Why do some think that the job market for physics majors is terrible?

chill_factor

I'd still say that's more theoretical than other fields. Computational is fine, but on what subject? Not all subjects to be computed are the same. Computing stuff that companies pay for (finance, protein-drug interactions, CFD, etc) is different in terms of interpreting the code and background knowledge than say, laser interactions with low temperature alkali metal gases or black holes.

You might be able to do both. Or you might not. There's different methods used in computing different things. Molecular mechanics vs. DFT for instance.

So if you take the risk of computing stuff that people don't pay for, and don't know how to switch out, what do you do? Big Pharma used to hire chemists to do computational biology work and drug discovery, not physicists, why? If the *computational* part was the most important (as opposed to results interpretation) why not hire all physicists, or even better, computer scientists?

You might be able to jump around different computational fields, that's true. But is everyone or even more than half smart enough to?

Rika

What do you mean by that?

I wanted to do pen and paper theoretical physics because I have anti-talent for programming and I am too clumsy to do an experiment :P

I had an idea that this kind of job is about "creating new stuff on paper" but it's not like that :P

Now I have a job where I do "creating new stuff on a paper" but implementation is most important process.

Engineering is cool in one way - even if you do pen and paper work - I mean a design, you have a chance to confront your ideas with reality while in theoretical physics it's not always possible.

Most of my physics peers ended up in various engineering fields, programming, teaching or medical physics.

Another strange thing about Americans - even through they make a war all round the world most american physicists think that working on weapons is immoral while I think that's one of most interesting and exciting job that physicists can have.

chill_factor

I think there's extremes between "programming everything yourself" and "pen/paper only".

Alot of the science and engineering software is written already. You just need to know how to use it. That's why mechanical engineers use SolidWorks and chemists use TurboMole, they're tools (like screwdrivers or hammers) that you use in science.

Just as its not realistic to ask every user of a screwdriver to create a steel foundry and manufacture the screwdriver themselves, there's lots of jobs that involve USING scientific software, but not necessarily programming it.

camjohn

I don't know about that last part. If the unemplyoment rate is roughly 4% amongst PhD physicists (last time I checked), and most (I'm assuming you mean at least 51%) of PhD level physicsits don't work directly in a physics related field, that means that at least 47% of PhD level physicists find work in the financial market or some other non physics related field. That sounds hard to believe.

ParticleGrl

Well, what other conclusion can you come to from those numbers? What would you estimate is a sensible retirement rate for physicists? And its not just finance, I know physics phds who work in IT, who work as actuaries, who work as programmers, who work in management consulting, who work in insurance, etc. However, I don't know very many physics phds who work as physicists.

Its not at all hard to believe if you are actually familiar with the job markets in question. Its also the answer to your question- as I noted. The reason people say the job market is bad is that they are thinking about the 'out of the field rate' not the unemployment rate. The out of the field rate for physicists is very, very high.

I went to a top school for my phd, and most of my cohort are moving out of their first postdocs right now. About 10% have somewhat stable private-industry physics jobs, just under 70% have left the field (myself included, I do analytics for an insurance company), and the rest are in second postdocs now. This is a small sample (one cohort at one good school) but it makes it easy for me to believe the BLS numbers.

If I expand to physics phds I know, instead of just looking at my cohort, my sample gets even more skew toward out-of-the-field because I did my phd in high energy theory. No high energy physicist that I know has a private-industry physics job. Most left the field, the rest are looking for academic work.

camjohn

There weren't any defintie numbers that lead to my conclusion; the whole point of my last post was that I found it unlikely for it to be true that "most physicists," don't work in the field becuase it would entail at least 47% of physicists working in the financial market. I guess that that isn't such a bold statement from what you're telling me. But it is important to keep in mind that experience with job market varies not only from person to person, but even school to school. It's very hard to have an accurate predictive indicator of the job market from just one person, but the fact that 70% of your particle physicists colleagues left the field is certainly intimidating.

I would have thought that particle physicists would be among the most employed fields of physics due to its applicability, research, and appeal to investors. Is this the way it is for most particle physics? Isn't high energy physics among the more applied of the fields of physics?

twofish-quant

Same with physicists although the crash happened in the 1970's. Something that you can feel at MIT is the resentment among physicists and mathematicians that the biologists and management people are running the place.

