Near the End of A PhD and Have No Job

Astro_Dude

I'm really at the end of my rope.

For months I've applied to jobs in industry, gov't, and even academia with little to nothing in the way of responses. I've gotten on the order of 1-3 responses back, and almost all three said that they'd "might have" hired me if they didn't get unexpected cuts.

For background, I have a M.S. in physics, B.S. in Physics & Mathematics, and will soon get my Ph.D. in physics this summer. Sounds like I totally have a great resume right? Well, it turns out that I made a horrific decision in wanting to do my thesis in observational astronomy. So while my degree says Physics, much of my research experience isn't very transferable outside of academia... which I have grown to despise. I don't want to be in this environment anymore. I don't want to move 3 more times in the next six years before even having a hope of a permanent job. I want to be able to start my life... I'd love a job in industry (particularly in defense)... but I can find very little in the way of openings I even vaguely qualify for.

I don't have the vigorous theoretical background to do high-end finance, even if that would be of interest to me. I have some computational skills, but virtually everything I find computer based in jobs requires much more skills than I have (e.g. specific databases, language or engineering programs). What I do have is the PhD to prove I'm a good problem solver, and a smart driven person. I have authored many papers, can (and have) taught others how to use astro tools, and I am above average in scientific statistics. I have scripted a few basic monte carlos in Python, but that's really the extent of my coding skills.

Still, everything I find wants ridiculous requirements, and generally the response I hear back for jobs I do qualify for is "...but you don't have an engineering degree". I'm losing my mind in that I can't find very many jobs that I qualify for, and those that I do stick their nose in the air because my degree says Physics and not Engineering.

My best luck in matching my skills has come from looking at Systems & Research engineering, but I generally never hear back from those positions. I suppose mostly because they are either entry level or require knowing every engineering program the company uses. While I'm on the subject, I've never really figured out whether I should sell myself as an entry level person with a lot of skills or a qualified person with no experience???

I guess I'm just posting to figure out what the heck I'm doing wrong. I just am so darn frustrated... I feel like I've wasted my time, and I should have just gone straight into the workforce out of my B.S....

EDIT: I also try to sell my very limited experience with radios and Jackson E&M as being relevant for signal analysis and such....

DesmondShark

Where did you go to school?

whats your thesis topic?

eri

I did the same thing - PhD in physics, observational cosmology topic. Got lucky with a postdoc, and just got a visiting prof job. But I also applied for industry jobs. Did you try posting your resume on Monster? I got a few hits that way - not all companies post jobs there (although some do, so check that out too, even for PhDs) but many read through resumes. Friends of mine who got into industry earlier than me showed me plenty of job ads they said I was qualified for even if I couldn't understand half the ad. There are lots of contractors out there that will hire you just because you're smart - a friend of mine working for Raytheon said they'll hire anyone with a PhD who knows Matlab. Having a PhD in physics and being capable of getting a high-level security clearance is all you need for some jobs with the NSA and defense contractors.

twofish-quant

How many resumes have you send out? In order to get a decent number of responses, you need to be sending out about 100-200 resumes (i.e. spamming everyone that moves).

You can start with www.dice.com, www.phds.org, and www.efinancialcareers.com. Also PM me since, I have the name some some recruiters for finance jobs. Also get in touch with Dommic Connor on www.willmott.org

It probably is very transferable. One problem with people in academia is that they don't know how to market their degrees.

Did you work on microcontrollers? Have you worked on statistics? Ever programmed in C++. Worked with MATLAB.

One important thing. Stop telling yourself that your degree is useless. Part of the goal in getting a job is to convince someone that your degree is extremely useful to them, and it's hard to convince someone else if you don't believe it.

Something that you have to realize is that no job ad is going to tell you what the real requirements of the job are. So if you have anything that looks like they are offering a position, then you need to spam them.

Do you have experience with microcontrollers, statistics, time series analysis, or data analysis? Also, a lot of finance is not about what you know, but how quickly you can learn.

There are a lot of different jobs in finance with different skills.

