nlsherrill said:
Although the likeliness of getting a tenure position in the field of your dreams may be a long shot, it is certainly possible and I know many people who ARE in those positions who worked very hard to get there.
It's possible to win the lottery or become King of England. I just wouldn't count on it.
Also, don't think that you can get the position if you work hard enough. If there are n spots and 10*n applicants, everyone works hard.
What is strange about your posts is that you always seem to advise people on not getting PhD's if they love physics, yet you do, you claim you are very interested in physics, and then you say you are "pretty close" to what you wanted.
I don't see the contradiction here. If you really are that obsessed with physics, then you aren't going to be influenced by anything that I say to convince you that you shouldn't do it. I've been told that if you plan to convert to Judaism that the first thing that a Rabbi will do is to try to convince you not to do it.
Same principle.
I can only come to the conclusion that you have either seen many of your friends fail to do what you have and feel bad for them, or you don't want more physicists that could take away your dream job from you, and I think its the latter.
No. I didn't get a tenure track research position, and I have no hope of getting a tenure track research position. I found something else that got me what I want out of life, but that was a lot of pain and agony. Was it worth it? For me, yes. For someone else no.
And also I do want to make it clear that the "dream job" make be a mirage. For example, right now it's not hard for a physics Ph.D. to find a job in Wall Street with a starting salary of $120-$150K. However, there are only several thousand of those jobs, and if you suddenly started having 10000/year physics Ph.D.'s instead of 1000 Ph.d.'s that would overload the system, and so salaries would drop and the jobs would be hard/impossible to get.
It would be nice if you didn't give completely false hope to a young person who has a dream, because you don't know what they are capable of or anything about them. It's good to give people a perspective of what they are getting into, but I disagree on crushing their dreams because you think they might not get a job.
We are dealing with 18 year olds and not eight year olds here.
By the time you are 18, you should be mature enough so that your life won't fall apart if someone tells you that there isn't a Santa Claus. If you don't want to hear someone talk about reality then you don't have to read anything that I have to say.
Also, the earlier you think about things, the more chances you have to change your future. If you start swimming the English Channel and 80% of the way through, you have problems, then you are in deep trouble. If you take a look and it seems that you aren't going to make it, you are in a much safer position.
Furthermore, taking humanities courses does have a purpose, but I would not agree at all that they induce deep thinking more than physics
It's a different type of thinking, but if you have a well taught course then it does make you think very deeply about things. Things like "so why am I trying to study physics?"
The critical thinking skills needed for coursework has transferred over to critical thinking in everyday tasks. I hold that physics has taught me to consider my options in every situation in a much deeper sense, and no other subject besides possibly math or philosophy could come close to that.
I don't. The problem with physics is that there are certain characteristics of physics problems that don't occur in other situations. For example, the laws of physics do not change, whereas the laws of finance do change from month to month. Physics tends to deal with repeatable things whereas people are not repeatable. One electron will act the same one one day to the next, but people just aren't that way. Physics problems tend to deal with things in which you have more or less complete information. When talking to a person, you don't have anywhere near complete information.
People are not electrons. Physics will help you look at the world, but if you think that physics is the *only* way of looking at the world, then you are setting yourself up for a pretty nasty fall.
Your chances may be slim, but you seem like a determined young physicist in the making. I also am a physics student, and from theoretical physicists I have spoken with, majoring in physics is a must. Double majoring in mathematics would probably be good if you have any extra time, but put the physics first.
Here is an example of "deep thinking" in action. I don't think saying that "your probabilities are slim" is a meaningful way of talking about the situation. The situation is that you have 100 people, and 10 spots. Describing the situation as P(win) = 0.1 doesn't fully describe the situation because if P(win) = 0.1, then there is a decent change that P(winners > 10) exists, when in fact P(winners > 10) = 0.
Physicists are human and are subject to the same types of cognitive biases that Las Vegas gamblers and lottery players have. To figure out how to deal with these sorts of tournament situations it helps to understand human psychology and one way of understanding human psychology is read great literature.
One other thing is that professors are often some of the worst people in the world to talk about physics careers, since they've spend all of their lived in the university, and often have no clue what life is like outside. Also there is selection bias. You are talking to people where P(winner) = 1, which can seriously distort what is likely to happen to you.
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