Astronomers - Where are we going and who will we be when we get there?

Let’s talk about the US Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Physicists and Astronomers.

Here’s the link:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/physicists-and-astronomers.htm

    First note the median pay of a physicist or astronomer: $106,360 per year. Honestly I find this number laughably large. You can scroll down and find that the breakdown is actually physicists’ median = $106,840, while astronomers’ median = $96,460, which is still large, in my opinion. Let’s just focus on astronomers here. I think it is a bit misleading to lump physicists and astronomers together; I haven’t heard of many people switching between these two research fields — not without a great deal of effort.

    The “median”, by the way, is a kind of average of a set of numbers. It is defined as the number in the middle when you list the set in increasing order. You may be more familiar with the mean average (sum of the set divided by the number of items within the set). The median is less susceptible to being dragged up or down by large outliers in the group. For example, the median of 1, 5, and 10 is 5. If the set were 1, 5, and 10000, the median would still be 5, because it is the middle number. Whereas, the mean average would change a lot.

    So I wonder - what is going on here? Surely they are not counting post-docs among this group of astronomers.

    Let’s go to the “Work Environment” tab. Here we find that in 2012 the number of astronomers was 2,700 jobs (and physicists was 20,600). This immediately explains why the overall median salary is biased toward a higher number - the physicists make more money and there are more of them than astronomers. But still - 2,700 is a low number of jobs. I suspect that they are only counting faculty, let’s check the breakdown:

54% of astronomers work in colleges, universities, and professional schools.
21% work in research and development in the physical, engineering, or life sciences.
19% are employed by the federal government.

    This leaves about 6% unaccounted for. So, a little more than half of astronomers are actually faculty members. If that’s surprising at all, it’s because it seems low to me (excluding post-docs and grad students). About 1/5 of astronomers are employed in research and development. Presumably this is outside of colleges and universities, and outside government entities. I suppose this could include observatory staff astronomers, but my perception is that they make up more like 10% rather than 20% of the community. Is it possible that the post-docs are included in the 21% category? Post-docs are mentioned in the “How to Become One” tab:

“Many physics and astronomy Ph.D. holders who seek employment as full-time researchers begin their careers in a temporary postdoctoral research position, which typically lasts 2 to 3 years. During their postdoctoral appointment, they work with experienced scientists as they continue to learn about their specialties or develop a broader understanding of related areas of research. Their initial work may be carefully supervised by senior scientists, but as they gain experience, they usually do more complex tasks and have greater independence in their work.”

    All true, but let’s not keep post-docs down. In my opinion, a Ph.D. graduate is fully qualified to become a faculty member straight away. That’s not true for everyone, but for many I think it is. The fact that post-doc positions are common now is due to there not being enough permanent faculty spots to go around. There’s an oversupply of qualified people, and an under-supply of positions.
    As an aside there is probably demand for a whole new set of faculty; there are plenty of undergraduate students who want to learn physics and astronomy. There just isn’t enough funding to support those faculty. And everyone loses a little bit. Write your senators, folks.

“Pay” tab.

“The median annual wage for astronomers was $96,460 in May 2012. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $51,270, and the top 10 percent earned more than $165,300.”

    If you are lucky enough to get a job offer in astronomy, use this information to negotiate your salary. Be a little careful when quoting these numbers, though, because the breakdown shows a stark contrast between university employees and federal employees.

    Federal employees are the highest paid with a median of $139,000 per year, but only make up 19% of astronomers. University and college faculty, while making up the majority of astronomers, are only making a median of ~$78,000 per year. Still useful info for that initial salary negotiation.

    So realistically if you get to be a tenured faculty member, you still aren’t going to make the overall median salary, because the median is being brought up by the federal employees — despite the median being robust against outliers (~20% is not an outlier). 

    Let’s take a look at the “Job Outlook” tab, and here’s the kicker. During the 10-year period from 2012-2022, the federal government expects the growth rate for astronomers to be 10%. With a population of 2,700, that means we can expect 270 new jobs in 10 years. That’s probably not counting the replacement of people who retire, so let’s be generous and throw those in there too. Call it 350 jobs over 10 years. That’s really generous, because the number that is actually projected on the website is 300 jobs. Also note that the projected employment in 2022 is 2,900, which is 200 greater than 2,700, not 300 as is listed in the 'Numeric' column. Hey Bureau of Labor Statistics, 200. / 2700. is 7.4%, not 10% - can we get a little better precision here? Lots of post-docs’ careers depend on this measurement. For being a bureau of statistics, they are remarkably inconsistent.

    You know what? There are probably more than 300 post-docs this year looking for permanent jobs. Good luck. You might get hired sometime during the next 10 years.

