Question: What has been your favourite/worst part of your career so far? +What's the next step to having a career in Physics after school?

Matthew Malek answered on 17 Mar 2014:

The best part of my career so far has been getting to travel to exotic corners of the globe to work on cutting edge experiments. Like living in Japan for two years when I was a PhD student… or moving to the UK in 2006 to search for dark matter at Oxford University!

The worst part of my career happened when I was a PhD student, and my experiment blew up! One of our light sensors imploded, starting a chain reaction that took out over 7000 of them! (There are about 13,000 total) I’m told that the noise was so great, it sounded like dynamite and shook the labs! That disaster cost about $30,000,000 in damage, and it took us a year to recover and rebuild.

Finally, your last question: If you want a career in physics, you start out by going from school to uni. Then you usually do a Masters and a PhD. After that, you have a lot of option! If you want to continue in academic research, you usually get a post-doc position at a university and later look for a lectureship. Other choices include working at a national lab… or going into private research. Some people also leave research and go into teaching or govenment policy jobs. The skills you build up as a physicist give you options like going into a computer programming job or into finance. (These two tend to make the most money!)

A PhD in physics opens a lot of doors and gives you many options. It even qualifies you to be a mission specialist astronaut with NASA! Now THAT is my dream job!