PhD Jobs Update: Post-Docs Fill The Void

The fine folks at the AIP's Statistical Research Center have the latest employment numbers for physics PhD's a year after graduation. First the good news: unemployment is still amazingly low.  Only 2% of physics PhD's were unemployed a year after graduation compared to about 9% for the general population in the US over the same time period and over 10% for those ages 25-35.  The bottom line is that physics PhD's continue to be extremely employable.  Isn't it nice to feel wanted?

Now for the bad news:  between 2008 and 2010 the fraction of new PhD's taking potentially permanent positions fell by about 8%.  The deficit was made up largely by increases in the availability of post-docs, at least partially due to the stimulus package passed in 2009.

 So while there are still plenty of jobs, more and more of those jobs are temporary positions designed to funnel people into faculty jobs that have been extremely scarce.

Hopefully, the potentially-permanent jobs will return as the economy improves.  Of course that is assuming government deadlock, the national debt, global warming, European fiscal crises, or attacks by Godzilla don't derail our tepid recovery.  While physics PhD's aren't immune to the world's economic woes, it does appear that we're faring better than most.

What PhD's Want To Be When They Grow Up

Almost everyone who goes to grad school in physics does so thinking that they will one become a tenured professor at a large university.  And anyone who has been around a physics graduate program for a while knows that for most of us that is simply not going to happen.  A recent book by Paula Stephan entitled "How Economics Shapes Science" shows that 23% of physics PhD's hold tenure-track appointments 6 years after their PhD, which means that less than one-quarter of those that survive grad school will get to be a professor in the way they imagined when they started.

That's a dismal way to look at grad school, but I've made a strong assumption in the preceding paragraph that some of you probably already noticed.  I assumed that every grad student wants to have a tenure-track position at a large research university.  It turns out that what grad students want is far more diverse than that, and that it changes over the course of the average student's grad school experience.  A recent study by a pair of management experts looked at exactly those questions and the results are fascinating.  I recommend reading the entire paper as it's very well-written and accessible, but here at the two points that I found most interesting.

First, they showed that even when asked to disregard the likelihood of actually getting a job in one of six areas, only 37% of beginning grad students in physics rated a tenure-track faculty position at a research university as "highly desirable" and that the percentage of students with that opinion didn't change over the course of grad school.  Note that the percentages can add up to more than 100% because respondents could indicate multiple areas as "highly desirable".

This indicates that new physics PhD's are not facing 1-in-4 odds of getting a tenure-track position, but rather that the odds are more like 1-in-2, assuming that there was little overlap between those that liked the "faculty-research" and "faculty-teaching" options.

 The second highlight is the way that students' opinions of the six career paths change over the course of grad school.  They tracked what percentage of students rated each career path at the end of their graduate careers versus their ratings when they entered grad school.

This shows that the faculty options were the two that took the biggest hits, meaning that a significant fraction of grad students realized that they didn't really want to be professors after getting effectively apprenticed to one for 5-7 years.  Presumably replacing that career goal are fields like R&D at start-up firms and government labs, which saw the biggest increases in attractiveness.

I find it very encouraging that most grad students realize that there are good things to do with a PhD in physics other than become your adviser, and that grad school actually does help open minds to other options.

Sauermann, H., & Roach, M. (2012). Science PhD Career Preferences: Levels, Changes, and Advisor Encouragement PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036307

Poor Economy Spikes PhD Physcists Unemployment to 4%

Nobody gets a PhD in physics for the money - mostly because there isn't a lot of money in physics research - but there are some nice economic benefits to having a PhD in physics.  For example, while the rest of the country is dealing with 9% unemployment, the latest data from the AIP's Statistical Research Center shows that PhD physicists are experiencing only 4% unemployment.  I may not make a ton of money, but with a PhD I'm likely to at least be bringing home a paycheck.

The AIP also released data on what those 96% of physics PhD's were doing immediately after graduation; over half (56%) take a post-doc, a third take a potentially permenent position, and 7% take an "other temporary" position, which I'm guessing includes things like non-tenure track faculty positions.  If we break things down even further we can see that the type of work a new PhD gets hired to do depends greatly on which of those three categories he or she falls under.  

As one would expect, those that take potentially permanent positions often switch subfields or leave physics entirely, which many advisers seem to think is a terrible waste of a PhD.

Naturally, what one get paid varies greatly between what type of employment you have. 