Is there any chance that in the next two to three months, you can turn yourself into a scipy guru? Also it's better if you don't do basic monte carlos. If you can write python scripts that can do something useful with your experimental data (i.e. you have a FITS image that needs automated filtering) that would be useful.

Also for finance jobs, you should download Visual Studio Express and try to compile something simple like "Hello World." You aren't going to be a C++ expert in a month, but you can go a long way by showing that you aren't allergic to C++.

Don't bother matching your skills. Just spam your resume to anything that moves.

It depends on the what the job is looking for which is tough since people will not tell you what they are looking for.

A few standard things for Ph.D.'s

1) you aren't sending out enough resumes. You should be sending out 100-200 resumes. If you've contacted about 20 people, that's not nearly enough

2) you are sending your resumes to the wrong people. With extremely rare exceptions, you do not want to send your resume directly to a company or HR. Most Ph.D.'s assume that they should send their resumes to the email address that says "send your resumes here" which is a bad thing to do. You should be contacting recruiters and headhunters.

Also avoid HR. HR has no clue what to do with you.

3) There could be something wrong with the resume, although if people are calling you back, then it's likely to be "good enough." Also it makes a difference if someone specifically calls you back and tells you that you aren't a fit for the job.

twofish-quant

For finance jobs posting your resume on Monster is worse than useless. You want to know who has seen your resume.

Jobs in most areas invariably do not state the real qualifications. The problem is that 1) you don't want anyone to know that you are hiring experts in field X and 2) you don't want to let people know what you are looking for since you will get spammed with people that claim expertise in a given area.

If I say I'm looking for a python guru, then I'll get a million resumes claiming knowledge in python. If I don't mention that I'm looking for a python guru, then I can very quickly filter out all of the resumes that don't mention that they have experience in python.

Yes, that sounds like something out of Kafka. That's also why companies go through headhunters.

Matlab experience is also very useful in finance. One thing about physics Ph.D.'s is that it's uncommon to have a physics Ph.D. with any sort of statistical experience so if you have any time series modeling or statistics experience, spend two weeks reading books on econometrics.

And if you can't get a high-level security clearance, there is Wall Street. One thing that is somewhat funny is that it's not uncommon for Chinese physics Ph.D.'s to put in their resume that they are members of the Chinese Communist Party, which will pretty much kill your application to work at the NSA or a defense contractor, but which is a mild positive for jobs in finance. Something that is sort of amusing is to see the difference in the type of people that what to join the Communist Party of the USA and the Communist Party of China. People that end up joining the CCP tend to be yuppie career focused people that are joining the CCP because it helps you a lot in getting jobs.

One big difference between the culture of defense and Wall Street is that in Wall Street, if you work for bank A, and then your arch-competitor bank B, comes up to you and offers you 2x money, then you would be considered a fool for not switching teams. On the other hand, "switching teams for money" in the defense industry is something that will cause you to end up in jail.

twofish-quant

One other thing for resume writing. One "must have" piece of information is work status and security clearances.

I should point out that one very frustrating thing for astronomy Ph.D.'s is that the major employers defense, finance, and oil and gas are all very tight lipped people that don't like to talk very much about what they are doing.

A major defense contractor is not going to very loudly say they they are hiring people to do X since their competitors (i.e. the Ministry of State Security of China and the FSB in Russia) are reading those want ads, and investment banks hedge funds, and major oil companies are the same way. If you look at the want ads on the financial boards, they will never say who is really hiring and they won't say for what.

In the case of finance there is this other aspect of public relations. Right now, most people in America hate banks, so mentioning that you have good jobs available for physics Ph.D.'s looks bad.

ParticleGrl

I feel your pain. I've been looking since last December, when I finished my high energy phd, and am currently tending bar while I look for more challenging work.

I've had some luck getting interviews with business consulting firms, so you might want to look at that route.

Astro_Dude

Sigh... so I spent an hour writing my response to all yall only to be logged out in the process and lose it all :(. Hopefully I remember everything I said on my second attempt...

My apologies if it's a little fractured, I tried my best to recall everything I said before the computer ate it! :-p

Thanks for all the replies!

