exox

"What It Means To Be Open" by Lu Wilson is well worth watching:

https://youtu.be/MJzV0CX0q8o?si=aVmlJNuSlSyjomQa

However in comparison to the American election, where Trump has been explicitly clear in his plans and prejudices.

A number of voters opting for Leave did so based on information provided by the Leave campaign, a lot of which turned out to be very misleading or just plain false.

Edit: And so it's not unreasonable to think that a portion of Leave voters may have already changed their minds in the wake of what has transpired.

Given the 72.2% turnout[1] it was just 37.5% of the voting-eligible population that voted for Brexit.

The whole Brexit saga makes me think more than ever that voting on issues of such national importance (including general elections) should be made mandatory.

[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/how-did-turnout-a...

37.5% of the population voted to "Leave the EU". The definition of what "Leave the EU" actually meant and the way in which the leaving would actually take place was never discussed.

If the EU was just a group of people holding hands, and after deciding to leave you were informed that instead of just letting go, the only way out was to cut off both of your arms, I imagine you might want to re-think your decision?

The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before I’d actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital.

Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years.

Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects.

As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.

I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?

Introduction To Statistical Learning:

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Is an excellent statistical learning reference.