Not sure what that means… UT Austin has a pretty highly regarded (top 20) psychology department.
Typically though; with a psychology doctorate, you’re expected to go into private practice, which can be quite lucrative. I imagine the number of positions in academia to be relatively tiny by comparison.
I have no quarrel with UT, and know next to nothing about psychology.
The point is: It was TX. Maybe one of the nicer niches in TX, but TX.
The little lady was not a TX girl - she spent 4 months looking and then accepted the non-teaching position.
She was listed as co-author on a textbook - posthumously. The only book credit in her name.
When she was given the 90 day prognoses, she was back in her old stomping grounds (UoF) within a week or so. Not a TX girl.
I didn’t make it clear - her job had nothing to do with Psychology - it was an administrative position.
I really can’t imagine her treating patients. Apparently she couldn’t either.
He is a geophysist; from the little I know about him, he doesn’t seem like the type of person who would step foot in Texas even for a quarter million doors, unless it was Austin.
My sister is a psychologist - she makes far more money than this guy is being offered - it’s not even close.
I wasn’t thinking of it that way - I thought he had a high quality degree. My thinking was that the quality of his degree was something much better than what most people have.
I did not know that the job market for physics was as unsteady as many of the posters are saying - even for someone who I would consider the cream of the crop.
Would he consider overseas? Not all oil and gas is in TX/OK.
This can also be grim: Mining. Poke a rock and find the ore.
That’s how most people think. They look at the degree first and then figure “it’s a fancy degree from a good school. It should be worth something!”
Companies don’t care about what your degree is or even really how “smart” you are unless it translates into skills that make money for their business. I don’t know the job market for physics PhDs, but I would assume it largely consists of:
True, although the demand is still there and a PhD in Geophysics from MIT is in a far better position than most. In an overseas site like Angola, a presentation by the operators of a concession to partners and national oil company representatives impresses the participants and can carry a a good bit of weight.
Keep in mind that 80k working for a magazine might work out to be the same hourly wage as 160k working at a law firm or in finance.
People always say stuff like that regarding careers in finance, law, consulting or Big-4 accounting. While it’s true that when you account for all the overtime, the per hour rate might not be any different from a $40-$60k a year job, I say that doesn’t matter for several reasons:
Of course it’s true that most people can’t work two full-time jobs. But lots of people work one full-time job and one part-time job and still don’t work as much as associates at Skadden. For a while I taught at a university while also working (normal human) full-time, and it was a great middle-ground.
Maybe you don’t value very highly your free time at early and mid-career. And that’s certainly a valid choice. But there are a substantial number of people who disagree with you. I’d rather get to participate in raising my kids than retire early or retire in the .01%–and many people agree.
And I say this having worked at a fancy law firm and having family members in each of the other careers you described, not as some outsider.
I think this story sounds fishy. A PhD in Physics from MIT and he can’t find a job making more than 50k? I work for a major defense contractor and we hire kids straight out of undergrads from shit schools for 50-60. A PhD from MIT even with no working experience would get you in the door At any science or engineering tech house for $100k/yr in even the worst parts of the country.
Sounds like bullshit to me.
The person in the OP received a BS from MIT. The PhD is from Berkeley.
Government and academic positions are fairly notorious for being low-paying with better-than-typical benefits. Also, it depends on the level of experience and whether the individual has a degree that might make up for a lower-level of experience, and also what that person will be doing.
For example, I graduated with a Masters degree in Archaeology and was moving on to my PhD and was offered a job for $17,000 doing field and lab work, with no benefits and had to provide my own transport. I wasn’t what you’d call a seasoned archaeologist and I didn’t have a ton of business acumen, though my degree was from a very prestigious university. But, digging in the dirt 10 cm at a time and taking photographs of features every once in a while and sieving dirt isn’t exactly rocket science.
So I got an entry-level marketing position for more than twice that and moved onto writing and later product management instead. (And no, I never got my PhD - the job offers I received prior to going into my doctorate program highlighted for me what I’d probably be making later, and I just wasn’t committed enough to do that.)
One of my professors in college would always tell us how great it was to be an engineer, how you made more money than any other major, how the majority of rich entrepreneurs had technical backgrounds, and how you could get a job any time even in a recession.
But, he was careful to say, you had to be willing to move to where the jobs are. He said that in the previous 5 years, every single engineering grad got a job after graduation – except one. He said there was one guy who didn’t want to leave his girlfriend and refused to move for work. He was the only engineering grad he knew of who wasn’t employed as an engineer after graduation.
So maybe this guy isn’t casting a wide enough net? If he refuses to move for a job, or is unnecessarily restricting the locations where he’ll work, he could be filtering out all the decent jobs.
Then he ought to be satisfied working in his preferred location & not be so crass as to worry about money.
Did he love the field so much he didn’t check out employment opportunities? What are his classmates doing? How about the previous classes?
No real diff. Not exactly Podunk U.
Of the physics specialties, his is one of the best paying I’d think. But there is not a lot of oil and gas in DC.
Okay, he hates Texas. How about Oklahoma. The Dakotas? Any place with fracking which is just about anyplace.
Or does he hate field work? I’m with Bridget Burke. He may be shooting himself in the foot. You don’t major in diplomacy if you never want to live in Washington or NY.
I’m assuming that academics is out. Does he not like to publish? I’d think there would be openings since many new PhDs would get drawn to industry.
A PhD in geophysics isn’t a PhD in physics - at Berkeley, it comes from the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. Berkeley has a top Geophysics program, but industry isn’t going to have the kind of pipeline from that California hippie haven that they’ll have from UT Austin or Princeton. I’d guess that the Berkeley degree is a plus for academic work and a minus for industry work.
If he’s been out two or three years, what has he been doing in that time? The $50k offer sounds like a pretty standard postdoc in earth sciences (which is my field too), but that would usually be offered to a new graduate rather than someone who finished that long ago. Schools and government research facilities get away with paying postdocs that little for a number of reasons, but the primary reason is that very few PhD grads have the publication record to compete for a tenure track job, and postdoc positions offer the best opportunity to shore that record up. If you want to be a tenure track professor in an earth sciences field, you take a postdoc (off the top of my head, I can think of two recently professors without postdocs - both out of the same school with phenomenal publications records).
I wouldn’t assume that he’s looked for an industry job - the lower paying job sounds like a bog standard postdoc, and the “magazine” position sounds more like an editor at a lower tier journal - as the OP said, he “has to read … crap studies that aren’t even close to being fit for publishing in a serious science journal.”
In general, the grad students who want to go into industry do it with an MS instead of with a PhD. Some of those folks go back to school on the company’s dime and end up as industry scientists with PhDs. Companies do fund academic research, but they then like to hire the same students who did the work. If he hasn’t had a connection to industry over the course of his grad work, it’s going to be difficult (not impossible) for him to break into it now - and an aversion to Texas is going to make it even harder.