Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work 226
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.'"
Re:old story for this physicist (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Expect Great Things (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot
You do need to be somewhat of an idiot, at least about finances. PPs get paid very little in grad school, only a little more afterwards, and often end up in the unemployment line at the whim of legislative budget committees. The same thing happened when the SSC [wikipedia.org] was cancelled in America. Is there any other career where brainpower is rewarded less?
Re:why not work for wall street? (Score:1, Interesting)
Because graduating in physics to become a finance quant is simply sad, it's a waste of talent and brainpower. There are some people who don't put money at the top of their ideals, even if it might sound incredible to americans...
Furthermore, this article doesn't reflect the entire reality of particle physicists, but only of those who want to work for CERN, which is basically the most exclusive lab in the world. OK, it's not easy to be hired there, but a particle physicist might work in any physics faculty of any university in the world, not to mention the thousands of companies who would like to hire them in their R&D departments. The supply/demand ratio is extremely favorable for them.
Since A-bombs stopped being cool (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
misoverestimation (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting a PhD is nothing like it used to be. The whole process has become industrialised since I was young, and - while it's excellent that there *is* so much support - it doesn't represent the independent intellectual achievement that it once did.
So, while I'm very happy that there are so many people training at this level, they shouldn't think they're that great.
Re:Tech clustering have value... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways, feel free to tell me why the US is so awesome, I kinda need it...
It's flawed like any other country. People tend to focus on the bad news because a) it was the unquestioned superpower for nearly two decades and everyone loves a good fall-from-power story, b) they have a poor understanding of history, and/or were blissfully ignorant of reality when younger, so they subconsciously inflate current problems, and c) some people derive a twisted satisfaction from being prophets of doom. For everything you mention, if you look back a few decades you will find much worse examples. Crime peaked in the 1980s/early 1990s and has been in decline ever since. The spy agencies used to be far more aggressive in violating our rights - the big thing that's changed recently is that they have more technology at their disposal than ever before. As far as human rights violations and war crimes are concerned, well, they're small potatoes compared to the Jim Crow era or the Vietnam war. Not that we can't do better, but progress is incremental.
If you really want a perspective on how much it could suck, I recommend the book "Nixonland" - in many ways we're living in paradise compared to the hell that America once seemed destined for. Also recommended: "Postwar", which is actually about Europe, but also shows how an entire continent devastated by war - and at various points threatened by violent social unrest - ended up becoming a reasonably prosperous and pleasant place to live. I find books like these make me far less pessimistic about the future.
I've lived in the Bay Area for the last ten years, and there are few places I'd rather live. Despite being a native-born WASP-ish American, I still feel out of place here, just like every other corner of the earth; I'm not nearly attractive or stylish or sociable enough. But it's one of the few places I've been in where people don't give me crap for it, because this place is stuffed full of people far weirder than me, with a huge variety of backgrounds. The science and technology sectors here are equal to anywhere else in the world, as you're certainly aware. There is a small core of rabid left-wing activists who generally make pests of themselves, but otherwise everyone minds their own business most of the time. It is just as socially liberal as you may have heard, but not nearly as left-wing economically as its reputation suggests. You'll find relatively high support for progressive income taxes and public services, but we like our iGadgets and pricey apartments too. I have never heard anyone in the area ask a question like "what church do you attend?" (More common: "who's your weed connection?")
The best thing is that you can move here from anywhere in the world, and as long as you have something in common with at least a handful of people, you'll find a way to fit in, and in a generation, your children will be Americans in every sense. There aren't many countries about which you can say this. (Canada and England are major exceptions.)
My only big complaints about the area: first, the insane violence in places like Oakland and Richmond - it is easy to avoid most of the time but absolutely horrific to read about and vastly out of proportion to any lingering economic/racial injustice. Second, the large number of truly helpless homeless around. I'm not talking about the aggressive (mostly younger) and relatively sane bums who flock to SF - and are widely despised by most people who live here - but the schizophrenics and just plain miserable older folk for whom there is no good solution except to try to keep them clothed and fed and out of trouble.