 

Those that work in the private sector have typical starting salaries between $70k and $100k, while on the other end of the spectrum post-docs in academia typically make between $40k and $50k.

So what's the moral of the story?  Getting a physics PhD is a good career move if you don't want to be rich but would like a fairly stable career trajectory.

The Latest on New Physics Grad Students

We recently had a discussion about the issues surrounding the process of getting a PhD in the US and thanks to the AIP's Statistical Research Center, here's an illustration of a strong argument in favor of fixing the system.  First, let's look at the trends in enrollment of 1st year grad students at PhD-granting departments:

Note that while there was a small drop-off in enrollment in 2009, the numbers have been fairly consistently around 2,800 for most of the past decade after a big dip in the late 90's thanks to the dot-com boom, which siphoned away a lot of potential grad students.

Now look at the number of PhD's granted over a much longer time period, although let's focus on the last ~15 years:

Here again there is evidence of the late 90's dot-com boom, delayed by about the average length of a PhD program, but note that the average is somewhere in the ballpark of 1,300, or roughly half of those entering grad school.

Now let's look at the number of tenure-track faculty hires over the last decade:

Interestingly these numbers are extremely constant. But again the average is somewhere in the ~360 phase, or only a third of the number of physics PhD's produced.  This is roughly in line with the anecdotal evidence from my department that showed about 30% of PhD's from 2000 to 2005 had tenure-track faculty positions.

That means that of those student's starting a PhD program at your university this year only roughly half will get their PhD and only about 13% will get a PhD faculty position.  Of course all programs are not created equal, but the averages don't lie.

So in the grand scheme of things, we are (a) doing a poor job getting people through the existing PhD programs and (b) preparing people for jobs that a large fraction of those that do make it through will never have.

Does the PhD Need Fixing?

Many of you have probably seen the special edition of Nature that is devoted to "The Future of the PhD".  Much of the discussion centers on the career prospects of those with a PhD.  As most of those in graduate school know, there are far more eager 1st-year graduate students than tenure-track positions at R1 universities - and often to have a shot at the few positions available at R1 universities one has to slog through multiple low-paying post-docs after a median of 7 years in a PhD program.  Part of Nature's special feature includes an editorial entitled "Fix the PhD".  But here's my question to those of us in grad school: in your experience, does the PhD system need fixing?

Before we jump into the debate, let me share a little bit of data.  First, Nature has put together a few nice set of graphs showing three relevant tidbits on key aspects of the PhD experience - namely the number of PhDs awarded by field, the median time to completion for the hard sciences, and the employment of science and engineering PhDs 1-3 years after graduation.

Several things that stood out to me.  First, medial and life sciences saw a huge increase in PhD production and many of the anecdotal horror stories I have heard come from those fields.  Second, a median of 7 years in grad school seems high to me - using data from the past 15 years in my department I have personally computed a mean time to completion of 6 years for my program.  Finally, I was surprised not to see a growth in the number of non-tenured faculty.  Other sources have clearly indicated that the ranks of the non-tenured have been growing, but apparently not with new PhDs.

The second bit of data I would like to inject comes from my own department.  CU's Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences department is pretty good, but I would say that CU is somewhat average when it comes to the top-tier of the astrophysics world.  So in the hope that CU's PhDs are in some sense "average", I decided to track all 43 of the PhD recipients from my department between 2000 and 2005 using Google and ADS in order to see where they were now.  I sorted them into 7 categories (post-doc, tenure-track faculty at research institutions, tenure-track faculty at non-research institutions, non-tenure-track faculty, research staff, industry, or other).  The results are on your left.  Note that all of those that still post-docs graduated in 2005.  Interestingly, only 1 of the 43 PhDs is in a non-tenure track faculty position and a very large fraction (67.4%) are still publishing in peer-reviewed journals in astronomy, physics, or planetary science.  As a side-note, the "other" category has some great entries, including a fellow that works for Answers in Genesis, another that works for a foundation that advocates for manta rays in Hawaii, and another that does market research for Kaiser Permanente.

So, there's a bit of data - more is of course welcome - now what does it mean?  Is the PhD system in the US broken and if so, how does one fix it?

Solar Physics Jobs In A Recession

Solar physics enjoys the blessing/curse of being a small sub-field of in the physics and astronomy community.  The Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) has roughly 600 registered members out of over 7,000 registered members of the AAS.  For comparison, the Division of Condensed Matter of the American Physical Society has over 4,000 members.  My point is the that is if the physics world is Europe, solar physics is like Latvia.