I have been looking through Monster and Careerbuilder for quite some time. I've had generally bad luck with them, most positions don't really seem right (or are wretched). Not to sound like a pompous ***, but it just doesn't seem like it's the best place for people with our degrees to be looking...

I've had friends at DCs (although not physics people) help me the same way. I often see the list of things in the posting and say "Dude, I don't know what half these acronyms even mean", but I'll apply anyway since why the hell not. I find that I almost always don't understand half the crap they're talking about on DC postings. I know I can do the work, it's just half the time I don't understand what programs or industry standards they're talking about.

One thing I have also tried is USAJobs, but lemme tell you what a waste of time that is. You are literally firing resumes off into the ether. I actually know people that have posted listings on there and they'll outright tell you that 99% of the time, the position is already filled. They'll write the job listing with the person they want's resume in front of them. Unless some vet applies with your experience, they get the job.

About 100, but yes, I need to be sending out more.

That willmott website doesn't seem to be working? It transferred me to a GoDaddy registration page.

I'll try out those sites, and PM you shortly.

That is very true. The other issue is that most professors don't really even know how to sell yourself outside of academia.

No C++, MATLAB or microcontrollers. I do, however, have a lot of statistics experience. In fact, I generally have a much better bead on scientific statistics than most every physics PhD i know. My adviser drills stats into my group a lot. I'm honestly surprised more advisers don't do this, because the biggest part of being a good scientist is being able to understand your own data. Also, the ability to understand how much data you need to get is of huge importance when you're paying through the nose for telescope time.

Granted, most of my stats is frequentist analysis (linear and non-linear regressions). Analyzing whether that bump in the light curve is significant is a very important skill to have. Understanding your signal to noise is a big part of astro too. I don't really remember my combinatorics and more mainstream stats, I know in my bones what I need for my work though. One issue though is I almost always see stats based jobs want people knowing crap like SAS or R... I don't need that for my work, so I have never had a need for it. I do my own regressions and fits, which is what I imagine those programs are doing for those guys anyway.

Yep. I know, it's just hard to keep optimistic is all.

This is interesting, as I often get discouraged by the huge list of skills wanted. I know I can do the work, but I figure that with hundreds of people applying, I'll be in the bottom half of tick marks. I also figure that the computer is going to screen me out before I even land on a desk because I don't have EXACTLY the right keywords.


Data analysis and statistics go hand in hand with my every day life. I have to be able to understand my data and usually that requires doing statistics. I'm not sure how much light curve analysis counts as time series analysis, but that's a lot of what I do. I also can do periodograms, but that seems to me like I'm being redundant.

I use both light curves from satellite detectors and space/ground based images in my work.

I actually already have some experience with SciPy although I wouldn't call myself a guru per se. I usually use SciPy for their curve fitting software, just recently got into it. Some powerful stuff there. I generally use NumPy though. I also have used Space Telescope's PyFITS package, although generally just for turning binary FITS tables into usable ASCII format for other scripts.

Aside from binary tables, FITS files i usually use are images where we use astro tools such as IRAF to analyze the data in the FITS file.

So this ends up touching on a question that I've never gotten a good answer for. I don't want to lie on a resume, but I understand the value of selling myself. I also don't, however, want to say "I have experience in C++" and then when asked for specifics have little to say.

How would I phrase something like that on a resume. As an example, over five years ago, I worked with Perl. Basic script writing, nothing fancy. I don't bother listing it since I haven't looked at Perl in over five years, and don't even remember anything about it. I almost feel it would hurt me to put it on as if I was in an interview and asked about it, it would just seem stupid of me to have put it on.

I also don't want to annoy people though. For example, if I apply to five-ten positions that the same hiring manager is going to see, I'm going to either annoy him or he's going to realize I am literally applying for anything, and he'll assume I'm not particularly interested in a specific position.

This is insightful, because it kinda seems cynical. As a question, however, if I see a position that asks for an engineer, should I just apply anyway if I even remotely think I can do it? It just seems like a waste, especially because of all the time that can be wasted looking for hiring manager's names in vain.

