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Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, is nationally recognized as a leading small liberal arts college. Within this institution of only 1300 undergraduates, one quarter of whom major in music, physics is thriving. Lawrence graduates an average of 10 physics majors and several minors each year. More than half of the physics majors go on to graduate programs in physics and related fields, placing Lawrence well ahead of other primarily undergraduate institutions.
John Brandenberger, chair of the Lawrence physics department, attributes this success to the faculty's belief that an effective undergraduate physics program must embrace far more than a curriculum. The five physicists on the faculty thus support several activities outside the classroom, including an aggressive recruitment program focusing on high-school seniors interested in physics; student involvement in faculty research; a steady stream of prominent physicists who make extended visits to the department; and a broad range of interactions among students, faculty, and visitors, including colloquia, teas, retreats, conferences, and planning sessions.
The department offers recruitment workshops, which currently focus on computational physics, laser physics, plasma physics, and x-ray diffraction. The weekend workshops attract 30-35 high-school seniors from around the nation. Travel to the workshop is subsidized by the university, and the attendees stay overnight with physics majors. Roughly one-third of the attendees matriculate at Lawrence. The workshops depend heavily on the participation of current physics majors, thereby giving students a role in sustaining the livelihood of the department.
Attracting students is only half the battle. To retain them, Lawrence focuses on high-quality teaching and a contemporary curriculum that provides opportunities for advanced projects and individual electives in the senior year. For the summer, students are encouraged to work with Lawrence faculty and to seek research experiences elsewhere at major laboratories. Recent physics majors have spent summers with research groups at CERN, JILA, NASA, IBM, national observatories, and various large research universities around the world. The department also supports a chapter of the Society of Physics Students and a Women of Physics group that endeavors to bring women physicists to speak about their research and to meet with women and men students.
Sustaining an undergraduate program with this breadth requires a major commitment by faculty and students, but those who are involved in the physics enterprise at Lawrence believe the extra efforts are justified. To reverse the current downward trends in physics enrollments nationwide, it may be necessary for more physics departments, both large and small, to broaden the range of their offerings, activities, and outreach to undergraduates.
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