Much has been said about the utmost vital need to be highly ranked. All sorts of important people, from prospective students to governments, take note of the one number to which your program is distilled by a prestigious, serious and rigorous ranking agency. At Pitt we did not enjoy particularly high rankings so far, which made us very-very sad.
Until today when we got a shot of awesome news – not only are we ranked high, but we are NUMBER ONE, in the WORLD (In the Universe most likely for that matter).
University of Pittsburgh Physics and Astronomy Department was ranked first in the world for the quality of coffee from a department coffee machine.
To the skeptics out there who might be wondering – how has this ranking been established? The same way as the US News report ranks graduate schools – we asked a few people. The US News survey department chairs in your discipline (let’s say physics) from US universities “name top physics/condensed matter/particle/astro graduate programs”. Some of them, maybe 30%, reply, and they do some math (likely addition and division) with those numbers, then they publish them for everyone to contemplate and make their life choices. So the ranking of graduate schools is based on the opinions of a few people who likely never been to most schools, haven’t seen their labs, haven’t read their papers, didn’t talk to their faculty and students…
Inspired by this great system, we did the same. We asked. We did not have time to ask all department chairs in the country, since we only had the idea this morning, so we just asked ourselves. But we’ve been to MANY departments. And we drank their coffee. And we are definitely number one, in physics, in this category.
(If you include other departments, e.g. chemistry, we would probably have to yield to the University of Oregon, though we are still to visit. If you include regular coffee shops, some of which are in the Physics buildings, we will probably also go down in ranking, quite far. If you ask department chairs to rank coffee machines, and then average their replies, you will get Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Caltech etc.)
spin and coffee 