Astrophysics

[Aymee]

My husband has a very good job in IT (Citrix Network Administrator, also does some programming--not his official job title, but he's better than some of the official programmers at his work.) He's self-taught, does not have a college degree. I'm applying to grad school now, and will be done in 3-5 years. With a Master's degree, I'll have tons of debt and still only be making about 70% of what he makes now. Although he's got a great job currently, his heart's desire is really to be an astrophysicist.

We were planning for him to go to school in the evenings the same time I'm in grad school, to at least get his AA, possibly him BA by the time I graduate. But I'm wondering if this is the best path, or if he should just get his AA at Community College and wait to finish the last couple years of the BA until I can support him and he can either quit or work PT while going to school and concentrating more fully on his school, to have a better chance of getting into a good grad school program.

We don't know much about the process, both of us have blue-collar backgrounds and I'm currently experiencing these "oh... hindsight is 20/20" and "wow, wish I knew that 4 years ago..." sorts of feelings when it comes to my grad school. (I'd never heard of fellowships or stipends until late in my senior year of college for instance.) I don't want to make the same mistakes with his school.

What kinds of things should he be doing as an undergrad in order to be a better candidate? (We don't have the option of moving right now, so his choice of schools is limited to Olympia/Tacoma and MAYBE Seattle area.)

Thanks.

[go3187]

(I realize that I'm bumping a very old thread here.)

I think it depends a lot on what someone wants to do with an astrophysics degree. Finding jobs in astrophysics is very, very difficult at the moment, and bordering on impossible without a PhD. As discouraging as this might sound, most of the astrophysics students I know who didn't go for a PhD work outside astrophysics, very often as programmers. Also, of those with a PhD, most -- even some of those students with very good results (5-10 published papers, many conference talks, many accepted research proposals, etc.) -- end up doing jobs that could have been done with a physics or CS degree. Of the remaining few, many follow their PhD with (usually) two postdocs, then search for jobs in academia; but there's also the risk of not getting a (second) postdoc position in astrophysics... as it happened to my former officemate, who had to leave astrophysics and now does research in climate change (numerical simulations).

That doesn't mean it's impossible to do astrophysics. But after much time and money invested in an astrophysics degree, there's a high chance that an astrophysicist ends up not doing astrophysics. If someone already has a very good job in IT, she/he should ask herself/himself whether it's worth giving it up only to (likely) end up applying for jobs in the same field a few years later.