thinkies said:
AND why does a f***** doctor make more then an astrophysicist, both of them require same hard work, just different fields. Lack of people in astrophysics?...o.0
Well as one of my friends (a fellow physics grad student) said, "when doctors mess up, no one dies." Let's face it, medicine is just a lot more useful to society than astrophysics. It's true that an astrophysicist's research may lead to the idea that leads to the idea that leads to some new technological marvel. But doctors need to save lives every day, which requires a whole lot of innovation, and leads to technological advancement a lot faster thanan astrophysicist's work. I might concede that astrophysicists are smarter...though as an astrophysics grad student myself I'm obviously biased. However, at the end of the day people need medical doctors way more than they need us.
Anyway to answer your question, I can give you some hard figures from my school. My thesis advisor (tenured professor) makes $90,000/year. The assistant professor in my research group makes $80,000/year. Of course my research group is really comprised of physicists masquerading as astronomers (I do high energy astro, which is really more physics than astro), so maybe their salaries are slightly higher than that of most astronomers. For example, there's full professor in my department who does regular astro, who makes $80,000/year. There's also an older woman in my department who makes $100,000/year, but she's ~60, so maybe it's because she's been around for awhile.
So if my physics & astronomy department is representative of most departments in America, these should tell you the sort of salary you can expect to make as an astrophysicist. You won't be rolling in dough, but it's more than enough for a very comfortable life. We who do academics do have a few advantages over doctors too. We can come and go as we please, we don't have to carry beepers around, and we get to contribute to scientific scholarship full-time (no life saving to get in the way). Resident physicians work 60 hours per week because they have to. We work 60 hours per week because we love what we do. Personally I very much enjoy analyzing data to look for information about stellar evolution, soldering preamplifiers, and yes, even doing my statistical mechanics homework. And even my measly graduate stipend is more than enough for me to get by (yes that's right, we effectively get paid to do our homework in graduate school). It's also the sort of job from which you never have to retire, if you don't want to. There are a lot of old physicists in my department. I think quite a few of them are probably going to die before they quit physics.
Does this sound appealing to you? If so, then sign up in a few years. But if not, then I'd recommend running away while you still can. It's an arduous and rewarding path, but it doesn't have much financial incentive. You don't want to want to waste 9-10 years on something that won't fiscally pay off.
And you can't even properly spell it!
