Why spend 10 years to get a physics PhD and then go to work for Wall Street?

justinlj

i hated it when people who studied science and engineering went on to do business and finance. i believe that many of them left because there werent sufficient opportunities or pay to continue working in science and engineering.

in that case, wont there be a brain drain in the area of science and engineering itself?

but it cant be helped i guess. money is a very important motivation for people to work.

i really dread the day when all our inventions and discoveries are made by china and india, while the rest of us are busy generating cash out of nowhere and getting ourselves into bigger debt.

i feel that a big change is needed to make science and engineering seem more profitable and a worthwhile investment in the long run.

i live in a small country, singapore, and even as an undergraduate, i have seen how much science and engineering have declined in my country. singapore is used to be considered one of the four asian tigers which include hong kong(now part of china alr), taiwan and south korea.

in my country here, there has been an exponential increase in people going into finance rather than engineering and science. and our government is trying to make our country into a financial hub like the wall street. just imagine, the whole country, surviving largely on finance.

our semi conductors mncs have all relocated to china and india, for lower cost. the manufacturing industry has since moved away long ago, since singapore doesnt have sufficient land for big manufacturing plants. and we only have a small government backed R&D agency that tried to come up with something. all there is left is petroleum, which has an offshore island dedicated to this particular industry. almost a large portion of our engineering sector is already outsourced to china and india.

but is it good that for a country to be so dependent on the finance sector?

i dont think so. because i have only seen so many of our own people losing jobs in economic crisis and our economy is in fact picking itself back far too slowly. that's because we are too largely dependent on the world's economy and we dont produce our own goods and exports anymore.

do you want to see something like that happen in your own country one day? while taiwan and south korea are still exporting large amount of consumer goods and growing strong in their engineering and semi conductor industry, all that is left in singapore is nothing. despite being a strong economy in asia, we never had any famous consumer brand worldwide or any important scientific discoveries done here.

taiwan has famous electronic brands like acer, south korea has samsung. and we all know too well about japan, they are one of the leaders in technology. and yea, in the US, apple, microsoft, just to name a few.

and these are the companies that will make the country grow stronger. not banks like lehman brothers and insurance company like AIA or watever there are.

you might be amazed though, our government encourages us to study science since young, and similarly like the rest of the asia countries, we have been drilled with maths and science since childbirth.

LOL. but look at what we have become.

this is what that could happen when nobody is interested or deprived in opportunities in science and engineering.

that's why i firmly believed that my country could have done better if we had been given more opportunites to become more outstanding engineers and scientists who could make products to be exported rather than having tonnes of bankers and managers trying to shift assests into their own pockets.

twofish-quant

If you are a physics geek, then you are far, far, far more likely to get a job on Wall Street with a Ph.D. in which study something that seems to have nothing to do with finance (say accretion disk theory) than you are with a quantitative finance degree. The general belief amount employers is that if you can handle numerical relativity, then you are going to be able to teach yourself all of the math and statistics you need for the job, and what's more, you can teach yourself math and statistics that *isn't* in the standard curriculum.

It's not what you know but how quickly you can learn. If you've done differential geometry, then if you need to know stochastic differential equations, you just order Okesendal or Shreve.

twofish-quant

There are about a dozen ways into finance and Wall Street.

twofish-quant

In academia, you'll need to author several papers a year, and personally, I think it would be possible to author a paper a year as a "amateur" provided that you were working with co-authors.

ocean drive

Actually, society needs more string theorists and academics working in research in order to develop new technologies for our future. Fundamental physics has the potential to create new technologies like faster ways to bring people, goods and information from point A to point B, alternative and cleaner energy sources and even faster computers.

If every physicist quit physics and went into finance, our society will be in trouble eventually since there will not be enough people working on ways to develop new technologies and products.

Modern society has enough people not producing technology: sportspeople, dancers, artists, gamers, actors, lawyers and people in government. Only people working in industry and manufacturing and those doing research in academia actually develop new technologies.

moogull

Amen to that, I have a friend in aero engineering at purdue and he and I always talk about how our society isn't motivating the development and production of new amazing technologies like we have in the past. It's almost like we have lost our competitive edge in science and engineering and put it all in finance and management...

That being said, as a Physics B.S. student (sophomore) I have always liked building things so I have really wanted to be part of engineering projects when I am out of school. But I feel like I am in the wrong position (aka Not a student of engineering) to go into that field. Will I be able to participate in the R&D of products at all? or have I locked myself out by not going to an engineering school as undergrad?

Ryker

Huh? If anything, there's now more people motivated and eager to develop new technologies than there have in the past.

fasterthanjoao

To keep this simple,

Yes, absolutely.

No. You'll still have great skills for things like this, and some engineers like to work with physicsts and bring them into work - it's a different way of thinking and can really excel if you choose to make the transition.

twofish-quant

I really, really don't think so. You really don't need that many Einsteins to develop new products. One Einstein can produce an idea that changes the world. You do need a ton of finance, marketing, and MBA's to manage production of said product.

