Thread: What do people do after completing a PHD in astrophysics or something related to space?

If someone completes a phD in astrophysics and gives his own idea too, what sort of jobs does he get? Are they high paid, average, or low? How exciting is the job?

Usually a "postdoctoral fellowship", a temporary job of one to four years duration at a university or observatory. The job usually involves full time research with a group, headed by a professor or senior person. The pay is about $50,000 per year. The usual case nowdays is to have two or three such positions before getting a permanent job.

You don't do graduate work in any field as job training. You do it because you're interested in the field, and would probably do it anyway, whether they paid you or not.

In the Real World (TM), Master's degrees are highly saleable, while PhDs are viewed as research people only, and have limited options outside academia.

They generally get jobs delivering pizzas for several months and then move up to Burger King manager.

From my experience they usually work at larger corporations such as NASA, JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Ball Company Aerospace Division, CRESST (Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology), or at a college/university.

They first must do a post-doc for a few years, and often do multiple at once to maximize their pay. After a few post-doc positions and while working one, they begin to climb the hierarchy of their department eventually leading to department head, or look for tenured positions within academia. Once contracted and/or tenured many do not change positions.

Aside from department/project heads, many astronomers will never achieve the highest pay rate reaching in the $200,000.00s, but many lead/head researchers fall just short of $100,000.00, like at the $90,000.00 mark. When I worked at a school in their Astro Dept, I dealt with entering figures of their paychecks, and no one made less than $75,000.00. Most people at the school were known as either associates (more money) or assistants (less money) and did not make over $100,000.00 (though, as stated earlier, they made just right under).

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About a third stay in science. The will do a number of fix term post doc positions before "hopefully" getting a secure position. Others go into teaching, banking, programming and a whole host of other jobs.

Note that despite what has been said above. Holders of PhD have demonstarted that they capible of creative independent thinking. This is not something that is required of an Msc. Also Msc are becoming quite common so PhD are becoming the new MSc.