One of the advantages of being a small field is that it is possible to track almost all of the post-docs and potentially permanent positions without too much trouble. I have been doing this for the past few years using the AAS Job Register and positions listed in the Solar News.  Generally I would like to know what sort of job market I'm going to be jumping into in a year or two, but I'm also interested to see the effect of the recent economic difficulties on the job market.  So here are the results:

I've sorted the positions by locations (US or everywhere else) and into post-docs or potentially permanent positions, although the line between the two is often a bit fuzzy.  Essentially post-docs include anything that looked like it was designed for someone coming right out of grad school, while the permanent positions include anything that might become something long term.

In the US there have been roughly equal numbers of post-docs and long-term positions, meaning that on average one should expect to hold one post-doc before getting something long term.  Roughly 60% of the permanent positions, however, are either research positions at national labs or observatories, or support staff (e.g., programming, education/public outreach, etc.).  The situation in the US is also exacerbated by the situation in Europe where there are nearly three times as many post-docs each year as long-term positions.  This leads to a net migration of foreign post-docs into US permanent positions, for which I have only anecdotal evidence.

In looking at the graph, one doesn't see any clear indication of the current economic turmoil aside from the fact that 2010 looks like a less-than-stellar year in all categories.  This may be the result of two factors:  first, it may take several years to see the effect of the poor economy propagate through the state and federal governments and the larger university community before it hits physics departments directly; second, the $865 million Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched in February 2010, so there has been a build up of hiring in related research positions and post-docs over the past couple years, which may partially offset a recession-related dip in hiring.

The bottom line is that solar physics, like all fields of basic science, is a tough career choice.  There are a lot of very smart people vying for few ideal permanent positions.  But trying to get into the field is not the career Russian-roulette that is seen in some fields.

Most US Physics PhD's Don't Go On To a Post-Doc

When those of us crazy enough to pass-up more lucrative, less demanding career paths entered graduate school most of thought we'd get our PhD's, do a post-doc or two, and then become a tenure-track professor somewhere.  At some point most of us realized that most of us were not going to end up as professors at large research universities, but for me at least a post-doc seemed like a necessary step in the whatever career path I envisioned.  It turns out that piece of the Physics Career Path™ isn't as ironclad as I once thought.  From the excellent folks at the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics, below is the break-down of what those who earned PhD's in 2007 and 2008 were doing one year later.

Note that for Americans only 49% go on to a Post-Doc, meaning that there is something to do with a doctorate other than take a low-paying temporary research position in the hopes of getting a long-term research position with moderate pay.

Here's the trends over the past 30 years for all physics PhD's. 

And here is the breakdown by sub-field. 

Note that over 60% of astrophysicists end up in post-docs, so maybe the Physics Career Path™ is my destiny after all.

Physics Major = Job

I am an astrophysicist. When I tell people that they look at me funny and ask me how on earth I make money doing that, albeit in somewhat more polite terms. My brother in a mechanical engineer. When he tells people that they assume that large corporations are dropping bags of money on his doorstep at night in the vain hope that one day he might design their next generation of widgets.

Well it turns out that physicists actually get jobs - seriously! From the AIP's Statistical Data Center:One thing to note here: the national unemployment rate had yet to skyrocket when this data was collected. In June 2008 (roughly when the data above was taken), the national rate was only 5.6%, so while physics majors were doing better than the average American at finding jobs, it wasn't phenomenally better.

Astrophysics as a Career: Where Do Professors Come From?

My last post in this series tackled the question of whether your PhD institution determined your career trajectory. The paper I cited by Gibson et al indicated that overall the effect was smaller than one might imagine, but that if a permanent position was the goal a PhD from a prestigious university does help. They did this by tracking the graduates of several PhD-granting institutions - something I’ll call forward career tracking. In this post I’m going to present some research that I have done recently that tries to address the same question by what I’ll call reverse career tracking.

Reverse career tracking means that I have found the PhD institution for faculty members at randomly selected universities and college in the US. To do this I randomly selected colleges and universities from the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education. To help provide a somewhat even sample I selected physics departments from the various Carnegie classifications to match the distribution of faculty between doctoral, master, and bachelor granting physics departments, as reported by the American Institute of Physics.

