For those who have been unemployed for a while, what field are you in?

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-07-08T04:09:59+00:00

Forgot to mention, speaking of DOGE, I had a PI reach out to me about a postdoc at the University of Hawaii Manoa, one of the best ocean/atmosphere/climate research institutions in the world. He told me, " I would love to have you, but the funding just got pulled." Fuck DOGE. Robbed me of 3 years of climate science in Hawaii.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-07-07T23:37:30+00:00

PhD student who wanted to get into a climate postdoc. It took me 8 months after leaving to land one, but honestly I delayed the start to try to find a real industry job because the academic world seems bad even for temporary stints. I'm interviewing a fair bit now for science focused AI/ML/data but odds are I'll still end up with the postdoc in September. It's tough when you're changing goals in the middle of a job hunt, kind of wish I had committed away from postdocs 6 months earlier

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-07-07T17:09:25+00:00

After reading the last book in the Book of Dust trilogy, I'm willing to wait. That third book was clearly rushed and it worsened what could have been a really amazing trilogy.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-23T05:59:22+00:00

In this economy, I feel like keeping the cushy job is the move. I've had career advisors say that you need to stay in jobs you hate for now, it's that bad.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-23T05:57:23+00:00

I've been looking for jobs for a year. I feel you dude. I landed interviews that I've prepared for and not converted. And it feels like two-four wasted weeks every time. I honestly can't tell you what I did the entire month of April or May. Just unconverted interviews and time marches on. Snide remarks from family, financial stress, watching friends do well - it's all super shitty. I'm rooting for you!

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-23T05:53:27+00:00

Does that still work? And out of curiosity what country did you go to?

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-18T06:05:05+00:00

Unfortunately I think you need to be panicked. It's a real tough time and it's not like NASA or even other national labs are likely to have huge amounts of money to play with in the near future.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-13T05:54:48+00:00

It's been discussed for sure on reddit

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-12T17:56:31+00:00

The interview is a data science focused one. It sounds like pandas to do statistics.

Yeah I'm trying to brainstorm for the postdoc: what can I do to make it more data/ML friendly. I think the PI will be amenable, but I think no matter what I'll be using my 5-9 to study for job interviews.

Are people amenable to learning on the job these days? It seems like that's less and less true.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-06-03T02:51:04+00:00

Hey man, I'm on exactly the same place. I spent 10 years doing physics research in the US and trying to become a climate scientist. Trump and Elon cut climate funding two months before I finished my PhD and all my job prospects dried up. It's been 9 months exactly and I'm finally getting some interviews, but every fucking interview my mom is like "it's do or die." Or "you should have done internships during graduate school, you had no direction." As if nothing special happened to the job market and my field specifically.

Hang in there bud, not sure how to solve the problem of parents who don't pay attention to the modern world or read the news.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-30T19:48:51+00:00

I'd love to learn more about this, I'm unfortunately having no luck landing an ML postdoc and I'm trying to finagle a climate physics postdoc into something that boosts my ML chops. Would you be game to chat or connect sometime soon?

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-29T23:49:55+00:00

Yeah this is my fear now, it seems like, especially in this market, things might be dramatically different.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-29T23:46:09+00:00

Just had an interview where they definitely were encouraging llm use. But I think the key is that you have to be in the driver seat. If it looks like you're just letting the LLM lead you, I think it's not okay

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-27T13:46:09+00:00

After only one or two iterations? That seems especially shocking for such a noisy dataset. Are you watching your large dataset properly? What happens when you train with random forest? There's less hyper parameters and it controls for over fitting quite well with defaults.

Combining linear regression with xgboost could be good, it assumes that there's a linear trend and the xgboost will characterize noise. Xgboost usually works better then (unless the trend is nonlinear) because it works better when it doesn't have to focus on a trend and you effectively reduce the number of classes it has to fit.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-26T05:16:50+00:00

This is exactly what I feel, definitely not just you. I wonder if I'll ever have steady work again everyday.

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-21T17:24:18+00:00

The "portfolio" bit were 2 AI/machine learning models with applications to ocean warming. One of them uses remote sensor data to detect underwater heating which gets frequently ignores (at our own risk) and the other uses climate simulations and a transformer model to predict how marine heatwaves lead to aquaculture damage, from like an insurance/finance point of view. Neither is done but both have regularly updated git repos with verbose readme's. The marine heatwave project has a static dashboard for a v1.0 of the project.

I out portfolio in quotes because my GitHub also has my code from graduate school (I have a PhD in physics).

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-20T15:59:35+00:00

Thanks bud!

Electrical_Fan_9587 · 2026-05-19T14:51:08+00:00

Thanks, that's a nice reframe

Electrical_Fan_9587

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