University of Washington
Astronomy Department

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Useful Links for Astronomy and Physics

• The UW undergraduate Physics major, which has very similar requirements to the Astronomy major; most of our students are in fact double majors in Physics/Astronomy

• Careers in astronomy (provided by the American Astronomical Society)

• General advice on careers in physics (and related fields such as astronomy) (provided by the American Physical Society)

• Links to many sites on careers (provided by the American Astronomical Society)

• Info on the very usefulk $20 book:"Landing Your First Job: A Guide for Physics Students"

• A commercial listing (Peterson) of graduate programs, with detailed info on some of them;  a search for "Astronomy" returned a list of 54 Ph.D. programs (in Sept. 03)

• Rank graduate programs in Astrophysics and Astronomy (on your own weighting criteria!), based solely on data collected in a National Research Council 1994 survey; the data are thus old (and unfortunately the UW's Astronomy Dept. was not even included due to a clerical screwup!), but still may be of some use

• In the interest of fairness, here's a pessimistic diatribe (written in 1999) by a former astronomy grad student at Georgia State University; he concludes that the job situation in astronomy is very bleak and that the astronomical establishment is unfair to the students that it recruits for Ph.D.'s