I then used department webpages and AIP surveys to find the PhD institution for each faculty member in each department. I did not include individuals that earned PhDs (or equivalents) from foreign institution, faculty members with Masters degrees, or those for whom no information could be found or multiple institutions were listed. I then took that data and found how many current faculty taught at universities in one of four categories (again using the Carnegie classifications): Doctoral-Very High Research Activity (DV, previous known as R1), Doctoral-High Research Activity (DH), Masters (M), and Bachelors (B). Universities with no physics department were counted with the bachelors granting departments as long as they had a major that included significant physics content and at least one identified professor of physics.

Finally I assigned each PhD source institution a score based on an average of 101 minus their rank according to the 2009 US News & World Report of graduate program in physics and 101 minus their 1997 National Research Council rank. Programs ranked in the top 100 of one system but not the other were given a score of 1 in the missing ranking system. Thus the higher the score the better ranked the institution. Overall these two rankings correlated extremely well, however the NRC rankings had an average ranking 13 points higher than the US News rankings, with most of the discrepancy coming in for rankings above 40 in either system. The correlation is shown here:
Finally I binned the data into average ranking ranges and did a standard least-squares linear fit to the binned data, including calculating the uncertainties in the best-fit parameters. In graphical form, the results are:

For DV faculty there is a strong preference for faculty to have come from high ranking institutions, in fact the slope of the linear fit is positive at the 8-sigma level. However as we look at the linear fits to the DH and M, we see that while they all have positive slopes, they are all consistent with no slope at the 2-sigma level. The linear fit to the B data is consistent with zero at the 1-sigma level.

It’s no surprise that having a PhD from a big name university helps one get a job at a big name university. Over 50% of faculty at top research universities received their PhD’s from institutions ranked in the top 15. However there is little to no evidence that getting a PhD at a highly ranked institution matters in getting a faculty job at anything except a highly ranked PhD institution. With almost half of physics and astronomy faculty in the US at Masters and Bachelors granting departments, if you want to be a professor and you are willing to take on some additional teaching responsibilities and give up some prestige, where you do your PhD matters little.

The Astrophysics as a Career Posts:

• An Introduction
• PhD Production and Jobs
• What's in a Name?
  

Atrophysics as a Career: What's in a Name?

In my last post in this series, I claimed that there is roughly one faculty job and one long-term research job for every two PhDs in astrophysics earned each year. While that is currently true it’s also somewhat rare if you look back over the last twenty years. The average number of tenure-track faculty jobs per new PhD since 1990 is roughly a third. If you factor in that roughly half of those positions are at Masters- or Bachelors-granting institutions, that means that only one-sixth of us will end up as professors at large research universities. Furthermore only roughly 70% of PhD astrophysicists will remain actively publishing 5 years after graduation. While the 30% that are not publishing could include some faculty at Bachelors-granting departments, it is likely that a significant fraction of us will at some point leave the field.

That leads to the question who gets what positions? What separates the tenure-track faculty at prestigious schools from those that end up leaving the field or working as soft-money researchers? There are a number of ways to answer that but I’ll focus on two. The hardest and probably most accurate way is to track graduates of various programs and see where they end up. The easier way is to look at the faculty of various departments and track where they came from. I’ll talk about the former in this post and the later in a later one.

In 1999 Brad Gibson, Michelle Buxton, Emanuel Vassiliadis, Maartje N. Sevenster, D. Heath Jones, and Rebecca K. Thornberry put a paper called “On the Importance of PhD Institute in Establishing a Long-Term Research Career in Astronomy” on the arXiv. It’s a great paper if a bit dated. However I think the core of their work remains valid. So here are the big points:

• Independent of where you got your PhD 60% to 75% of Americans with PhD’s in astrophysics remain active in research from 5 to 20 years after they get their degree. In graphical form:
• Where you get your PhD does impact where you remain active in research. If you graduate from a prestigious program you tend to get permanent or tenure-track positions, while if you graduate from a less prestigious program you are more likely to end up in soft-money or other temporary positions. This is shown graphically by:

So here’s the take-home messages:

1. If you want to be a professor at a research university it helps to go to a big name school, but not as much as you might think. Being in the top 25% of your PhD class in Wyoming means you are just as likely to get a permanent research position as if you are in the top 50% of your class at Harvard.
2. If you want to keep doing research, it really doesn’t matter where you go as long as you are prepared to do that research in soft-money positions or other less glamorous appointments.

