So I've taught intro math and intro physics at a local community college. The least I've been paid for 1 course is $2000, the most is $3500. One course is about 3 hours of lecturing and 2 office hours a week for a few months.
The first few times teaching a subject, designing lectures and...
Basically no one goes homeless after a phd, what they do discover is that they might not have a job in physics. Why do you want to get a physics phd? If you end up working in insurance or finance after your phd will you consider that time wasted?
If you go to get your phd, you are talking...
I'd extend the metaphor for accuracy- "I like math enough to get a phd" = "I like pizza so much that the only thing I want to do for the next decade is make, and then immediately consume pizzas one after another as I hone my craft. "
It depends. Would you be happy if you do something else for a day job, but teach the occasional math class at a small college for low pay? Getting an adjunct job is pretty easy, but the pay is awful (2k-3k for a 4 credit course), getting full time positions is very difficult.
Even high...
Pretty much yes, at least in the research professorship sense. Getting very low paid adjunct teaching positions is relatively easy.
The model of the academic job market you should have is many, many applicants for few jobs. This means that employers aren't going to gamble on a stale CV when...
You missed the part-time employed, which is 20% of the employed bachelors. We don't have satisfaction numbers because they were excluded from the rest of the survey, but I think it wold be fair to add them to the underemployed. That will move it up to 36% or so underemployed, which is pretty...
What I always found helpful was to save a few hard problems from earlier chapters and revisit them as I got farther in the book. i.e. when I'm at chapter 4, go back and do the saved chapter 1 problems WITHOUT referring to the book/notes,etc.
I would say forcing myself to work through...
This seems unlikely to be true any longer. I worked with several students at a flagship state school who met all of these criteria and the best program they got into were flagship state school. This upset most of them enough that they mentioned it regularly.
Hit up your contacts hard. Are you in touch with anyone who has a job similar to what you want? Do they know anyone? Contact your former university's career center, they may also have some contacts for you. Work that network.
Once you manage to get an interview, you can probably do...
When did you get your degree? Its hard for me to believe that someone can self-fund an education in today's tuition environment just by working over the summer and living at home. Even mid-tier state schools have grown quite expensive.
In the state in which I did gradschool, the flagship...
I'd be careful here. As a recently minted physics phd, I was totally unable to find a high school willing to take a chance on me. This was a few years ago, but I found the stories of shortage to be very exaggerated (much like the shortage stories about STEM workers)
Or you can find someone else willing to hire you directly into that job. In my experience, asking for more work responsibility is unlikely to produce the intended results.
Most of my peers, and myself, have had to change jobs repeatedly because most companies don't seem to want to nurture...
The downside is that in the way companies do things today, it can be hard to move up if you aren't willing to jump ship. I've changed jobs twice in the last three years (which is the extent of my entire working career).
In the first case, I discovered that I'd shot too low in my initial...
So part of the problem here might be that you don't actually like physics, or haven't found what you like. I legitimately enjoyed most of my physics courses, and most of the topics. While there were the occasional excruciatingly boring bits (crystallographic point groups come to mind), they...