One reason that I've been bitter was that I was raised in the 1980's when people were making a strong effort to recruit young people into science to fight the cold war. It *really* changes your world view when you get invited to the White House as a teenager with the President of the United States telling you who wonderful it is that you are becoming a future scientist, and then the home town papers putting your picture in the front page (local boy meets President). My youth was spent in that sort of environment: science fairs, talent searches. You put someone through that, and then at age 30, whoops, we didn't mean any of that......

On the other hand, one problem is that I still believe that science and technology remains the only real way of having long term economic growth. So I really can't tell young people to "reject science" since I really believe that we would be better off with a nation of scientists and engineers than a nation of lawyers or for that matter investment bankers.

Which worries me since I see this "well here we go again." One thing that I try to make very, very, very clear to anyone that isn't getting their Ph.D. in the next year is *do not expect a job on Wall Street*. If everyone expects a job in finance, then we'll get flooded.

How do deal with this "flooding" issue is pretty hard. One thing that I think has helped is to be flexible. Another thing is to "think deeply about what's wrong."

ParticleGrl

More importantly, it varies field to field. Physics is a broad discipline.

Let me be clear- 70% of people who were in my "class" in graduate school have left physics ALREADY (class here is loosely defined to be the group of people I took classes with at the beginning of graduate school). Many more will once their second postdoc runs out. Thats across many fields, but is clustered in condensed matter and particle physics. In particle physics (where my personal sample is much larger and spans many schools) its much higher (almost 85%).

Its hard for sarcasm to come across well in an internet posting, and regardless, this isn't the best place for it. In case you are being serious- no, obviously high energy is not particularly applied.

However, my graduate school class contained many condensed matter physicists who have moved on to different things. In a sample of 18 experimental condensed matter physicists 4 got jobs in the semi-conductor industry, 1 is working with a defense contractor, 5 are in postdocs, and the rest are out of the field. So, thus far slightly more than half are still in the field, but statistically, a chunk of those postdocs are going to leave the field in another year or two.

Its worth pointing out thought, in lieu of your low-unemployment number- none of us where ever unemployed. I hit a low point at the height of the economic crisis where bartending (and I'm not the only physics phd I know who spent some transition time in the service industry) was the most lucrative thing I could find, but I was still working.

twofish-quant

In finance it isn't, and in large part it has to do with the tail wagging the dog. There are so many astrophysicists on Wall Street, that the simulations and numerical techniques that people use come from astrophysics, because that's what people are familiar with. Once you have a lot of astrophysicists in finance, then people start talking about financial problems in astrophysical language.

The other thing is that "it's who you know not what you know." If you are in computational astrophysics, you can easily find someone that will tell you step-by-step about to do to get a Wall Street job, and the odds are that you are going to be interviewed by another astrophysics Ph.D. that will quiz you on black hole theory.

For someone trying to break into biomedical research, I have no idea where to even begin.

It's like Chinatown. Lots of Chinese people end up around Canal Street, because if you are Chinese, you have a buffer that gets you into the US. In most investment banks, there are "physics towns" that are sort of like ethnic communities.

Now it would be nice if there were these sorts of colonies in other fields.

Because the human networks aren't there. It's not that hard for an astrophysicist to get a job on Wall Street or in a big oil company, because the people making a lot of the hiring decisions are also astrophysicists.

It's less a matter of intelligence than personality. It's *really* scary and painful to switch fields. There's also the matter of having infrastructure in place so that you can switch fields.

twofish-quant

Based on where people I know ended up, I don't consider that to be unbelievable at least for computational theorists.

It's actually not. I didn't have that much trouble getting a job outside of physics. The big problem that I had was the nagging feeling that I was a "loser" and a "failure." If the point had been made more clear that there wasn't that much chance of me getting a tenured faculty position, then I would have felt a lot better.

I think the biggest piece of advice I can give people entering the field is to have a better sense of what "normal" is. The one big regret that I have was that I was so upset after I got my Ph.D. that I let my research network grow cold. If I had known that it was "normal" to not get a faculty position after getting a Ph.D., I would have been able to continue to do some research at a low level. The main reason I didn't was again psychological. Being around full-time scientists made me feel even more like a failure.

Everything needs to be sold. There's also a status inversion. In academia, theory > computational > experimental. In industry it works the other way. experimental > computational > theory. One thing that's funny is that in some industries, it's an insult to call someone an "academic".

