The Computational Earth Science Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has immediate openings for Postdoctoral Research Associates with applied math and computational science skills. The postdoctoral research will focus on the development of novel physics-informed machine learning methods and computational techniques. These methods will be applied to challenging real-world problems such as energy production, climate change, environmental management, and carbon sequestration.
LANL is just having too much fun. I wish I knew someone who fit this position. The people I know who are big on tensors are well and done with post docs.
I work a lot on tensors (although I use a different paradigm, which doesn’t require storing giant arrays for tensors). Have a look at Grassmann.jl, it’s actually extremely difficult to get a job working on this because there are only a small handful of people in the world who actually understand this tensor approach. If LANL is truly the best place to work on tensors, they would know about it and possibly hire people like me. However, since I don’t have any degree or job history, probably nobody will ever hire me, and I guess I will just have to make this software and give it away free, and try to make some money off of consulting (once the rest of the world catches up to this kind of tensor algebra).
By not hiring me, the world is saying that advanced math knowledge and the skills to transform it into a computing library is basically worthless. By having me doing this next paradigm work for free, I am going to end up driving down the value of it even further. At least, people will recognize the contributions I made, once the rest of the world begins to catch up, maybe I can get some consulting gigs then.
@chakravala if you are unemployed and willing to write python, and work in the field of datascience/software I can try to find you a job. It may not be the headiest thing ever, but I know a few places that would likely love to have someone as bright as you around as long as you fit in culturally.
Thanks for the offer, you are welcome tell me about those opportunities, but it’s unlikely I will be “culture fit”, as someone who considers academia entirely obsolete.
@monty it seems you are addressing me specifically for your posting, but you are mistaken, I only have a high school diploma, I can’t apply for such jobs as I said earlier
I think what he’s saying is to apply anyways. What’s the worst that could happen? There is no law saying you have to have x degrees to get a job. You’re a smart person. You meet a lot of the qualifications. There are places for you! If not LANL - there are other’s. Your skills are valuable, most people just don’t know it yet.
Education: We are looking for scientists and engineers who have at least completed a postdoctoral appointment beyond Ph.D. or an equivalent of education and work experience.
Emphasis on the “or an equivalent”.
From responses you’ve made in this thread and others though, you don’t seem very interested in opportunities posted and instead seem to be focused on derailing them into a kvetch-fest about how you believe academia wronged you and how you don’t need it anyways.
Actually, I’m very interested in these jobs, they’re all great and interesting opportunities.
As for the “or equivalent”, I have already previously applied to very similar job postings with no success. Yea, I can apply, but nothing will happen, but worth a try.
As far as the “academia wronged” me thing, you have no idea what you’re talking about. They are really administrators on a power trip who did damage to my life just simply because they don’t like me. University is supposed to be an inclusive environment; however, I was deliberately excluded due to malice. That’s not an environment I want to associate with or be required to go through just be eligible for a job posting.
Why do you bring it up and induce me to respond, if you don’t think it belongs in this thread?
If someone is is really interested in jobs like this and has the skills but not the formal qualification, I would advise making contributions to open source projects run by the target organization or a similar entity.
A history of high-quality contributions demonstrating a cooperative and task-oriented attitude, the relevant theoretical background, and coding skills would probably be a good signal for some positions, and would put the applicant in touch with some people inside the organization already.
But of course it is working for free for uncertain payoffs, so it is a risky investment of time.
@chakravala
Speaking from experience, you should apply. I’ve held a couple of really great jobs where my degree was below what was required. I would not have gotten them if I didn’t apply.
There are two kinds of organizations when it come to this sort of job requirement. The ones where the applications are filtered out by someone/somecode in HR based on education before they get to the managers, and the ones where the managers get to decide if educational achievement matters in each case. The later are usually the better places to work
I have an advanced degree(Ph.D) in likely the only field I’ll ever work in. I still don’t want to work in a place where any person is prohibited from offering suggestions to problems at the round table. Or where someone is held back from learning new skills. A lot of places are really wisening up to this kind of mentality.
I don’t know much about US national labs. I know indirectly of some people who work at them. One of them said it was rewarding work, kept their mind busy, got to go home happy, etc. Another was pulling 60hr weeks on a not so busy time and was really fighting to stay afloat. When I toured one I saw people with mowhawks at meetings, and a tight knit group of researchers working together to solve hard problems - genuinely happy. It’s a mixed bag, is my understanding. Those environments are usually where you will find a lot of surprising things.
Tons of opportunities out there. Not all products of academia are evil. Some probably are - don’t worry you’ll smell them out the second they come to your door. But most people who come out of Ph.D’s, are flipping tired, a little jaded, and just want to live a fun life doing sciencey/mathy/stuff. My guess is if a place is recruiting on julia discourse it’s worth a fricking gamble!
We (LANL) hire experts not only with PhD; we also have summer student schools; I will post some of these as well.
In addition, we also hire M.Sc/B.Sc. professionals with strong programming, data analytics or machine learning background.
We may not have an active job opening at the moment (I will check) but we are definitely looking for masters/bachelor level people as well. Do not hesitate to contact me by email if you want (i am easy to google).
Hi folks, I’m sorry I nagged all of you with my personal problems in life, I’m at a point where I don’t exactly know where I’m going to end up or what’s happening.
I would have liked to get a PhD someday, and I would have liked to continue attending as many math lectures as possible, but there was a lot of weird turmoil going on that made my university experience exceedingly uncomfortable, I would like to be able to see academia positively, but I had a few too many weird and bad experiences that make me want to stay far away.
Math lectures are my favorite though, if I could I would continue attending as many of those as possible. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to do that.
Not allowed? Where I am from (germany) no one bars you from going to a lecture (probably no one would even notice you).
I mean you can not get credentials without being enrolled, but only sitting in a lecture for your own good is perfectly fine. If you want to go the “official” route you can enroll as a observer (auditor, I do not know the proper english term) and for this you only need an ID and have to pay a little fee.
Maybe this has to do with our publicly funded universities…man do I love those (if stuff like that is unique to that I even love them more).
That is true but not the case for all nations, esp. the public funded education that differs from private education (paid-by-parents in my country). There, (India) one needs an ID card to enter the campus (there is checking) and/or there are age restrictions, eg. Iirc 28years is the upper limit for masters or doctorate admissions. As a non-student, for “read-only access” to the library of a local pharmaceutical college, I had to get special permission from the principal to be allowed to read for an hour daily for only one month.
