Feeling a bit lost with an MPhys degree

[ben133]

I'm in the penultimate year of my MPhys degree and I am on track to get a 2.1

I am good friends with the people in the year above me and speaking to them has made me feel a little lost re: careers.

Medical physics is something that really interests me, and something I was planning on pursuing, but one of my friends has been told he'll be lucky to be short-listed without a 1st.

The defence industry is another area I'd be interested in, but I have been turned down recently by DESG for summer work.

I decided to attend a talk on post-grad research, and although doing a PhD would be very interesting, I don't want to go into a life of academia, so I have also been questioning that route.

I'm feeling like having a 2.1 is some kind of curse and there will be no jobs avaliable for me after I graduate.

Does anyone have any advice?

Regards,

Ben

[LAHLH]

The academic route is quite competitive and often that means that you probably will need a 1st to get a PhD slot, but this isn't always the case and it may be worth applying to some places to get a feel for this (you don't lose anything and it depends on the topic). A PhD is by no means the route you should take unless you are seriously interested in the research topic however, doing it just because you feel there's no other option won't likely end well. It will be demanding, long hours and extremely low paid compared to jobs you could get after your MPhys, also the chances of you getting a better non-academic job in the UK because you have a PhD don't seem to go up very much (I have no idea about Medical Physics by the way), so I wouldn't do it for that reason either. (there are a few exceptions, I thinks quants in investment banking are usually PhDs, also specific industry jobs that use skills of say condensed matter physicists exist, and there are prob more I dont know about, but generally you end up with the same job options you had after your MPhys, although perhaps looking a bit more competitive to the employer). PhDs really are apprenticeships to academia so its quite difficult to justify them without at least some aspiration for that, or at least a deep love of the subject matter( such that the PhD wasn't being done as a means to an end, but an end in itself).

I would have thought you would be fine with a 2.1 in industry, have you considered IT consultancy, finance, computer programming, GCHQ, teaching, erm....