Is a Tenured Professorship Attainable in the Field of Physics?

[capandbells]

I spend way too much time on the internet reading about the physics career path, and I've heard a lot about how bleak the job market is for prospective physicists. I know it's very, very hard to get to a tenured position at a university, but is it at least possible? I know it would require sacrificing money, relationships, family, prestige and other things that people in their 20s and 30s are generally looking for. But I can't imagine leaving the physics world to be an overtrained stock analyst or computer programmer. I know a lot of people, especially young people like me, tend to romanticize what life as a physicist is like; I know it's not about being a genius who singlehandedly solves the problem of quantum gravity or proves string theory or anything like that. But I can't help but feel like a life apart from physics would be meaningless to me. I get so much out of learning and finding things out that any life not structured around that would be crushing.

I get the feeling, reading these forums, that, unless you're Noam Elkies or Terry Tao, or you're very lucky and know the right people, aiming for being a professor is an unreasonable goal. Should I even try? Why not just change my major to finance tomorrow?(comedy answer: tomorrow is Saturday.)

 

[Jack21222]

It's possible, but have a strong plan B. I was talking to my undergrad research advisor about this. He said he applied to almost 100 places before finally getting accepted to this small state school.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Well, if you are taking physics classes, presumably you have a professor, so there is an existence proof that this is not impossible. Those professors had to come from somewhere, right? They don't spring up like mushrooms after it rains.

That said, planning your whole life assuming you will get a professorship makes about as much sense as majoring in music assuming you will get a chair with a symphony orchestra. A backup plan is smart.

 

[twofish-quant]

I know it's very, very hard to get to a tenured position at a university, but is it at least possible?

You have roughly a 10% to 15% chance of getting a tenured faculty positions at a research university once you get your Ph.D. Also, your chances significantly increase if you are interested in teaching positions.

But I can't imagine leaving the physics world to be an overtrained stock analyst or computer programmer. I know a lot of people, especially young people like me, tend to romanticize what life as a physicist is like

And understate what life in industry is like. One reason I like my job is that the work environment is very much like graduate school, with slightly more spare time and a lot more money. And I'm not "overtrained." The people that hire me are sharks and if they could get someone to do the same work with half the training, they would.

Just to give you an idea of what I do. Yesterday, I was staring at ten pages of integral equations and thousands of lines of C++ code to figure out a better algorithm to calculate a rather nasty integral because the old algorithm is seriously broken. The cool thing for me is that until this problem came up, I had no special knowledge in algorithms to calculate nasty integrals, so I'm learning this very quickly. In the past month, I've learned several dozen new mathematical techniques.

The reason Ph.D.'s get hired for this sort of thing is that if something breaks down, and you give it to someone, they may come back, and say truthfully, "No one ever taught me this stuff." With Ph.D.'s you have situations in which it becomes obvious that in order for the multi-dimensional integration to work that you need to do a QR decomposition in order to diagonalize the matrix, and if you happen to know nothing about QR decompositions, well learn.

But I can't help but feel like a life apart from physics would be meaningless to me. I get so much out of learning and finding things out that any life not structured around that would be crushing.

Academia doesn't have a monopoly on jobs where you can spend your time "figuring stuff out."

I get the feeling, reading these forums, that, unless you're Noam Elkies or Terry Tao, or you're very lucky and know the right people, aiming for being a professor is an unreasonable goal.

You aren't likely to get a professorship even if you *are* Noam Ekies or Terry Tao.