Student Resources

Graduate Information

Up-to-date information and documents are provided by the graduate advisor on Beachboard (enter Beachboard and look for My Organization). Information on the graduate program can also be found under Student Information.

Graduate Handbook

Forms for PHYS-496, 691, 697 and 698

The following forms have to be filled out by faculty and students and signed by the supervising faculty when signing up for units in one of these classes. Please discuss with your supervisor before signing up for any of these classes. Note that the requirement for any of these is that the student has to give a 5-8min presentation at the end of the semester.

Writing your thesis

An initiative taken by the Mathematics and the Physics departments to have a template for writing the thesis is underway for some time already. Below are two options. The first one has been developed by several generations of students at the Physics department and seems to work for the Thesis Office. The second one is a more comprehensive attempt by a former Master student of the Mathematics department, Roger Dellaca, to have a Thesis-office-approved CSULB class for writing the thesis in LaTeX (to install LaTeX see below). Both will be put on the site during September 2009. It is recommended to use the template developed by R.Dellaca. Furthermore, it is strongly advised (especially for theoreticians) that you write your thesis in LaTeX as it is used by many if not most of the Physics journals. Best is to discuss the matter with your thesis advisor!

Writing a Poster

Writing and printing a poster about your work must be done together with, and approved by a faculty member of the department. General information can be found on the site of the Jensen SAS Center.

• Template in LaTeX  (courtesy of Z.Papp). Clicking on the underlined words will download the zipped folder PosterTemplate.zip. Unzip it (double click on the folder name in Mac, or Windows, use the unzip command in Linux/Unix). This will create the folder PosterTemplate (the original downloaded file remains in the process). Read the "README_PosterLate.rtf" file first! It describes how to write the LaTeX poster and how to compile it. General LaTeX resources can be found below.
• Template in Powerpoint. This link leads you to the page of the Jensen SAS Center where you can download the template for Powerpoint. Informations on writing the poster in Powerpoint can be found there and in the help pages of Powerpoint.

 

Writing a scientific article

Writing an article with LaTeX is easy!

• Most scientific journals have a class file (ending with .cls) that contains the layout of the journal. You can download it from the journal homepage. For APS journals (Physical Review, etc.) the class file is presently revtex4 and can be downloaded here.
• On top of the LaTeX document you have \documentclass[X]{Y}, where X are various options and Y is the class name (the name of the file given by the journal, without the ending .cls)
• Most journals do not like or do not allow the use of "home-made" commands (with "newcommand" or "renewcommand"). Though useful for writing a text, you will need to remove them at the end. This is easily done with any editor.
• Some journals such as those of the American Physical Society (APS) want the figures in eps format. Others want pdf formatted figures. Keep this in mind when finalizing your figures. Note also that you cannot insert a pdf figure into Powerpoint. It is best to do one copy of the figure in jpeg format for that matter.
• more to come...

Writing and preparing a presentation: the abc of a good talk

The preparation of a scientific presentation requires to choose a media and to follow a few rules:

Feel free to contact Andreas Bill if you believe something should be added to this page or if you notice that one of the links is no longer valid. Thank you!