The Astrophysics as a Career Posts:

• An Introduction
• PhD Production and Jobs

Astrophysics as a Career: PhD Production and Jobs

My undergraduate adviser, Dr. David Neilsen, gave me a great piece of advice when I was trying to decide where to attend graduate school. He said “take the position that will most help you get your next position”. The more I have thought about it the more I realize the wisdom in that phrase. All too many undergraduates apply for grad school or grad students apply for post-docs without thinking about what they will do afterward. As much as possible one should plan his or her career in the opposite direction - chose an objective and then figure out how to get there in reverse order.

For 74% of all grad students that objective is to become a tenured professor at a large research institution or national lab. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t that many positions available. In 2006 there were over 1,400 physics PhDs granted and less than 300 new faculty hires at PhD granting institutions and 150 hires at national labs in the US. Obviously many of us are not going to do what we think we’re going to do. What happens to those who don’t get tenure-track positions at large research universities?

To answer that I turn to an outstanding paper by Travis Metcalfe entitled “The Production Rate and Employment of Ph.D. Astronomers”. I would generally recommend reading the paper - it’s concise and contains some valuable and interesting information - but let me highlight what I find to be the most important finding, shown in this figure:By comparing the number of jobs advertised per new PhD in astronomy, Metcalfe has essentially calculated the rough probability that a new PhD will hold each of these jobs. The take home message is that in astronomy, every new PhD can expect to hold 1.5 post-docs, which at 3 years for the average post-docs means 4 to 5 years on average, and then roughly half will end up in research positions while the other half will end up as faculty. However if we look at those numbers over time, the story gets less optimistic. In 1990, for example, there was only 1 faculty job for every 6 new PhDs, making the competition much steeper. However the AIP’s projection of the number of physics PhDs through 2012 is roughly constant, so hopefully we can avoid a repeat of the bad-old-days of the early 90’s where production was high and jobs were scarce.

The Astrophysics as a Career Posts:

• An Introduction
  

Astrophysics as a Career: An Introduction

When I was applying to graduate school, I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted to do with my life other than some vague notion of becoming one of my professors. I liked school and I liked doing research so graduate school seemed like a great option. I also knew that the unemployment rate for Ph.D. physicists was extremely low (2% in 2006), so it seemed like a good career choice. For me things have turned out pretty well - I am in a good program in a good research group making progress towards my PhD. I consider myself lucky, though, as I have seen several people either fail out of grad school or chose to leave without completing their degree due to dissatisfaction with their adviser, their institution, their research topic, or simply their career.

Much of the advice I received as an undergrad was anecdotal and varied strongly with the career path of the source. Those that had done well told you grad school was a wonderful idea while those on their fourth post-doc told you to do something else. In my next several posts I’m going to explore some of the available data on career issues relevant to PhD scientists in an attempt to give anyone thinking seriously about their career in physics some conclusions based on data rather than stories. I will specifically highlight my sub-field, astrophysics, because I know it well and it is small enough to be manageable. These results will translate to varying degrees of exactness to other sub-fields.

I should also mention that I am by no means an expert in this subject. I’m just a third year grad student armed with some data both from other people and myself that wants to help you think about grad school and your career before you hit that 4th post-doc.

To start, let me layout the career path for someone in physics and astronomy. Details on these steps will come later, but for those of you that don't already know, here's a career in physics and astronomy:The data for this chat is available a the American Institute of Physics' Statistical Research Center.

Getting a Job in a Small Subfield

As most of you know I am an aspiring solar physicist. Solar physics is a small sub-field of physics, especially compared to things like condensed matter or cosmology. To give you an idea of just how small it is there are only 58 junior members of the solar physics division of the AAS, which means that there are at most 100 graduate students in solar physics. I don't know how many grad student cosmologists there are out there but it seems like there are about 58 pre-prints published in cosmology every day.

Small fields like solar physics allow for a more congenial and casual atmosphere in some respects since pretty much anybody that's been around for a while knows pretty much everybody in the field. Due to the small size, solar physics has developed it's own online newsletter - the "Solar News" - that anyone can submit information to, including job openings. That means that pretty much every job that comes up in solar physics from NSF section chief to post-doc at Western Montana A&M goes through the Solar News.

