up awards for major scholarship holders have helped in recent recruitment.

Presently, we have the capacity for at least 20-30 more graduate students. We have approximately 70 faculty members (including associates and adjuncts) who can supervise graduate students, and 140 graduate students would be a healthy enrollment number which would not stretch our resources (we currently have a shortage of TAs, due to the fact that a sizable fraction of our graduate students are major scholarship holders who don't need/want extra TA funding). This number of students would not be a problem for our guaranteed funding policy, as long as a similar fraction of our students continue to hold major scholarships.

We must not lower our standards in order to increase enrollment.

3.1.1 Recruiting Weekend

Our first major recruiting weekend last spring went well. We managed to contact over 40 of the 52 NSERC PGSA Physics and Astronomy winners last year, invited them to visit UBC. Thirteen of these NSERC holders did come for a visit and we paired each with a current graduate student mentor/guide. Several who visited said they probably would not have considered UBC had we not invited them for a visit. Several non-NSERC holders were also invited, and a number of our own undergraduates attended. We propose to continue this event and expand it by inviting senior honours undergrads here and at SFU to participate.

3.1.2 Undergraduate Exposure

We have had a presence at the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference (CUPC) for the past 3 years, sending a faculty member and literature with the undergrad delegates, and we have received good feedback. We recently sent one faculty member to the Atlantic Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy Conference (AUPAC) as well. We must continue and expand these recruitment efforts, to include Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) and Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) annual meetings, and other undergraduate conferences, keeping in mind that it is often the very best undergraduates who attend these meetings.

3.1.3 Top-ups

The recent turnaround in graduate enrollment numbers is at least partially due to the excellent NSERC top-ups we have offered in the past two years. We propose to keep NSERC top-ups at an attractive level, regardless of the university/Dean's top-up contributions.

3.1.4 External Seminars & Colloquia

We encourage faculty giving seminars and colloquia at other universities to take along recruitment information. Several faculty members have done such recruiting with notable success, including specific visits to other universities' undergraduate societies. A Graduate Program poster is currently in the design stages, and we will have grad advertising packages available to give to faculty members who visit other universities for colloquia and seminars. We shall work on extending our aggressive recruiting to American undergraduate students, as there is an untapped market of excellent young scientists just south of the border.

3.1.5 Web Site

Our Web pages are a great advertisement for our Graduate Program and we shall continue to explore opportunities to use this Internet technology to our advantage. The Graduate Co-ordinator has done a professional-looking job with the Web page design and layouts. We/she get thousands of inquiries per year concerning our Graduate Program. The ever increasing volume of applications lead her to implement a pre-screening application interface on our Web pages. This pre-screening has helped greatly reduce the number of underqualified applications, easing the admissions workload. She has also interfaced the full FOGS application online forms to our application info Web pages, making the application procedure very simple for applicants. Despite all this stream-lining, numbers of applications to our Graduate Program are still up in the past 2 years. The creation and and frequent updating of over 40 Web pages for graduate students and potential graduate students in Physics and Astronomy has helped in eliminating many standard inquiries. We have put our P&A Graduate Program info/brochure into PHYSLINK and PhysicsWeb, which are well-used public shopping grounds for Graduate School information in Physics and Astronomy.