I am almost 30 with a Bachelors in English/Creative Writing. I chose this field basically because I was flat out undecided for many years and just went with this. For many years I have felt as though I never found my “niche” in life, or what I “wanted to be when I grew up”. I didn’t focus very well in college as a result of having no interest and graduated with a 2.8 GPA. (I grew up believing I would simply take over my parents Real Estate office anyway so “who cares? about the GPA anyway?”. Almost 6-7 years later, real life experience and a lot of growing up my mind has finally refocused.
I have an incredibly strong interest in Astrophysics. My husband has his PhD in Pharmaceutics so this might have had a lot to do with being exposed to the sciences. There have been so times where I will sit there listening to the details of his experiment and wish I could have been in the room or watch a documentary on the universe with my mouth open for several minutes..and believe me when I tell you I have seen MANY of them. I strongly feel that this is what I missed out on. This is what I should have studied in college and followed through on. For Christmas I even asked my husband to get me a telescope. I NEED to do this.
At this point however I am pretty skeptical about if it will ever be possible for me to even get accepted into a program having been out of college for many years now with a not so great GPA to look back on. Does anyone out there (maybe in the field) have any suggestions for someone who found their niche far too late in life?
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
An Astrophysics Degree?
Posted on October 19, 2012.
Far too late? You’re 30, not 60! Also, why did you go to college at all if you planned to take over a family business?
My suggestion is to start small and cheap in the beginning. You’re basically starting over, a full undergraduate degree before going on to grad school. Do your undergrad work, or at least the first 2 years of it, at a smaller, cheaper school. Things happen in life. Right now, you don’t have a ton invested in this. If you started out at a smaller school, and something came up after 1 year, you could walk away for a while without losing much. If you went somewhere more expensive, and had to bail early on, more would be lost.
Don’t shy away from trying something, especially if you and your husband are in a financial position to do this. Colleges don’t have a problem with non-traditional students – on the contrary, you’re more likely to be good at college than a recent high school grad. As an adult, you’re more confident – if you need help, you’ll ask for it. You’ve had time to work and live as an adult – you’re more likely to treat college as a job, rather than an “experience”, especially since you’ve already been there once and have the lessons you learned from the mistakes the first go round.
Go for it. Approach it as an adult, rather than a naive 18 year old kid, and I see no reason why you won’t get in and succeed. A 2.8 isn’t that low, and it has been more than half a decade, so that grade isn’t going to factor in heavily now.
EDIT: My father didn’t graduate high school. He went back in his mid-30s, got a GED, and went on to an engineering degree. Colleges want 2 things, above all else. 1 – your money, they want your tuition. 2 – work hard so that you get a degree and represent them well when you get to the working world.
You’d have to basically start over with a new bachelors degree. This one needs to be in physics. Pretty much all the jobs in astrophysics require a PhD in astronomy, astrophysics, or physics, and that means you need to major in physics in college. Your biggest problems will be (a) finding a school willing to let you do a second bachelors (many won’t allow that) and (b) paying for it – you can’t use financial aid to pay for a second bachelors (no government loans).
After you earn a bachelors in physics, you’ll need a high college GPA (3.0 minimum, but even lower ranked programs expect a 3.5 or better), high GRE and Physics GRE test scores, and research experience in your field (spend your summers in college working at your school or others to get experience). The PhD is another 4-8 years of college, followed by 2-6 years of postdoc positions before you can get a full time job at most schools or observatories/NASA.
You need to be willing to move for college, grad school, postdocs, and a job. There are very few jobs in astrophysics, so you take what you can get – and that pretty much always means moving across the country or out of it. Do you love the field enough to major in physics and do well? Enough to move 3-4 times before getting a job and pulling your family along with you? Enough to work 60 hour weeks with no overtime in grad school and your job to keep it? Enough to move to a country where you don’t speak the language just to get a job? If not, maybe just stick with watching documentaries and looking through a telescope. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Far worse to get halfway through the program or further and then find out it’s not what you expected or want.
First let’s be sure this will be a real lasting interest. With 3000 planetariums in the USA there is bound to be at least one near you that would welcome a volunteer. Since the current academic year is already set in stone, use the time to see if you can maintain an interest. If you can, the GRE for admission to a grad school will be needed, and if you do well on it, this plus your presumptive maturity could overcome your GPA. Remember that the PhD will require a fearsome amount of math (calculus and statistics) as well as physics, some chemistry, and I always recommend some geology. Plus the astronomy.
The AAS website lists colleges and universities offering degree programs in astronomy and astrophysics.
Not everyone gets a PhD from Harvard: NASA’s resident expert on eclipses only has a Masters in astronomy from the University of Toledo (he was one of my students as an undergraduate)