Today, I came across Landau's Wikipedia page and the biography of Landau written by Dr. Lifshitz in Volume 1 of Course of Theoretical Physics "Mechanics". His diverse knowledge in theoretical physics and research attitude really impress me a lot. His name indeed appears in many physics textbooks, but what astonished me the most is that he learned about the latest research results from seminars instead of reading papers, and he always by himself worked out the novel research results that interested him instead of following the authors' reasonings.
After seeing Ashley Ruba's twitter post about salaries in the academia vs industry, I would like to share my experience of switching career after 4 years of postdocs. When I was young, I used to dream about being a scientist like the professors I met in the class and famous physicists I knew on the books. I was fortunate enough that I was able to get into Duke Physics, where I started my dream and had been a physicist for about 9 years until last September, when I switched to work in the industry at an age of 34. Many facets of the academia convinced me to switch my career. My PhD life at Duke (~ 5 years) My research experience at Duke University was actually a great journey that I really enjoyed doing research and learned the experimentalists' mindset from my advisor Prof. Finkelstein. To be honest, my learning curve of being a low temperature physicist is actually quite long. With my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I had minimal knowledge in physics prior to
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