Not in my day.

This is a little odd, because SKA seemed to me to be the most interesting and relevant (to other areas of science and industry) due to its enormous computing and data management challenges.

Most of us do eventually get the memo that we’re on our own, but not until much later than we’d wish… Whatever the rest of the field does, I make sure to have this kind of discussion with all the undergrads I work with who are thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs, as well as with any Ph.D. students who find themselves wondering what comes next.

Re #20 — I was disappointed by Debra’s comments on that front. We need to do more than just tell our students that other career options are out there. We need to make some changes to our curriculum and our mentoring process, so that our students will be better prepared for those career paths. While Debra mentioned the disturbingly high ratio of postdoc positions to career–path positions in Astronomy, she didn’t mention any steps to address the issue. Or that big-budget space missions are what create the need for all those postdocs, but not a need for their long-term services in permanent positions. I’ll wait to read the report, but I wasn’t encouraged by the rather tentative answer from the committee on that front.

Or Australia.

In fact (12:05pm) Debra Elmegreen just took a swing at that, saying that astronomy departments really need to mentor their students to be aware of other career options… and that many of those options didn’t require Ph.D.s.

But it’s a good question (and there are some good comments on it, Julianne’s particularly) — how much farther can we really push, experimentally, before we hit solid walls based on finances, or other resources (land, energy, …)? How long before we start hitting sociological fundamental limits — organizational size and complexity, attention span (esp. of elected representatives)? What ARE those limits, even? The SSC analogy is apt, and the LHC is already at the small country level in terms of staff and funding…

It’s dreary, almost too dreary, to imagine that exciting science may simply have gotten too hard to actually carry out in practice. Nothing like resource limitations to channel creativity, though.

i met too many people that instead of talking about science, talk about money/projects… the astropoliticians probably forgot Maxwell’s equations.

Speaking as a young European astronomer (planetary science actually, but close enough): Funding situations in the UK are dire, and in the near term they will probably only get worse still, and while the rest of the EU is fairing better on the whole, the perception at the moment still seems to be that the best opportunities are state-side. YMMV.

After just completing a post-doc in the US, my only new offers came from Europe… and now I am in Europe. What was the generic reason no US post was available? The universal answer was, “money shortage.” Combined with the overproduction of PhD’s in astronomy/astrophysics, if a young astronomer is not competing for prize fellowships or having success raising soft-money, then their career outlook is bleak.

It’s a sad state of affairs in the US that the most promising career prospects for a young intellectual are in the defense industry because they have all the loot.

“Young astronomers start looking for jobs in Europe.”

This is the situation in about every other field of science, so if it isn’t happening yet in astronomy, then the field must be (relatively) overfunded.