Out of curiosity I went through the Solar News archive and figured out the number of jobs each year in solar physics from 2005 to 2009. To start I only included the ones in the US and I sorted those into three groups: post-docs, research positions (temporary and tenure-track), and tenure-track faculty positions. Behold the graph:
Over those five years, there were an average of 17 post-docs, 11 research positions, and 5 faculty positions available each year. If we further assume that a third of those 58 junior members of the solar physics division graduate each year (this is probably high but let's run with it anyway), that means that on average there are 19 PhD's minted each year and for those 19 people, there will be 17 post-docs available. And when those 17 post-docs are looking for potentially-permanent positions there will be 11 research and 5 faculty positions waiting for them. That means that on average 84% of those that graduate in solar physics will keep doing research in solar physics - and this excludes those that get jobs in industry or in primarily teaching roles. That's not bad at all.

However there is one other factor. Europe and Asia have become major players in solar physics. I am unable to find data on how many PhD's they produce each year, but I do have data on how many post-doc and potentially-permanent positions they advertise each year. Behold graph #2:
Foreign countries produce a lot of post-docs, but a comparably small number of permanent positions. That means that there is a large influx of solar physicists with a post-doc or two under their belts into the market for long-term positions in the US.

Overall, however, the job outlook in solar physics is quite rosy. There are few people competing for few jobs, which tends to work out pretty well.

Statistics on Grad School and Getting a Job

When I (someday) graduate from CU and receive my doctorate, I will be the first person in my family to do so. We have had a small army of Nelsons with Masters degrees and one law degree that I know of, but as far as I know no one before me has gone for a PhD. Since this career path is something I have never seen in my family, I am always very curious to know more about it. I would like to know things like what kind of job I'm likely to have after I graduate and what the job market is like. I imagine that anybody reading this blog as a grad student or undergrad wants to know the same thing.

To answer these questions, I recommend talking to people who have done it. Their experiences cannot be reduced to data, so get them in verbal form. However, as a physicist, I much prefer looking at data over trying to average people's life-stories. Luckily, the American Institute of Physics has a wealth of statistical information on their website. So here's what I have found by running my own little analysis of their data. All of these conclusions will be drawn from data from 1998 to 2008 (or 2006 in some cases). I used a decade worth of data because I felt it was a good compromise between getting trends that are valid today and giving enough averaging time to make this valid for the next 4-6 years (when I hope to be in the graduating/job finding phase). Here's what I've found (in no particular order):

1. For physics PhD programs in the US, on average, per year, there have been 2,519 incoming students, 12,358 enrolled students, and 1,222 PhDs awarded. If you assume a constant dropout rate per year, that means that it takes on average 7.6 years to graduate, 10.01% of students dropout per year, and on average only half of those who start a PhD program will finish it. Those numbers vary by about plus or minus 10% on any given year, except the graduation time, which varies by plus or minus 2 years.
2. The number of incoming graduate students in American programs is growing by an average of 3.3% per year, while the number graduating is growing by 1.0% per year. By comparison, the percent growth in full-time equivalent (FTE) physics faculty has done the following:In on average, the number of FTE faculty is growing by 0.67% per year for PhD-granting departments, and roughly twice that (1.36% and 1.38%, respectively) for Masters and Bachelors departments. The general trends look like this:

I was thinking about drawing some conclusions, but instead I think I'll let you draw your own. Comment away on what you think this all means.

Physics Pays (at Least with a Bachelor's)

The American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center is far and away the best source for career-related data for physicists. Their latest data release is out and here's the punchline (in graphical form):
That's right - physicists beat out the mathematicians! Apparently statistical mechanics is more commercially viable than real analysis. Who would have guessed?

The bottom line is that physics is potentially one of the highest paying Bachelors' degrees that one can earn. Couple that high pay with the sheer joy of learning quantum mechanics and you've got one awesome major.

Math Skills Bring in the Big Bucks

CNNMoney.com has released it's annual list of the top paying college majors. The top 15 are listed in the table on the right. As you'll notice, they all have something in common: math skills.

It turns out that so-called "math-based majors" are in short supply - they make up only about 4% of college graduates. So good old economics tells us that if supply is low, demand is high, which is good news if you can do math.

By comparison, if you take a two of the most common non-"math based" graduate degrees, they would wind up at #2 and #19 on the list. A law degree pays an average starting salary of $73,396 and a masters of business administration averages only $50,301 to start. That means that, roughly speaking, it pays as well to do 4 years of math-heavy schooling as it does to do 6 to 7 years of math-light schooling.

