What are my chances of getting a job in actual physics research?

Vanadium 50

I think it's more like joining the Air Force and not becoming a pilot. There's plenty of other stuff that needs to be done, but it may not be your first choice.

twofish-quant

We seem to be going down the analogy road, but....

One thing about graduate school is that it's more than "school." When you are in graduate school, you are not merely training to be a pilot, you are a pilot. They put you at the console of a 747 and then won't let you out unless they know that you can do it.

This makes physics graduate school, different from say law school or medical school. When you are in law school, you aren't a lawyer. When you are in medical school, you aren't a doctor. When you are in physics graduate school, you are a physicist, a scientist, and a "real" researcher, since there is no way that you can learn to do scientific research other than by doing it for real.

That's the "good news" about doing physics. It's not hard to be a physics researcher. You just apply to graduate school and as a student, you are a "real" researcher. The tough part is if you go in, figure out what you love the stuff, and want to figure out how you can do it for the rest of your life.

chill_factor

thats true. a grad student is indeed a real researcher. and it is a job. I put in the hours in lab every day just like at a factory job.

but i think what the OP was asking was probably along the lines of a nonstudent job.

reasonableman

I chose 'professor = physics research' because those were the criteria of the OP. As you say, that is highly debatable.

Are you sure about this? I interact with a few academics and the most usual cause of post-docs leaving their field is the poor value proposition. Of course, there are poor post-docs that can't find positions but, a more common problem is something like, their professor is moving and taking the team with him, and the post-doc doesn't want to move *again*.

I contend that, if, at the end of a post-doc you are willing to go anywhere, to work in any field and have decent professional skills, you will be able to find a post-doc position. If you continue this for a few decades you probably (~75%) can land a permanent position somewhere.

ParticleGrl

After about two postdocs, the chances of getting another are minimal (at least in the fields I am familiar with). I've worked with several postdocs who hit that wall.

reasonableman

But don't some post-doc positions only last about a year? It would seem crazy to write-off someone if they've only done two years, not saying it doesn't happen though...

Also I did add the caveat changing field may be necessary, if you are an experienced person in a newly, fashionable field then you'll have an easier time. Changing fields makes this more probable.

As I said, my only experience is externally interacting with UK academia, so I maybe wrong, or my experience may not be applicable.

twofish-quant

I'm interested in knowing your background.

If you are junior faculty and have actually gotten a professorship, then we need to have a talk because I'd be *very* interested in knowing what I should be doing differently, and who I should be sending my resume to.

If you are an undergraduate or have just started graduate school, then we need to have a talk. First of all you've been extremely misinformed, and I'd be very interested in knowing who has misinformed you. One thing that's a consistent theme in a lot of the papers that on careers is that undergraduates have extremely skewed expectations.

Even in fields where most people end up in research positions, it turns out that few of those positions are tenured faculty.

Most post-docs are three years.

It's *extremely* difficult to change fields within academia. It's not totally impossible (there are people here who have done it), but it's extremely difficult. The trouble is that if you spend ten years studying X, and suddenly there are new jobs in Y, you are competing against people that have spent ten years studying Y, and you are likely to lose. Also if you spend a year "retraining" then you have lost ground against people who haven't.

If UK is hiring, then just let me know where I should send my resume.

twofish-quant

This is a pretty relevant paper

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011AAS...21714502D

I find it particularly interesting since I'm in the sample.

One other useful paper is

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0904.2571.pdf

Something that is interesting is that most people in astronomy stay in astronomy in some form or another.

Zarqon

hmm, how to interpret "50% of graduates are in postdoc position after 6 years, but 75% are still doing astronomy after 7-14 years"? To me those numbers seem to contradict each other. Also, 75% still doing astronomy after 75% seems to indicate that many are able to stay in academia? Note, I'm also in academia and now that tenure is difficult, so I just find the numbers in that abstract a bit odd.

Locrian

Why?

Maybe it has to do with defining "doing astronomy". . .

twofish-quant

Since I happen to know the people in the study....

It's actually quite a complicated picture. It turns out that relatively few people (I think the number was about 10%) end up with tenure-track positions in research universities. The jobs associated with "doing astronomy" turn out to be quite varied with some people doing K-12 teaching, community college teaching, science journalism, research position, and lots of people getting professorships in small liberal arts colleges.

There's quite a bit of ambiguity involved with the term "doing astronomy." For example, I know someone that happens to be the head an academic supercomputing center. You could probably classify him as doing astronomy. Some for someone on a technical staff of an observatory. They aren't publishing papers in Ap.J., but they could be classified as doing astronomy.

And then there is me. For the purpose of the paper, I was classified as having "voluntarily left" astronomy (although "voluntary" is another word that's disputable). On the other hand I have taught introductory astronomy courses at the University of Phoenix as an adjunct, so whether you want to classify me as in the field is debatable.

However, the fact that most people end up in career situations that are hard to classify is in itself interesting. There are a lot of "backdoor researchers." For example, astronomy department needs someone to babysit computers. They hire an astronomy Ph.D. to do system administration work with the understanding that they can do research on the side.

reasonableman

I wrote quite a long response but lost it as I was automatically logged out. My main points:

- I am not an academic I work for a government contractor, we often work with academia. In seven years I have seen one post-doc attain Reader. Many are still at the same level as when I started.

- I looked on findapostdoc and findaphd, the ratio of science post-docs to phds was 1:10. Clearly it is a difficult market. (Also a few of them were for just one year).

- I am not saying it is easy to get a permanent position at a university but I want to balance the dominant message on this forum that it is not impossible, but incurs severe costs.

- I didn't mean change field from biophysics to HEP, but you can go from using a technique to developing it for example.

- The field you want to research clearly plays a part. Astrophysics is probably one of the more difficult.

twofish-quant

This is one problem with thinking about "lottery ticket" situations. It's not mathematically impossible to win the lottery since mathematically, one person has to be able to get it, but I think it *is* unreasonable to think that you can win the lottery by working hard.

You have 10*X applicants. If by going insane and giving up everything, you get yourself down to X applicants, then you win. The trouble is that my observation is that by giving up everything, you still have 2*X applicants, which means that you are still likely to lose. One reason that I use the lottery ticket analogy is that my view is that even if you put in maximum effort, you still end up with more applicants than places, which means that what determines if you get a spot is random or essentially so.

There's also necessary/sufficient. To win the lottery it's necessary to buy a ticket, but it's not sufficient.

I don't think you can. One big problem with Ph.D. physics research is how as a practical matter one gets typecast.

Maybe. One thing that is curious from Dinerstein's study is that astronomy is probably one of the easier areas to find work since there are (surprisingly) large numbers of non-academic technical support positions and teaching positions.