Physics PhD Success: 1 in 10 or 1 in 4?

[diligence]

Something that I think would be kind of cool is if someone starting printing physics professor trading cards. Also it puts things in perspective. It's great to play baseball, but if you have a student that thinks that they are likely to be a professional major league baseball player, it would be wise for them to have some sort of backup plan. The difficulty in getting a research professor position is on the same order of difficulty.

Haha, yeah. Good thing earning a PhD comes with a sort of "built-in" backup plan that's certainly not inherent in professional sports. Worrying about a backup plan while searching for a professorship with a PhD doesn't seem to warrant the same concern as certain other pipe-dreams might.

By the way, do the statistics you quote apply strictly to physics PhD's, or are these across the board? Regardless, I know that any area of academia is cutthroat, but I don't seem to catch the same vibe coming from, say, the math community, which is where my aspirations are beginning to lean (maybe partly due to the grim outlook you provide, but mostly because i don't truly enjoy experimental physics. i find writing proofs infinitely more enjoyable than accounting for uncertainty). Of course, math is super competitive also, but I'm getting the impression that the "gauntlet" is traversed a little earlier than physics (i.e. grad admissions vs post-postdoc job searching).

 

[Geezer]

Question regarding this statistic:

I've read on here a lot that if you complete a physics PhD you have a 1 in 10 chance of obtaining a research professor job. 1 in 4 chance if you graduate from a top school.

This is after an average of 6 years of postdoc'ing (for the top school, 1 in 4 chancer). No idea what it is from the set of all schools.

Yeah, that seems right to me.

 

[l-1j-cho]

I thought getting a tenured professorship is 1/25 or so if you graduate from the top tier school. Where did you get the statistics