In addition, I mentioned USAJobs earlier. There, if you don't score 100 on the requirements you're dead in the water. You won't ever make it past the computer, and you're just hosed.

So I guess it's interesting to hear that often times people aren't looking for what they say they are.

I agree, I need to contact more people. I have been too faithfully sending resumes into the ether of "apply here".

The problem, as I've said and will repeat below, is that often times there is no easy way to find out who I should be talking to.

So this actually touches on another problem I have. I can not, for the life of me, find hiring manager's names 90% of the time. LinkedIN? Oh, they're all anonymous. Google? No Dice. Calling the company? They won't say. I constantly hear that saying "Dear Hiring Manager" is a kiss of death on cover letters... what in the heck are people supposed to do if they go to such lengths to hide themselves?

Every single career fair and recruiter I have talked to looks at me and shrugs when I tell them physics. They'll yes me to death when I explain the versatility and usefulness of my experience but in the end the answer always comes back... "You're not an engineer, I don't know what to do with you."

I have literally been told by people that I'd be hired if I had my quals and a B.E. instead of a PhD.

One thing I do that I know a lot of people are too lazy to do: I always try to make my resume tailored to each app, which gets easier and quicker to do each time. I add things all the time based on the posting, I'll shift more relevant things to the top... anything I can to make it match the damned computer's filter.

One of the people who have gotten back to me were either people I directly worked with in the past, so they knew me and liked me. The other group that springs to mind is a group that would totally have been an awesome experience for me, and I think it helps that someone in my program just went through their training successfully, so they know what they are getting. In both cases, they showed a lot of interest and budget cuts came into play...

The third is probably the only time I ever heard anything from a real person on USAJobs, but that didn't pan out.

It's pretty bad for most kinds of science and engineering too. All it does is take you to the same site you'd have gone to directly anyway. The only time I've ever been contacted through those sites is for crappy sales jobs.

This is incredibly insightful. I have heard people say that job postings are a "wish list", but when applying for DCs and big name companies, I just have to assume that 100 people are applying, 50 of which have everything on the list...

MATLAB is also very useful for anything in research or engineering. I've heard that MATLAB to Python is an easy transition, maybe it is the other way too..

One thing I have seen occasionally - some ENTRY level jobs demand that you already have the clearance now. Generally they just say "ability to get S/TS/SCI", but sometimes even entry level jobs want you to already have it. Such is the job market I guess. It's also much easier than I would have thought for foreign nationals to get clearance.

This made me laugh. :D

Well, there's no way I can think of to say "Ability to get clearance" because that seems like a waste. Although this is interesting nonetheless. I have certainly applied for positions with the hope that maybe they're looking for someone with the skills I have and they just didn't say.

As for being tight-lipped that's totally true. I wish I had experience like some of my colleagues in parallel processing and hydrodynamics. They all have jobs in places that are tighter than Fort Knox. They can't say what they do, but given what their research was and where they work, it doesn't take a genius to make a good guess.

Hey, at least the bar hired someone who they know is going to take off as soon as she gets a job!

Good idea, thanks! :)

JDGates

I have an observational astronomy PhD, and work in the defense industry.

Look at the studies and analysis FFRDCs, plus Lincoln Lab and the Applied Physics Lab.

Look at smaller defense contractors (e.g., Metron, SPA) -- the bigger ones have more regimented hiring processes and tend to have positions more like "Blah Engineer - Level IV" that will need more specific requirements to fill.

Government will be very hard to break into for reasons you've already discovered, but not impossible; look at OSD CAPE, for one. But it's easiest to find out about opportunities through networking.

I won't bother arguing with twofish, but some of his job hunting advice is...idiosyncratic, particularly the "spam everything in sight" approach. Personally, I think you're much better off spending time finding jobs you're really interested in and tailoring your application to those jobs. Worked for me, anecdotes aren't data, blah blah, but where I work (with lots of PhDs) we want to see that you know what we're about, why your background would work well for us, and that you're interested in us and not, well, just another PhD who can't find a job somewhere else.

