PhD programs -- I’m interested in both astrophysics and AMO physics

[shja]

Hi everyone, l have a situation and l thought you could help me. Actually, l live in the U.S. and want to apply for several phd programs, but I’m interested in both astrophysics and AMO physics, and l can’t decide which track l should pursue a phd in. I’ve talked to several professors from my department and all of them told me to do the one which interests me more, but for me both are equally the same, so l want to ask u which one has more ongoing active research? I know some people in astronomy would say that I might not end up doing something related to this field, how about AMO? what does the future path of AMO or Astro look like? what are some other job titles rather than academia (for both of them)? (I know that I should never choose one because I want to pursue a career in academia but it’s always important to have a general idea about the outcome and please give me a straight answer and don’t say the one which interests you more! and I prefer to do research in observa. Astro and experimental AMO)

 

[Choppy]

I may not be in the best position to comment on ongoing research in astro and AMO, but one thing to point out is that a lot about your future career prospects (academic or otherwise) can actually come down to the details of the problem that you work on for your PhD, rather than the subfield itself.

For example, if you go into astrophysics and do your PhD on a project where you develop a neural network for combing through a particular data set to search for evidence of extra-solar planets, that kind of work can potentially open up a lot of options in the data-mining and machine learning industries. Whereas if your project is more on the observational side and involves image filtering and processing, there may be more options for you in research and development areas of medical imaging companies.

So I don't know if this helps you, but you might want to think a little about the types of problems or projects that you enjoy working on and the skills that you want to develop over the course of the PhD. Look into the graduate programs that you're interested in. Many will keep and publish some kind of "where are they now" data, so prospective students can see where their graduates are ending up. Looking at the details like this is probably going to give you more of what you want than an answer like "go into AMO physics because there are more industrial applications."

 

[shja]

thank you Choppy; could you please tell me some of the job titles for both of them? to be honest I’ve heard that people with a background in condensed matter or AMO will find a lot of jobs related to their field or similar to their research while other people may do something completely different (like hep-th, hep-ex, or Astro) or better to say Applied careers are well defined in industry rather than a pure subfield.