How Is High Energy Physics as Career?

[SuperStringboy]

Lot of people asking about the jobs and salary of Astrophysics and i have also asked before. Now i ask about high energy physics..What about salary at CERN and Fermilab ? and is it has more job opportunities than Astrophysics and theoretical physics at usa or europe?

What do you say?

 

[Locrian]

It's funny, because HEP was in a terrible state career wise not long ago. With the LHC coming online everyone talked about how things would be better, and I thought it was reasonable.

We were naive. The LHC has created huge demand for graduate students, but has increased the number of actual permanent positions by a very small number. So more people than ever are on the train to nowhere.

A similar thing happened six or eight years ago, where the NIH had its budget doubled and yet permanent positions increased by around. . . zero. Why hire permanent positions that are really expensive when you can haul in graduate students who are cheap?

What do you say?

I say that the top 3% of all students who study HEP - the ones who excel at ever level, the ones who attend the top schools, the ones who get the big-name advisors - will have excellent career prospects and lead fulfilling lives. If you aren't sure you're in that subset, look elsewhere, or at least have a great backup plan.

 

[ZapperZ]

Right now, with the current budget debacle in the US and UK, high energy physics does not look very attractive as a career. It wasn't that attractive before when compared to condensed matter/atomic/medical physics, but it is worse now.

Zz.

 

[hardopc]

ZapperZ, what would your thoughts on the current career for HEP be? More attractive than 08? Less attractive than 08?

 

[lubuntu]

I think it has a lot of POTENTIAL....get it? :)

 

[hardopc]

was that stemming from sarcasm or were you serious?

 

[arunma]

Grad student in high energy astro here. Question: if you're not doing condensed matter, then precisely what can you do with a PhD in physics outside of academia that still involves doing physics? Because I really don't want to become a quant on Wall Street who writes ROOT scripts to predict market forces.

 

[TMFKAN64]

I think there is also demand in industry for people with a Ph.D. in optics.

But for astrophysics, I think your alternatives are either academia or NASA.

 

[vanesch]

Are you talking about experimental or theoretical HEP ?

As an experimentalist, there are a lot of opportunities in instrumentation, like in medical imaging, on synchrotrons or in the nuclear sector, or in the data acquisition business which is even larger.

 

[quZz]

What about theoretical HEP? or theoretical nuclear physics?

 

[Locrian]

Because I really don't want to become a quant on Wall Street who writes ROOT scripts to predict market forces.

Don't lay awake at night worrying about ending up with a job on Wall Street. It probably wouldn't happen if you wanted.