Career opportunities for NSCL Graduate Students

Your success as a graduate student is important to us. Our graduates are in high demand, and they are the best testimony to the quality of our highly ranked graduate education program.

As a nuclear or accelerator physicist, engineer, or nuclear chemist educated at NSCL, you are well positioned to pursue a variety of career paths. You are expertly trained to do research in a university, at a national laboratory, or in an industrial setting. You are well qualified to teach in a small college or a big university. You can go into science policy or into business. You can work for the U.S. Patent Office or on Wall Street or at Mayo Clinic. If you are not sure which direction to take, we have a large network of NSCL alumni. They will gladly speak with you about their professions.

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) reports the importance and value of physics training across a rich diversity of educational and occupational paths.

We don’t have any hard data on the salaries of our graduates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that our graduates are doing well compared to the average of physics Ph.D. salaries established in national surveys. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has analyzed employment trends in physics and conducted biennial salary surveys for the last 20 years. The AIPs 2000 Physics Academic Workforce Report suggests that, in 2001, academic departments were unable to fill all tenure-track openings in physics, and it projects a shortage of well trained physics Ph.D.s for the intermediate-term future.