Of course the sad part for those of us working on our PhD's is that the average starting salary for 9+ years of post-secondary education is $70,370.

Googling Us

I ran into an old friend from high school on Saturday that I haven't seen in years. We chatted for a bit but then I had to run. I gave her my e-mail address so that we could keep in touch but I also told her that if she forgot the e-mail, she could find me on my department website.

That got me thinking, how easy am I to find online? I have been told that when applying for post-docs or faculty positions you should try to have some link to your research come up within the first ten hits when you search for your name (or your name + "physics") on Google. I decided to try us all out and here are the results, in order of Google rank):

1 (tie): Jared - Jared's blogger profile is the #1 result when Google looks for Jared Greenwalds. Interestingly, that beats out a British meteorologist's reseach page.

1 (tie): Ryan - Searching for Ryan Tanner is a lost cause but "Ryan Tanner physics" brings up Ryan's smiling face on the very out-of-date BYU physics theory page as the top result.

1 (tie): Laren - The first result for Laren is his spring 2008 office hours schedule.

4: Joe - Joe's other blog comes in at #2 when I search for Joseph Smidt.

5: Me - The #8 result for "Nicholas Nelson" is a poster I presented at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC-Santa Barbara last summer.

6: Bill - Neither "Bill Evans" or "Bill Evans physics" produces a result related to Bill in the first 10 hits. Better luck next time.

Additional Employment Statistics

For those of us hoping for a career in academia, here's another bit of sobering statistics. The PhD class of 2011 is projected to be between 1350 and 1500 graduates. From 2004 to 2007, there were an average of slightly less than 500 tenure-track faculty positions available per year. That means that unless this trend changes, we'll be facing roughly 1 in 3 odds of getting a tenure-track position when we hit the job market.

Sleep peacefully with that on your mind.

A Decade in College and Your Starting Salary Is...

The American Institute of Physics has released it's latest data on the average salary for a physics and astronomy post-doc working at a PhD-granting university. So if you're considering that route, here's what you can plan on being paid:

Now compare that with the latest results for all post-PhD salaries (2003-2004) and you'll see that it pays to go work in the private sector or at a national lab.
However, the sad fact is that roughly two-thirds of those earning PhD's in physics and astronomy end up in a university post-doc.So if you were planning on getting rich doing science, you might want to consider another option.

Note: All figures and tables here come from the wonderfully useful (if slightly out of data) information found at AIP's Statistical Research Center. I suggest you check it out - if you haven't already.

The Faculty Search Continues (and Will Finish!)

As I mentioned before, UNC is currently doing an astro faculty search. Today they had the final candidate give a colloquium, out of five total candidates they brought in for final interviews. I previously told about the first two candidates. So the final three have ranged from extremely interesting to down right boring.

Last week we had a candidate from Germany. Like the others he was very smart but I get the sense that if he were teaching a class he would quickly loose the students unless they already knew what he was talking about. In other words, they would have already needed to take the class to understand him. I really don't have much I can say about him.

The candidate from today is actually a postdoc at UC-Irvine, Taotao Fang. While his research seemed rather interesting and he also gave the impression that he would be able to do a lot of research and be a good paper mill, I also got the impression that that would be all he would do. That is, he would not be a good teacher, which this department is desperately looking for (they have good ones, they are just busy with other things, like being the dean and the chair, and expanding their multi-million dollar business, and making spectrometers for 4 m telescopes, etc.). His presentation was rather unfortunate (Joe you don't have to tell him I said this, I would rather you didn't), because he had 3 professors fall asleep during his talk (they sit on the hiring committee), so I don't think he made a good impression.

But the person I'm personally rooting for is TJ Cox, currently a postdoc at Harvard. He spoke earlier this week and he made an extremely good impression on certain key faculty members. His talk was well prepared, relevant to everyone (not just the astro people) and made sense. I think freshmen could understand most of it, which is a good indication that he would be an excellent teacher. To give you an idea of what he does he has a video on youtube that simulates a galaxy merger (he wrote the merger code and someone else wrote the radiative transfer code). It wowed many people in the department, and made a big hit.



Personally I think that he will be the one that will get the job. I'm hopeful because if he comes here I would definitely end up working with him. Like I said, I think he has the best chance, and I think he has a friend on the inside (a fellow faculty member here in the department that also did a postdoc at Harvard, and she is on the hiring committee). So having friends and connections helps.