Astronomy is an international endeavor — astronomers often work on teams involving people from multiple continents, and have opportunities to work in multiple countries. This gives them the chance to meet and become friends with people around the world. It is not uncommon for astronomers to attend research meetings or professional conferences, giving them the chance to travel to remote locales and add stamps to their passports.
What matters is steady progress, in whatever daily schedule best suits you. Do you work best in one-hour bursts interspersed with reading? Do you think best while sipping tea at a cafe? While there are always some scheduled events — classes to teach, meetings to attend — an astronomer is, to a large degree, left to work in whatever manner works best for her.
And of course, night owls fit right in! The process of earning an Astronomy or Astrophysics degree equips one with analysis, reasoning, programming, and communications skills that are in high demand in the workforce.
A sampling of accessible fields can be found at the Jobs for Astronomers website. As discussed on the popular fivethirtyeight. Furthermore, studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have indicated that the unemployment rate for astronomy degree holders is one of the lowest in the United States, as reported by CNN.
You'll need four to six years just for a bachelor's degree, which is true of many other professions. Then comes graduate school, which can take anywhere from five years for theorists up to seven or eight for experimentalists and observers.
Then comes a postdoctoral research appointment, where your on-the-job training continues outside of your Ph. In astronomy and physics, you typically have two or three of these two-to-five-year stints before you're considered ready for a faculty job at a major research university.
Part of the delay in going from pursuing a degree to getting a dedicated job is the general lack of funding in astronomy and physics, and I'll talk about that more in another article. But another part is that it simply takes time to bring someone up to speed in academic research. You need your base knowledge, which is hundreds of years of accomplishments and accumulated wisdom compacted into a few short classes.
Classical physics, statistical mechanics, relativity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics form the backbone of a physics degree, with some more work on optics and common astrophysical processes added to extend to an astronomy degree.
Classes usually peter out once you're a couple of years into graduate school. The remainder of your time is spent working on your dissertation research under the guidance of your adviser, and that's where the real training comes in.
That's when you learn how to be an actual scientist, not just have science facts and methods shoved into your cranium day after day. It's over the years of your thesis research that you learn how to prepare a poster or presentation at a conference without looking like an idiot, how to handle questions from competing researchers who are trying to poke holes in your work, how to take naps during conference calls, how to shove all the right introductory fluff and jargon into a paper, how to read a paper while looking for clues of what to work on next, how to ask intelligent-sounding and relevant questions during a seminar, how to beat the analysis software into submission, how to properly format a figure for publication, and on and on.
During those years, you're also brought up to speed on the true state of the art in the field, and you learn things that the classes, with curricula probably designed two decades ago, simply haven't caught up on.
You learn what people are working on right now, and where you can push to advance the current limits of human understanding. In these roles, your adviser is crucial. This person is not only your mentor but also your colleague and co-worker. Initially, they guide you and help shape your research directions, but very quickly, they'll be learning from you about your latest discoveries and newest methods.
That is why they hire you, after all — to train you at first, but with the aim of making you useful. Look to Professor Gallagher and Professor Beauchemin for topics on experimental high-energy physics. Perhaps you are interested in not the smallest this universe has to offer, but the largest. For the past two years I have been doing research within extragalactic astrophysics, particularly focusing on some of the most prolific star factories to ever exist.
Unfortunately due to factors such as extreme distances and envelopes of gas and dust, actually resolving these galaxies is challenging. For these reasons we use a combination of empirical evidence and statistically rigorous computer simulations to determine the underlying evolutionary properties of these fascinating and unique galactic populations. Before coming to Tufts, I thought breaking into the field of research would be daunting.
But the process is made easy and exciting at Tufts because of our friends and peers in Physics and Astronomy. At Tufts, to go deeper into your Physics education is to befriend your professors and peers.
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