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Asked by tulloche to Lucy on 15 Nov 2019.
Question: After you complete your PhD are there lots of opportunities for jobs in your field of particle physics?
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Lucy Budge answered on 15 Nov 2019:
There are several options – with going on to a postdoctoral role the most obvious. As far as I know pretty much everyone who applies for postdoc positions does get one, but this can be anywhere in the country/world. Postdoc positions tend to have a 2-3 year contract. The next step is then a lecturing position, that has no fixed term. However, many people will do several postdocs before becoming a lecturer. This is in part due to there being a shortage of lecturer roles compared to postdocs.
Many people don’t follow that track however, and may go on to jobs in public engagement/outreach, other science research roles or move into various industries.
Personally I have decided to move into industry once I finish my PhD (most likely software engineering or similar). The other scientists here who are further along in their career may be able to provide a better answer – since I haven’t looked into staying in research and they’ve progressed further!
Comments
Susan commented on :
There are generally a reasonable number of openings for postdocs. As Lucy says, pretty much every capable PhD student who wants a postdoc will find one, but not necessarily in the place they really want. The real problem, for people who want an academic career, is moving on from a postdoc (more usually, a couple of postdocs) into a permanent position – those are harder to come by. Also, postdoc positions are fixed-term, typically 3 years, which is problematic for people who are getting to the age where they would like to settle down and perhaps start a family.
Fortunately (since we don’t want bright people who have studied hard for 7+ years to wind up unemployed) many PhD students, like Lucy, choose to go into industry, where they will be better paid and have better job security! The skills students learn in experimental particle physics (working in big international collaborations, analysing large data samples, working with big code bases that are written and maintained by multiple people, giving presentations, writing reports, often living and working in another country, sometimes (if they’ve done a hardware project) designing and testing electronic circuits or real-time data acquisition systems) are very saleable in industry, so PhD students who want to move out of the field when they’ve finished generally have no trouble finding a suitable niche.
tulloche commented on :
Thanks Susan for explaining that to me, I get parents saying … well what will my child do at the end of their degree – will they be able to find work etc, its good to know how it works.
Anne commented on :
In theoretical physics not every capable PhD student who wants a postdoc position will find one. There is much, much less funding for theoretical postdoctoral positions than observational/experimental ones (this is completely reasonable: to make progress we need far more experimentalists than theorists). Consequently the ratio of postdoctoral positions to PhD positions is significantly smaller in theory than in experiment. However the theoretical PhD students who don’t manage to get postdoctoral positions have developed lots of useful skills which usually make it fairly straight-forward for them to find interesting, well-paid jobs in other fields.
tulloche commented on :
Thanks Anne – that makes sense now!