Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government set in motion a broad set of measures whose aim was to screen foreign applicants for entrance into the US, to try to identify those who it was felt might attempt to carry out further attacks. Since the 2001-02 academic year had already begun in most schools, and since it took time for…

Despite years of continued growth, women's participation in physics remains among the lowest of any scientific field. The issue is of great concern to many in the scientific community, spawning talks at conferences, data collection efforts, and speculation about the causes of women's low participation in physics. Although women's participation in…

On the weekend of February 3-6, the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois hosted the 2005 National Conference of Black Physics Students, marking the 19th consecutive year that the Conference has provided African American physics students with the unique opportunity to meet and network with counterparts from all across…

The American Institute of Physics has regularly reported information about physics and astronomy graduate students since 1968. In more recent years the survey has shifted to focus on first-year graduate students, with a survey of the full population of graduate students every few years. This report covers surveys of first-year students for the…

The decision about which college to attend can be daunting. College bound high school students may pore over catalogs, make visits to multiple campuses, and negotiate the intricacies of financial aid. There are a variety of choices, and the most basic of choices involves what type of school to attend. Should it be a well-funded research university…

The 2004 joint annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP) was held in Washington, DC during the weekend of February 18th-21st, 2004. This conference, held jointly for the first time this year, provided the over 300 African-American and Hispanic-American physics…

About one-third of the physics majors in the class of 2001 took more than 4 years to complete their undergraduate studies. The most common reasons were receiving a double major and changing majors. There are 761 departments in the US that confer at least a bachelor's degree in physics. These programs produced 4091 bachelor's degrees in the class…

The eighteenth annual National Conference of Black Physics Students (NCBPS) was held February 5-8, 2004 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Conference brought together Black students interested in physics to meet and network with Black working physicists, corporate as well as graduate school recruiters, faculty members, administrators,…