Is Pursuing An Academic Carrer (in Mathematical Physics) Stressful?

[Ege_O]

Hey everyone, I am a new member. This post is about something that bothers me a lot and will affect my future. I am not sure whether I'm pursuing a carrer that is right for me.

I graduated from the physics department of Middle East Technical University in Turkey with 3.45/4.00 CGPA this year. I've always wanted to be a theoretical/mathematical physicist since the elementary school. I took String Theory, General Relativity, Particle Physics courses in my undergraduate years. I've imagined myself thinking about the deep questions in physics and teaching it. I am searching for a master program in Europe nowadays.

However, many people around me and on the internet say that a career in academia is very competitive and not well-paid. I am afraid that if do PhD in mathematical physics it will be too late to change my career and I will be unable to find a job outside the academia since the areas I am interested in are relativity, foundations of quantum mechanics and so on.

I don't want to live a rich life or be a professor at the top universities, however, I don't want to live a stressful life either. I want to have a stable job with sufficient salary and little amount of stress. I am open to any suggestions. I recently conderider pursuing a career in other areas such as particle physics, cosmology or quantum computation, however, my dream job will always be theoretical physics.

 

[Choppy]

There really isn't much of a way around it. Academia is competitive no matter how you look at it. For a rough rule of thumb there are an order of magnitude more PhD graduates than there are professor positions. So most PhD graduates end up leaving the academic world through no fault beyond simple statistics.

One bit of advice here is to decouple the term "career" from the term "education." Your education is what you study in school. Your career is what you'll end up doing to feed yourself. The two are correlated, obviously, but just because you study one field doesn't mean you're electing to embark on a career in it.

None of this is to say you shouldn't study what you want. That's where your passion lies and if you're really sure about it - pursue your dreams with your education. But be smart about it. Build a BACKUP PLAN.

That way if you finish your PhD and realize that things aren't going the way you thought, you've got some options to feed yourself. I can't tell you exactly how to do this. But you might want to think about picking up some programming skills to go with your theoretical studies, or doing an internship.

 

[Ege_O]

There really isn't much of a way around it. Academia is competitive no matter how you look at it. For a rough rule of thumb there are an order of magnitude more PhD graduates than there are professor positions. So most PhD graduates end up leaving the academic world through no fault beyond simple statistics.

One bit of advice here is to decouple the term "career" from the term "education." Your education is what you study in school. Your career is what you'll end up doing to feed yourself. The two are correlated, obviously, but just because you study one field doesn't mean you're electing to embark on a career in it.

None of this is to say you shouldn't study what you want. That's where your passion lies and if you're really sure about it - pursue your dreams with your education. But be smart about it. Build a BACKUP PLAN.

That way if you finish your PhD and realize that things aren't going the way you thought, you've got some options to feed yourself. I can't tell you exactly how to do this. But you might want to think about picking up some programming skills to go with your theoretical studies, or doing an internship.

This is the exactly the way I've decided to follow. Nowadays I am looking for mathematical physics master in Europe but as a back up plan I want to develop in programming especially in data science and machine learning.

Thanks a lot for your answer, it gave me courage to walk along this path.