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Physics, M.S.
Graduate Degree
Program Overview Request Info Program Highlights Featured Courses Career Opportunities Admission Requirements
Program Overview

Physics offers students a well-rounded education, with a broad array of knowledge in the physical and natural sciences, including chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and engineering. Students who study physics will develop several other traits useful for employment in non-physics fields and will develop skills in programming, numerical literacy, creativity and problem solving.

Physics is present in many specialized fields, including astronomy, astrophysics and nanotechnology. There are also medical physics, geophysics, microelectronics, engineering, chemistry and biophysics opportunities, as well.

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Program Highlights
Award Winning Faculty

At Marshall, we take pride in excellence in both research and teaching and our success is partly due to having world-class, award-winning faculty who are not only experts in their fields, but are also active in research.

Opportunities

Graduate students have a wide range of opportunities available for anyone interested in pursuing research. Topics addressed are diverse, spanning from theoretical condensed matter research, nanoparticles, soft condensed matter research, water filtration, laser and phonon physics, gravitation, relativity and numerical physics, optical astronomy, young sun-like stars, photovoltaic devices and thin film solar cells, and more, just ask or email one of our faculty.

State-of-the-Art Facilities

Students in the master of science in physics program take advantage of several facilities on Marshall’s campus in West Virginia, including the “BigGreen” cluster, which features 276 central processing unit cores, 552 gigabytes of memory and more than 10 terabytes of storage. The Molecular and Biological Imaging Center (MBIC) provides students with instrumentation, infrastructure and a learning environment required to support the research and teaching programs at Marshall. Recently, a portable Atomic Force Microscope was also acquired for use with research and teaching, as well as a JEOL JSM-7200F Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope and a Lulzbot 3D printer.

Featured Courses
PHY 508 - Thermal and Stat Physics
Introduction to Thermodynamics, kinetic theory of gases, classical and quantum statistical mechanics, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics, and application.
PHY 520 - Astrophysics
A detailed study of core problems in Astrophysics such as orbital dynamics, radiation processes, stellar structure and evolution, galactic dynamics, and cosmology.
PHY 542 - Quantum Mechanics
Mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, particles in potential fields, perturbation theory and other approximation methods, scattering, applications to simple systems.
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Career Opportunities
Physics offers students a variety of work opportunities that lead to challenging, exciting and productive careers. The field also offers employment opportunities throughout the world in government, industry, schools and private organizations. Starting salaries range from $45,000 to $70,000. The types of jobs held by graduates with a master’s degree in physics include:
  • Research Engineer
  • Data Analyst
  • Diagnostic Medical Physicist
  • Therapeutic Medical Physicist
  • Teacher
  • Clinical Scientist
  • Astronomer
  • Doctor