ParticleGrl

How does one find any actual info about defense contractor type jobs? I've tried emailing and calling various people at some of the places I'd like to work, but the few responses I get back are all along the lines of "we can't really talk about our work." Usually, they also encourage me to apply, but tailoring a resume/cover letter seems out of the question- the job posting is vague and I have no clue what I'd actually be doing there.

MathematicalPhysicist

You'll be fixing the stargate or something mundane like that.
;-)

Mororvia

(not going to quote your entire essay)

Regarding contractors, I would browse a list such as this: http://washingtontechnology.com/topl...ists/2010.aspx

Go down the list and browse what many or all have to offer. You may see a lot of duplication between some companies since some can be a subcontractor to another. The difficulty with a list such as this is that it doesn't show many of the smaller companies that may be easier to get in to, and I don't know where to find such a list.

Regarding USAJobs, you're right. Many times it seems like your submission just goes into the void, never to be heard from again. I've found that many agencies do provide feedback for whether or not your resume was passed on for further consideration. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a requirement though as many don't provide feedback.

As you or someone else mentioned, if a position is only open for about a week or so, definitely still apply, but they may be targeting someone in particular. I think this method makes good sense though because why should they bring in someone new if they already have the staff available to do the job?

Finally, the CIA and NSA don't post on USAJobs. If you are interested in working for them you'll have to go to their websites directly. Also, there are many contracting companies that staff those offices as well.

Good luck!

Astro_Dude

I guess I've been thinking too much in terms of the big 5, so that's certainly an idea.

Lincoln lab is a great idea, didn't even think of that.

So would you agree or disagree in terms of applying to a job even if I don't really meet all the requirements? Even entry level jobs I see have at least something I don't match on the required/strongly desired list. It's almost as if DCs want people to have everything right out of the gate.

Sometimes, I find I can deduce what they're talking about, but even then only in a vague sense. The bigger problem, I think, is that often times it's damned near impossible to get the name you need. Couple that with reading all these hiring managers writing advice columns saying "If it isn't addressed to me, I think the person is lazy and throw the app away!", and it's just depressing.

In the middle of my backswing?!?!?!!

Astro_Dude

Sorry, missed this while I was writing the last post... :D

This is a much more intuitive list than some of the ones I have found... and I certainly have been focusing too much on big names I think...

The most I usually get from USAJobs is a form email saying I qualified and I was passed along... but almost always that was for statistics based jobs. Generally never for physics related things because they'll have things like "We want a physics/engineering PhD who was in Fallujah".

I guess my problem is it's all a ruse in that case. I know USAJobs has to, because they are required by law, but I've seen it in the private sector too. It's just a little dishonest if you ask me.

Oh yeah, I applied to both those guys back around Christmas. CIA never said anything and NSA just sent me form letters saying "Still Not Interested" every 30 days for about 4 months. I should probably update NSA though...

I know people who have worked with CIA and have outright told me that generally applying to CIA is a waste of time.

MaxManus

Yes it is an easy transition and so is python/matlab to R.

twofish-quant

You are right. Those sites are useless. The jobs sites that are useful for financial/technical jobs are dice.com, efinancialcareers.com, and phds.org. If you are interest in finance positions, focus on jobs near NYC. Also if you USENET is useful if you have a geographical region in mind (i.e. austin.jobs)

Wilmott.com

If you mispell then it gets you into a random site into the ether.

If you apply for a finance positions, you should highlight the statistics experience. Physics Ph.D.'s have a bad reputation in Wall Street for being weak on statistics.

One book you should read is "Analysis of Financial Time Series" by Ruey S. Tsay. You don't have to be a total expert in everything in the book, but it will be useful to know what a GARCH model is.

Analyzing whether that bump in the stock price is significant is also a very important skill.

The magic worlds that you need if you want to go into finance is "extensive experience with statistical data analysis of time series".

In finance, having the words "Physics Ph.D." gets you through the first set of HR filters.

It's usually a HR person that does the initial filtering. "Physics Ph.D." "statistics time series analysis" should get your past the first keyword searcher.

