The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Some time ago I posted that my field - a subfield of physics, with research largely funded by the U.S. Dept. of ______ - was on pins and needles due to a zany scheme by the Department to completely reorganize how research was done (and not, as people tend to assume, due to Elon Musk. Though probably helped along by the impulse to be ostentatiously but ineffectively budget-conscious.)
That scheme took time to be launched and has been in progress for long enough that prior grants are beginning to expire unreplaced, and as of today, that hits me.
If my group manages to survive, they want me back, which I'm glad to hear, but the rumors flying at this point are wild, supposing that nobody is going to be spared, but all eventually left to run dry 'til maybe the next calendar year. (Though Congress seems blissfully unaware of this, actually raising the funding of our field to record levels for next year. Disapproving huzzahs for fiscal irresponsibility, I guess.)
So I think it's unlikely I'll be able to return to my previous place, and also unlikely that I won't have to move for a new job. Which is kind of a shame - even though I've been living in an incorrigible single-party state, the place I've been living has been moderate enough, and I've grown to feel like it's home, especially due to my church. But oh well. I will go where I must go.
And in the event anybody knows anybody who could have use of an aerospace engineer/fluid physicist, I'll probably be available over the next few months.
Honestly, it might be for the best for you personally. The conversion rate from in a Ph.D. program to tenured physics professor is laughably small. Even if you make it to the tenure golden land, you will have given up what will probably be the most productive years of your career in opportunity cost to make the starting salary of a quant at a B-tier fund. You'll also have to move a zillion times anyway for a very likely postdoc grind.
I don't know what the state of the art is in fusion research, but if you can manage to crank out even one marginal paper applying ML/RL techniques, call it AI on your CV and you should be able to get into the interview pipeline at some big tech or quant finance firms. Crush the coding interviews with leetcode grinding. Practice not doing anything too weird in the face to face. If you update your linkedin and are at a top 30 program, you should have recruiters contacting you regularly. They will provide interview prep. If you are not at a top 30 physics program you are never making it to the tenure golden land anyway, it doesn't matter how good you are. Something like 70% of the faculty in R1 research institutions have at some point attended one of something like 10 schools. Of the remaining, something like 90% come from a pool of the next 20. (US based, there's a paper about it somewhere on I think the arxiv)
Once you have your foot in the door, join the line of people hoping to jump to the next unicorn, or rest and vest.
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