Tfw accepted an internship to work on fusion and plasma physics at a tokamak this summer

Nice job user. I just did a reflection on what I've done in my life and realized what a useless scum I am. Feel better to know someone out there is helping society.

>brainlet can't find an internship on theoretical physics to unravel the secrets of the universe and quantum gravity
>doesn't realize his experimental internship is going to be no more than computing means on excel

Yeah, I will not be working for an idiot programming stupid for him, unless something changes.

I'm planing a plasma physics workshop at a stellarator this summer. Where is your tokamak?

Accepted to MIT for a Master's next semester, feels good. I'm going to try to change it to a PhD when I get there.

Sorry, user. Stay patient and you'll get your opportunity someday.

If y'all are still here:
I have no experience with plasmas, but I have really good grades and I've been doing research in another area of physics since my freshman year. I expressed a lot of interest in plasmas in my essays and I had good recommendation letters which I think helped a lot as well.
California. How about you?

Damn. That's impressive. What are your stats? What program are you going for?

It's the Wendelstein 7x in Greifswald, Germany.

I'm gonna take part in an exchange program with a university in Japan to do some research work in optics there. I don't know how it'll go down, since I don't have much lab experience in that field, but it'll be interesting nevertheless.

DIII-D?

What are good grades in your view? Sitting on a 3.8 with plenty of experimental research behind my name. I've studied as much as I can about plasma physics on the side, but never applied to any reactors. Have you done any write-ups regarding plasma physics, prior? Did you make any science-based blogs or channels? Are your letters from people in that field?

Nice!

Yep

4.0, haha. I have never done any project, write up, or blog relating to plasmas. I just told them I had an interest in working on it.
My letters are from my research advisor (astronomy) and a professor I'm chummy with (condensed matter).

ayy lmao dude I worked at DIII-D a few years back. Who did you get as a mentor? Has Bob started sending out emails yet?

Yep! I talked on the phone with Bob last week and we've exchanged a few emails since then. My mentor is John Lohr.
How was your time there? What did you work on? What do you do now? Any advice?

Bob's an interesting guy(in a good and bad way). He's insanely good at what he does. I mean really. damn. good.

John Lohr is fucking awesome, you are in for one hell of a ride. I can not overstate how cool he is. You are in for a hell of a time.

My time there was pretty chill. I don't want to give too many specifics because lel Veeky Forums. I had a couple really long (like 15 hour) days, but that was by choice not necessity. I got to work on more computational stuff I guess? The beach is awesome if you don't mind naked old dudes. The whole summer was a great experience. One thing I realized from all the talks I went to was that I really wasn't too interested in the direction plasma physics was going. I'd have to basically go to Japan or Germany ( lucky bastard, have fun) to do something I was interested in. At the moment I'm in academia in a different field.

Have fun with it. If you communicate with the mentors you can do all sorts of stuff and have an even better time. They would love to go hiking or rock climbing or whatever with you guys.

...

Lol. Nice. How is he interesting in a bad way? I'm not sure exactly what he works on.

I'm really excited. I'm going to be working on taking measurements related the the gyrotron, but other than that my project proposal was pretty vague.

Got accepted to a physics PhD program. Not a summer program, but it was a pretty big deal for me. Wew 6 years of wasted life here I come

If ITER fails, tokamaks are done for. They can't keep building bigger machines. Stellarators seem far more elegant, especially with advances in our design capabilities. There is also intertial confinement which seems promising, although they need to at some point figure out how to actually produce energy from it.

The point is that it should have happened long ago.

He's....... interesting. He can just drag on for a long, long time when he is speaking. A very long time. Sometimes his humor can come off as a bit dry too which doesn't help. He does stuff with waves in plasmas. If you have an interest in that stuff, he published a review article on it a little while ago.

Working with John you would probably end up doing something with the Gyrotron. His part of the lab is pretty fun. You'll get to be down the hill with the tokamak most of the time.

by "it should have happened," do you mean fusion power? Things turned out to be a bit harder than we thought they might be. Inductive current drive is a real downer.

Also I forgot to mention, FRC reactors are the shit. Princeton has a group working on them, and it what Tri-alpha uses.

"We chose not to go the moon (after 1971) or do any of the others because they're just too hard"

good luck and congrats

I got a full time co-op over the summer designing car parts

What specialty are you shooting for? If you're going the math phys route, I hope you're going to Ivy or MIT/Caltech, cause you're not going to get a job in research or academia otherwise.

Lol. Why do you say that?

>you're not going to get a job in research or academia
[citation needed]

Eh. definitely not true, but the idea is not far out of place.

It really depends on your field. For example, if you want to do AMO you better go to fucking UC Boulder. Cosmology? U Chicago. Condensed Matter? University of Illinois. Nuclear? Michigan State. Not necessarily those exactly, but you need to go somewhere that is a good place for your field. The Ivys tend to have good programs, but some of them aren't even that highly regarded in science, and in most areas of study they are worse than the better public or non-ivy private institutions.

Even if you don't make it to a superb school, even if you go to Penn State or Ohio State or something, with the right advisor you can go far, it's just more of a tossup and generally a lot less safe.

I know a PhD at a directional school who is getting paid 120k a year to do mathematics research for a company in Boston

Also my current adviser did his PhD at Penn State and did research for Stanford for years

you mention, "for a company," which is definitely a great career path. My post was geared towards those looking at academia.

>Even if you don't make it to a superb school, even if you go to Penn State or Ohio State or something, with the right advisor you can go far

You would need to have done impressive work as a doctoral student or did something pretty groundbreaking early in your post-doc to get placement in academia.

Fish through your school's for professors doing research in math phys. There may be outliers, but most schools (barring community colleges) are going to have math phys researchers with either their undergrad / doctoral / post-doc in some ivy or top tier school.

I've seen a shitty state school get a handful of researchers from Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT fight for a "reasonable" professorship. These people and the people that were cut had incredible backgrounds... and they're out there fighting for gigs at lack-luster schools. The market is saturated and you're fighting with the best out there.

Times are a lot different then when those people got their positions. I'm not claiming there aren't outliers, but the people that are hiring nowadays have such a huge pool to choose from. Most of the time these people don't really understand math phys research and so they make cuts based on what school and post-doc locations alone. If you're lucky you'll have math phys people within the department actually guiding the cuts, but even then it's a crapshoot.

Be realistic here. Actively look at open tenure-track positions in the field that you want to work in (immediately). You'll see how insane the applicant pool is. Having a dream and goal is great, but a drop of realism might save some heartache.

I mentioned Ohio state in particular because they (at least used to be, I think the head guy may have retired?) were arguably the best in the world at AGN reverberation mapping. The people trained there are something like half of the field. Similarly, West Virginia University is arguably one of the best places in the world to do radio astronomy (they also have a pretty dope plasma lab). If my point was that if you aren't going to a school that everyone knows, you have to go to a school that everyone in your field knows.

Overall though, I agree with a lot of what you are saying. And even if you end up with a position in academia, if you can't make the cut and get funding you are pretty screwed.