Physics is not a warm model problem. You don't need huge numbers of people to think up new ideas, because once one person thinks of a new ideas, then he just needs to write it down and everyone can copy it. Management is a warm body problem. Managing people and cleaning toilets are warm body problems. If you need to clean a toilet, you need to have a person physically there to do the cleaning, so the consequence is that there are more jobs for toliet cleaners than string theorists.

Not without an economic support structure. If you just have brilliant physicists and a bad economy, it ends up looking like the Soviet Union. A good idea is totally useless.

You need a lot more physicists in finance than in academia. A lot of finance involves dealing with rather complex equations that describe the world. If you get that wrong, then you send the world into another great depression in which case you don't have money for physicists.

Totally false.

twofish-quant

,

I think we should colonize Mars. The problem is that most people in the US when you ask them to pay for it disagree with me. Now I'm not the type of person to just sit back and grumble about this, I want to do something about it, but changing US society so that people think that they ought to be taxed more so that we can colonize Mars involves understanding money and power.

There is the golden rule. People who rule get the gold, and people who have the gold rule. So if you really want to change the world, you just have to get yourself in finance and management. If you think that there should be more jobs in astrophysics, fine, I agree with you. The trouble is that the people making the decisions are people with money and power, and if you want to change society, you just have to get into the meeting rooms with these people and become one of them.

twofish-quant

Also, being motivated and eager to develop new technologies involves hiring lots of people in finance with science and technology skills, because the fundamental decisions involve technical issues. If you are a VC firm you are going to get mobbed with proposals wanting money, and the people making decisions about what EE firm gets the money, tend to be people with large amounts of experience with EE.

twofish-quant

This is false. Modern finance *is* science and engineering.

A modern investment bank and hedge fund are extremely high technology places. Look into a picture of a trading floor what do you see, tons of computers. Everyone in finance is staring at a computer, and inside those computers there are just tens of million lines of code making critical decisions that literal influence the fate of the world. Writing and babysitting computer programs is a huge issue of science and engineering. Every investment bank has got several massive supercomputers with thousands of nodes.

The science comes in because a lot of what these supercomputers do is basically modeling how the world works or is supposed to work.

Who is "us". There are a lot of people in this group who are Chinese or Indian. If the US self-destructs and leaves India and China in charge of the world, people in India and China won't consider that a bad thing.

One thing about international finance is that you meet lots of people from different countries and people have different viewpoints. If you talk to someone from France, then you figure out that they aren't particularly interested in the well being of people in the United States. Why should they be?

One thing that gives me a smile is "peace through greed." In any multi-national corporation you see lots of people from different countries, with different religions, and different political views, all putting aside their differences to make a ton of money.

Ummmm..... It looks like a good decision, Singapore grew at 10% last year. Hong Kong has done the same thing. Singapore and Hong Kong are both city states, and having it be the management and finance centers are a good idea.

Singapore and Hong Kong are doing better than the rest of the world, and I really don't think that there really is much of a choice. Singapore and Hong Kong are both much too small to produce its own goods and export.

In the case of Hong Kong, it's part of China, so moving all of the manufacturing slightly up the Pearl River is not a bad thing. To get from HK to the big giant factories that produce the world's stuff is a two hour bus ride.

So partner with someone that's better at science.

Ummmmm...... Singapore grew at 10%/year last year.

I do think that healthy competition is a great thing, and Singapore's big competitor is Hong Kong. HK is doing quite well because it's tightly linked with the manufacturing centers in Dongguan, and people are pushing to interface it with the science centers in Beijing. Singapore has to do something different. A lot of Chinese factories are moving to Indonesia because China is getting too expensive, so there may be some opportunities there. Also Singapore is a lot closer to India and the Middle East than HK is. HK has the backing of the Chinese Communist Party, which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes not. Both HK and Singapore are "neutral territory" but HK is less neutral than Singapore which an advantage and a disadvantage.

Personally, I don't think that HK can by itself become a major center or science and technology. The big problem is that HK is a nice orderly giant gated community, and if you want science and technology to flourish you have to let random people in and put up with more "chaos" than people in HK feel comfortable with. But rather than to it in HK, you can keep the "chaos" in Shenzhen, and figure out how to take advantage of it there.

Shackleford

Marxism? Really? -_-

twofish-quant

Yes really. I'm quite a devoted fan of Karl Marx. The Marxist idea that the basis of understanding society is to understand economics and class struggle is one of the major reasons why I ended working in finance.

At its core, capitalism consists of the exploitation of the working classes by the power elites. However, the core mistake of Lenin and Trotsky was to believe that you could end this exploitation through revolution. What happened was that after the revolution, you have a new elite that is just as exploitative than the groups they replaced.

Therefore, I think that the way forward is not to try to end exploitation, but to increase the generation of wealth through technology so that you can have massive exploitation yet still create decent standards of living for the proletariat.

G037H3

Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustus, Ptolemy, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger would like a word or few with you...

twofish-quant

We've already spoken to each other.....

G037H3

I don't think you really listened