5 ms·

Sorry to pry, but what does one do after a professional astronomy career?

• eecc 6y ago
  You write Scala? (https://tpolecat.github.io https://tpolecat.github.io)
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Trick Soviet hackers into thinking your government lab is doing research on space based weapons.
  • codezero 6y ago
    From the labs I've worked in, I think the Russians would already know you weren't given the security of a lot of researchers' systems, maybe not national labs/NASA, but I even did some work at Goddard Space Flight Center and it was an ancient lab that definitely had live internet Ethernet wires here and there that systems were plugged into doing... stuff.
• codezero 6y ago
  I did a lot of data processing, and about 1/4 of the year was grant proposals.
• unixhero 6y ago
  All (two) of the astronomers I know became fat, lazy, well paid engineers with a wife, house and garden, picket fence, doing programming and engineering at a multinational company. Sigh, I had such high hopes.
• benpanter 6y ago
  In my case, I founded a company based on the algorithmic approaches I developed as an academic - www.blackfordanalysis.com Folks who did their PhDs about the same time as me, and progressed through a couple of postdoc positions, are variously: science teachers, data scientists, product managers, quants, environmental analysts, software engineers, hardware engineers and industrial scientists. In the UK, fewer than one in ten astronomers who take a first astronomy job post-PhD (usually called a postdoc) progress to a permanent faculty position. Those that do make the journey typically take about a decade and three to four fixed-term positions to get there.