Student Training

The Gravity Group welcomes new students who share our passion for gravity, astrophysics, and math. Membership to the group is contingent on a selective and rigorous apprenticeship program designed to strengthen mathematical methods (dimensional analysis, perturbation methods, dynamical systems, and differential geometry) and to teach soft research skills (e.g. writing, LaTeX) that we consider essential to scholarly work in our fields on interest. All Gravity student-members take at least one general relativity course as an elective, though most take extra electives in astrophysics, general relativity, and mathematical physics. Students work on research projects that develop strong proficiency with Mathematica and/or Python. They routinely subject their research writing to rigorous peer review through the annual SPP Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas (Philippine Physics Society) conference proceedings.

The group holds a weekly Monday Journal Club to keep us up-to-date on the latest research developments. This helps strengthen our students’ critical thinking and public speaking skills. To cultivate wide interest in physics, we also organize informal meetings, which we call Crazy Gravity Fridays, for us to critically discuss physics topics outside our areas of expertise. These are usually based on articles from Physics Today or Quanta Magazine, and are fun opportunities for us to explore unfamiliar topics. They help us become fluent with many ideas and remind us of the underlying unity of physics as a discipline. Finally, we organize a highly interactive Annual Gravity Workshop that runs for two weeks in the midyear/summer term, in which faculty and students take turns lecturing, calculating, and coding, on various planned topics in gravity and geometry. These activities help build solid foundations for our students to achieve success in a wide variety of careers. Please visit our Alumni page to learn more about where our students go after Gravity.