I think it's a question of the kind of code that people do in science/engineering as compared to CS (my background is that I'm a practicing physicist, but started out with a background in Computer Engineering in undergrad.) Yes, some basic CS (say an algorithms class) would be useful--but much of what we're working on as physicists is not what a traditional CS program would emphasize. For example, you have people with relatively small data sets that they want to fit--learning a language is about as far as they need to go. Others end up wanting to put a user interface around it if they use it excessively or distribute it for others. While perhaps a course on UI would be of use, for most, it's not what excites us, or advances us in our field.

Now, there are some who are doing high performance computing where abstraction and software engineering become important--but again, at the undergraduate level, how many courses are emphasizing the advantages of say templated C++ programming for scientific computations?

I think a service course on scientific computing would be of more use to most physicists than a general background in CS. For those that will end up working on large projects, then perhaps a course on software engineering. As for math courses, maybe I was a bit weird, but didn't you learn diff. equations in high school :p? But as for things like PDEs and such--I will say that a lot of it is learned as part of the coursework for say a first modern physics course, rather than in a math course...

For us, math, programming, etc. are tools that we use to do what we're interested in...(This is in no way to denigrate math or programming)

The head of the program was a cosmologist, actually. I know that she taught herself to code, as did the other two profs I worked for. -I think that had something to do with their attitudes. Also, it might have just been from a practicality standpoint. We didn't have the room for multiple CS courses, and the students seemed to be able to pick it up well enough to do what they needed to.

I have to mention, I did take a 100-level CS course as an elective, and personally, it was too basic. I think to get what we needed, we would have had to skip the intro courses, and I it's possible the CS department would have frowned on that. On a related note, my PhD was in medical physics, and our department did have an agreement with the bio department to let us take a 400 level physiology class without the prereqs. It was a point-of-pride in the physics program that our students always lead those classes.

No doubt CS can get deep and anyone that codes could benefit from those higher-level courses. But, I think the situation wouldn't allow for that.

Maybe she was saying that physics students were bright enough to figure out what they needed on their own. From what I saw, she would be correct there. We weren't math majors, but we were pretty able. :)

The problem with a pure pull approach is that you only know the first things that let you accomplish what you want to do. Sometimes, those first things are good enough to get the job done, but not enough to let you really know what's going on. That's not a problem now, but it may be in the future.

Anyway, it seems more like you agree CS courses aimed specifically at scientific computing would be good and worthwhile.

>Anyway, it seems more like you agree CS courses aimed specifically at scientific computing would be good and worthwhile.

Oh, absolutely. I think there might be an analogy in writing. -I'm no writer, but I can pen an effective grant. I'd really like to be an effective writer too, but that would be a divergent path in light of my work.

There's just not enough time in one human life. :/

BTW, a second postdoc is cruel and unusual punishment IMO. My best wishes to your friend.

Also, it's sad and unfair, but even though I've know some people succeed in getting a permanent position after the second postdoc, it gets harder as the number of postdoc increases...

As a physics undergrad we were told "you should probably learn a programming language", but were never given any specific course requirements (or suggestions that I remember).

I actually took multiple programming classes and ended up doing my PhD in computational physics. One of the biggest issues is that much of the software written by and for physicists tends to have very poor design, because they tend to learn the bare minimum necessary to get things to work (in Fortran no less).

They still insisted you take math courses, correct?

This is true, but we still learned a ton of math techniques in our physics classes. I must have learned Fourier transforms about 6 times (and finally understood them after the 3rd time or so :) )