If you can add some non-trivial function into the package, that will also turn heads. Python is very heavily used in finance.

The important thing for your purposes is not to sell yourself on your C++ skills, but to make it clear that you aren't allegeric to C++, and that you have very, very, very basic C++ skills. You aren't going to get a job on the basis of C++, but you might be asked to code time series routine in C++, and being able to do that is useful.

If you can get to the point where you can compile and run minimum things in C++, then you can put "basic C++" in your resume.

Don't put it in. First of all, pretty much no one actually uses much perl any more. Second, anything you put in your resume is going to be asked in the interview, so you want to arrange things so that people ask you questions about stuff that you are good at.

1) It's unlikely that this is going to happen. What usually happens is that you have a first level of screening that gets rid of the candidates that aren't going to get hired. Then there is a phone screen which gets done by whoever has time, but it's usually someone relatively junior. Then if they like you, there are a series of interviews. Also hiring in finance is invariably a group decision.

2) You aren't interested in a specific position.

In finance yes, because most companies have a lot more jobs than the one in the storefront window. Also, the resumes invariably don't go to a manager. There is someone (usually a HR person with no technical experience), that immediately tosses out the resumes that don't work.

That's why the site is useless. People would like to have some computer system that gets rid of the first level of searchs, but this turns out to be something that computers are bad at.

Welcome to Kafka-land. There are people whose entire jobs involve keeping you from talking to anyone that matters. If you are a random job seeker, you are never going to get the name of the person that makes decisions about hiring so don't even try. What you do want to do is to have a resume that is impressive enough to go through all of the filters so that whoever makes hiring decisions will come and want to talk with you.

1) If you can get the name of someone useful 10% of the time, you are doing spectacularly well. You aren't supposed to know who the managers are.

2) Also, I hate the term "hiring manager" because that makes people think that there is one person in the company that makes decisions about who to hire. Except for really, really tiny companies it doesn't work that way.

Make yourself attractive so that people will want to call you. "I'm a physics Ph.D. with extensive experience in statistical analysis in time series and I'm interested in applying those skills to high frequency or algorithmic trading." Anyone interested?

That's because you are talking to the wrong people. You are talking to people from HR, and if you are a Ph.D., you want to avoid people from HR as much as possible.

You can do that, but keep in mind that the real qualifications may not be the ones in the job ad.

They don't. Also, if someone did have everything on the list, they'd demand so much money, that they wouldn't be worth hiring.

One reason that I went into finance was that even though I'd likely get fired for saying exactly what I'm doing right now, at some point in my life, I'll be able to talk about what I was doing in summer 2011. Even if I did totally mess up, the worst that anyone could do is fire me. That's not going to be true if I worked at Los Alamos making things go boom.

Also one thing that you should be interested in knowing is that one thing that is stamped "top secret" in a large corporation is the corporate directory.

twofish-quant

Different fields. Different cultures.

It's hard/impossible to do this in finance because companies won't post the real job requirements. One problem is that if you post the real job requirements, everyone will write their resume to hit those requirements, which makes it harder to do screening. Think of it from the companies view point. If you mention that you want experts in Common Lisp, everyone will claim expertise in Common Lisp. Now if you don't mention that you want someone that knows Common Lisp, then most people won't mention it, and the two people that do get interviews. If you do know Common Lisp but you don't mention it, then it stinks to be you, but why should the employer care?

The other weird thing is that sometimes the employer doesn't know the real job requirements. What happens in some of the jobs is that we will advertise for generally smart people, and then we'll figure out what we want them to do after we get a batch of resumes. Part of the reason that this works is that people are adaptable.

Finally, if you send your resume to a aircraft company, you can sort of figure out that your job has something to do with aircraft. If you send your resume to a finance company, all you know is that your job has something to do with money, which could be anything.

One thing that I like about working in finance is that I can somewhat more open about my motivations. I don't know of any physics Ph.D. for whom finance is the first choice of careers. You are interested in banking because you want to make money, and there's no point in pretending that you aren't just another Ph.D. who can't find a job somewhere else, because that's true for 95% of the Ph.D.'s that work there.