If you are an ivory-tower string theorist, it's amazingly difficult to find work, whereas if you are doing statistical processing of experimental results, it's pretty easy.

twofish-quant

One thing that's a laugh is to read job projection statistics from the past. Bureau of Labor Statistics is just guessing, and the notion that there is going to be a "growth in demand" for physicists seems to be totally absurd and out of touch with reality. The demand for physicists correlates very strongly with government funding for physics, and I don't see any sign that that is going up.

The fact that it's in a website designed for kids makes this alarming.

twofish-quant

That's pretty much what I have seen in astrophysics. One interesting thing is looking at historical rates. Something that surprised me was that in the late-1980's there was a burst of hiring for astronomers, and about half the Ph.D.'s in my university that graduated in the late-1980's ended up with faculty positions, so when people were talking about the new jobs in the field in 1990, they weren't making it up.

However, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, that hit astrophysics hard.

One other thing that has changed things is the internet. In 1990, if you left the field, no one every heard from you again. If the National Science Foundation issued a report talking about new physics hiring, there was no way for people to say "utter nonsense." Same with Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today, the internet doesn't allow people to disappear. I think that has a lot to do with it since the idea that there was a demand for physicists died around the time people really got into social networking.

That matches what I've seen. I've known physics Ph.D.'s that were underemployed, but none that were unemployed. Also whether or not astrophysics Ph.D.'s are employed in "physics" is a hard question. There are a lot of "backdoor researchers" in astrophysics. The way this works is that someone gets hired by a university as an IT technician to manage the computer network. But if he attends research seminars and writes papers, no one objects. For that matter if I called myself an "econophysicist" (and there are journals on this), no one I know would object.

The other thing that I've seen is that if you have a company in which lots of people have Ph.D.'s, the people with doctorates tend to be the last people to be laid off (which can cause a lot of resentment among people without Ph.D.'s).

FroChro

When you try to solve a complex problem using a method that is too simple, you usually get a wrong answer. The problem is that if you are unaware of the fact that the method was inadequate you believe the answer is right until it is too late. Moreover, practical "common-sense" people often tend not to question their method as long as it works.

You also can't ignore the fact, that great deal of progress in human culture (including science and therefore progress in technology) was most probably due to impractical endeavor.

I agree that thinking practically is often good, but I think there is a threshold beyond which it is no longer true. In recent decades I think the emphasis on practicality was greater than before. I don't know how much of a factor it has played, but we see crisis of the system now. One may wonder if it is not time to question the attitude.

Rika

The key is to keep stuff simple. If complex stuff gets too complex it means it's wrong.

If you can't handle keeping things simple, you won't handle complex things.

The most beautiful thing in the world is simplicity or to use better word for that - synthesis.

It's not like "common sense" means that you are an idiot who lacks creativity and imagination. I have no idea what kind of "common sense" people did you meet but because I am "common sense" in life I have a job in which I can do "not so common sense" stuff.

This progress was also made by "common sense" people useing "common sense" methods.

It seems that we define "common sense" and "practical" in very different way.

For me "practical skill" is a skill or knowledge that can be used on a job - even string theorists have those kind of skills. You can only get them by doing research not tests and it doesn't make you skilled monkey.

I agree that "skilled monkey" education style is not good but it's not what I am talking about.

FroChro

But, for example, you can't reasonably describe black holes using only Newtonian physics.

"The key is to keep stuff as simple as possible, but no simpler" - paraphrasing a quote attributed to Einstein.



I never meant to sound like I disregard a common sense or that I think it is a somehow restrictive skill. Just that sometimes people use it inappropriately when they oversimplify the problem they are solving.

I was referring to something more like a mindset. Thinking about why apples do fall on the ground, what the morality is, or how does a consciousness arise just for curiosity or fun is surely not practical, yet results probably may be used on some kind of a job.

Locrian

Nah, there's more than just those two possibilities.

TMFKAN64

Then your problem is that you are confusing "applied" with "experimental".

Science that is experimental is concerned with taking measurements of something.

Science that is applied is concerned with making something that can be sold at a profit.

It should be pretty clear that high energy physics is definitely measuring things, but there is no clear path to make money from Higgs bosons or neutrinos.