I wanted to provide a different answer from many of those "glad I left" answers here. I sympathize with those "keep the physics brain alive" goals of other comm

I wanted to provide a different answer from many of those "glad I left" answers here. I sympathize with those "keep the physics brain alive" goals of other commenters. Physics undergrad (2015) with thesis in nonlinear dynamics, but have done research in astro. Always wanted to do GR-related research. Landed an awesome job in quantitative finance where I write computational code (distributed computation) for various purposes (researching markets, analyzing risk, etc.). Job is interesting - but not "capital I" Interesting in the same way that physics was. I guess that is part of the trade-off. I'm considering going back to academia - especially in light of the G-wave phenomena finally having sizeable datasets to analyse in recent years - its getting increasingly difficult to keep my studies of physics/math at "hobby" level. Interested to hear if anyone else out there has "gone back".