    If you are interested, you might consider browsing some other occupations described by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for comparison. For example, “computer and information research scientists” numbered around 27,000 (ten times that of astronomers) in 2012, and are expected to grow by about 4,000 (15%) between 2012 and 2022. Hey, they also make a median salary of $102,000 per year (~20-30k more than the majority of astronomers). Turns out they have a lot of overlapping skills, too. Just something to think about. 


Information and quotes gathered from:
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014-15 Edition, Computer and Information Research Scientists, on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/

Visiting Yale

My current fellowship is sponsored by the Chilean national government. In particular I hold a FONDECYT Postdoctoral Fellowship. FONDECYT is an acronym for Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, which translates to National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development. Naturally, I live and work in Concepción, Chile.

But, thanks to my swank fellowship, I get to be my own boss and decide when and where I go for collaboration. It happens that my current supervisor has close ties to Yale University, and so I’ve extended my network to Yale as well. It also happens that I am part of a two body academic orbit, so coming in close toward Yale is particularly rewarding on a personal level as well as an academic/professional level.

Right now it is early December in New Haven, CT, and I’m in for a nice snowy New England winter; I am staying through the month of February. On my to do list while I am here is to reduce and analyze some spectroscopy of a sample of Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxies. These galaxies host active galactic nuclei (AGN), and are of interest to me because we expect them to have black holes that are smaller than those of other kinds of AGN. We can learn some really neat things about the connections between the AGN and their hosts by studying NLS1s.

I really like the department here. It is big enough that something is going on just about every day. There are lots of scientific talks, or journal clubs, or other social events to attend. I actually have more space here as a visitor, than I do at my home university - I guess being a private institution has benefits. So far I'm enjoying the environment, and I hope to get some good science done while I am here.

I’ll also be traveling to Seattle for the American Astronomical Society meeting in early January. I registered a bit late, and I am only able to present a poster on the last day of the conference, but it is better than nothing. Now I just need to make sure I have those data reduced and ready to show off before then!

In early March I’ll be headed back to Chile, just in time to travel to Puerto Varas for a science meeting. Puerto Varas is a beautiful lake town in the south of Chile, with great views of Volcan Osorno. I’m really looking forward to going back there, and I hope to present some good science results when I am there.

Bye for now!

Papers - Proposals to Publishing - Pt 1

I recently published my third first-author paper. It is always a great feeling when a paper gets accepted. As an academic researcher, papers are the primary product of my job. Yes, I have a “real job”. I get paid real money to perform a real service and I output a real product. And yes, this is a point I am defensive about. But to get back on track, this particular paper came out of my graduate work, so it is especially gratifying that it is published.

Publishing a paper is a lot of work. I suppose it is easier for some people or for some disciplines, but I have found it usually to take a significant amount of time and effort. Here is an outline of research from the proposal to the finished paper.

First you have to get an idea for your research project. Then you have to write proposals for either or both funding and data. This process itself can be quite intimidating, but it is often exciting. Writing a proposal is a good time to read papers/research from others and get ideas about what to investigate on your own. I often learn a lot at this stage. After you submit the proposal, it will usually take a few months before the results from the review committee are released. At that point, all you can do is wait - or, more realistically, busy yourself with all the other things you have to do.

Once time/funding/data have been granted you can start your actual research program. Going observing is one of my favorite experiences in astronomy, and maybe I can write up a how-to on observing runs in the future. But let’s say you go observing and collect a bunch of data. Then you get to go home and start analyzing, right? Wrong!

First you have to prepare your data. In astronomy we call this “reducing the raw data”. In other fields you might call it “cleaning the data”. You have to get rid of artifacts from the instrument(s) and perform calibrations so that you can interpret your data properly. The amount of time this takes is highly variable. It depends on several factors including what kind of data you have (imaging, spectroscopy, IFU), and also on how familiar you are with the instrument. It can help to have a pre-made pipeline for data reduction - or it can frustrate the bananas out of you trying to figure out how to run it.

After the data are cleaned you are ready for analysis! This can include an intermediate step, which is referred to by data scientists as “data wrangling”. You want to compare your measurements to some previous study, or mix data from two different sources. Often times these data are in various formats or calibrated to different standards. In order to make everything uniform, you have to perform transformations and/or recalibrate the data.

The analysis will obviously vary depending on the research program, but it might include spectral or image modeling, statistical analysis of data, error and uncertainty estimations, lots and lots of plots, etc. And after many long hours of work you get some results! In some cases this might reduce down to a single point on a single plot, or the results might span many pages of plots.

After all that work, you are ready to begin writing your paper. Some ambitious sorts may have already begun writing as they perform the analysis, but we’ll get to all of that next time on . . . Arbitrary Notations!

Kyle D Hiner