Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work

Jim_Austin writes "Teams of hundreds of young scientists — including many grad students and postdocs — staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs. Quoting: 'The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) The two largest particle detectors fed by the LHC, the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS)—which both independently spotted the Higgs—boast teams of 3000 and 2700 physicists. By themselves, the CMS and ATLAS teams minted at least 174 Ph.D.s last year. That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for. The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America.'"

Unreasonable expectations

[yesterdaystomorrow]

Young people should not go into physics expecting to become tenured professors. It might happen, but it's unlikely. And besides, why would you want to? Because your professor thinks you should aspire to it? It's actually not that great a job.

However. physics is still a great field of study because you can take it so many places. You can do engineering that engineers can't do because while they know the shortcuts while you know the fundamentals. I know a number of physicists who work in medical imaging, for example. The best RF engineer I know has a physics degree. A physicist needs great math skills, and unlike mathematicians, needs to be able to apply them in the real world. A smart physics student will take some classes outside of physics, and make mental connections between fields. If you're at a university, you should exploit the situation (and avoid being exploited).

Re:why not work for wall street?

[monatomic]

This is simply not true. Companies do not usually like to hire physicists, certainly not particle physicists. It is just not widely applicable to industry. Engineers are preferred. That's why there are not many jobs for them.

Re:Expect Great Things

[recharged95]

I was there when the SSC was cancel, ready to move to Dallas and then found I didn't have a job start date (cause it was canceled).

Luckily for that time, The Internet showed up and 15yrs later from that detour I'm trying to get back into pure Physics.

For the younglings of today trying to excerise the power of the Force (literally, f=ma, mind that), I'm not sure what they'll drop into if they don't get a position at places like LHC since headcount is very tight and current senior positions are occupied in young PhDs with another 20yrs going for them. Social Media and Wall Street are dying out, but there maybe some hope with "Big Data".

Re:why not work for wall street?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope everything you are saying is wrong.

Phd's end up 1/3rd in Academia 1/3rd at national labs and 1/3rd in industry. We know this because as scientists, we study this stuff.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/showpub.cfm?TopID=14

Depends

[Roger W Moore]

I've noted that here in Canada. In fact the engineers have managed to set up their own medieval guild structure so that, by law, you cannot have a physicist do certain jobs which they are more qualified to do than engineers e.g. teach physics! At one point they were even trying to get laws passed so that only engineers could work in any team designing ANY electronic circuit - fortunately that failed.

However if you get away from the pure engineering jobs and start to look at R&D or even in finance and you'll see lots of physicists. The data mining you do for particle physics coupled with the logical investigative/inference skills and a good understanding of large computer systems is extremely useful for mining financial data and making predictions. I know many colleagues who have left particle physics for the finance sector. Likewise R&D often requires that you know how things work which is where physicists often have the edge on engineers - although you'll undoubtedly be work with engineers to build things. This is a very similar model to physics research and again I've seen many colleagues take this route too. While the job crunch in particle physics is very severe at the moment if you look at the overall employment rate of physicists it is extremely high partly because a physics degree is so flexible.