Undergraduate study in physics and astronomy

Series of images: student in class; students in lecture theatre; student in research lab

The spirit of discovery

Physics is about more than numbers and formulae. It's driven by imagination. The excitement of discovery. You'll be using your scientific knowledge and creativity to explore and challenge ideas about the physical world – right from the miniscule sub-atomic world of quarks and gluons to the vastness of the universe.

Learn from experts

You will learn in an environment built around a passion for the subject. Our academic staff are experts in their chosen fields, with world-wide reputations for their research. This expertise feeds directly into your course, so you learn about the latest developments in your discipline and stay at the heart of ground breaking discoveries.

Team spirit

We're a friendly and sociable department, where academics and students collaborate as colleagues. Your personal tutor will support you throughout your degree and staff have an open door policy, so you'll always find someone to offer advice and encouragement.

As part of your course, you’ll get involved in a range of projects – working alongside leading researchers in our department and other students in your year. This type of experience builds key scientific skills as well as the broader skills that employers value highly – teamwork, communication, problem solving.

Your career

Your mix of scientific knowledge, creativity and skills like teamwork, IT and logical thinking, will open up many career possibilities. Our graduates are achieving success in diverse fields within and beyond the science arena, from aerospace, defence and energy to teaching, telecommunications and computing. Recent statistics show our students have an average salary of £25,000 six months after graduation; the third highest (after Oxford and IC) in the Russel group of research intensive universities.

Degrees with Employment Experience

Our courses can be taken as Degrees with Employment Experience, allowing you to combine your course with a 1-year employment placement.

More about employment experience

The right course for you

Choose from a wide range of BSc and MPhys degrees.

If you're keen to see more of the world, our degrees with Study Abroad could be for you. You'll spend your third year studying at a leading university in North America or Australasia.

Field trips and placements

As part of your course, you'll have the chance to do field trips in the UK as well as Europe. So you could find yourself investigating dark matter 1km underground in Boulby Mine. Or 2,400m above sea level at the observatory in Tenerife.

Click here to discover what you might do on one of our placements.

There are also opportunities to work in a research group during the summer vacation.

Highly satisfied

94% of our 2012 graduating students were satisfied with their course. Our National Student Survey score places us in the top five research intensive (Russel Group) universities for overall student satisfaction. In addition, 96% of our graduating students said that their course was intellectually stimulating.

Astronomy videos

Click here to see videos of the current activities of our astronomers.

Relativity revision lecture

Click here to watch a series of videos about relativity given by Dr Ed Daw who is one of our lecturers.

The physics of time travel

A day in the life of a physics student

More about how you'll learn

You'll benefit from comprehensive facilities, including dedicated teaching and research laboratories, study rooms and IT suites, two telescopes on the roof of our building and remote access to a telescope in the Canary Islands. Medical physics students use facilities in the nearby Royal Hallamshire Hospital.
See the typical timetable to get a feel for what topics you could be studying and how physics courses are structured.