Non-academic career options for the theroetical physicist

[twofish-quant]

I think when there is a shortage of workers, you hire the trainable people. When there is a glut of workers, trainable just means not-qualified-yet.

Employers will not train you even in the best of times. You have to train yourself. In the dot-com era, employers were picking people off the street, and it turned out that a lot of them were just totally lousy, but a lousy programmer in that situation turned out to be better than no programmer.

Also, you are not home free once you get the job. Most jobs are likely to be obsolete after a few years, so its a little like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine.

 

[twofish-quant]

Roughly half are in postdocs. With one exception the rest all had extremely difficult times finding industrial work (a year or more of searching, one guy is now getting a masters in actuarial science, another is going to nursing school).

One thing that makes this difficult is that it's hard to figure out whether this is getting a Ph.D. or just a bad economy. It makes a difference because there is this idea that "if I did my masters in statistics, I'd be set" whereas it's possible that if you did your masters in statistics, you'd find it just as difficult to get a job. One thing that makes job ads misleading is that you might see a ton of want ads for statisticians, but you may also being dealing with a glut of people with statistics degrees.

Also, it may be that the worst thing for a physics Ph.D is more school. Once you've gotten a Ph.D., you've spent all of your living memory in school, and you've likely learned a lot of things that are seriously dysfunctional outside of the school environment, and more school just makes that worse. You get ahead in school by not failing and by pleasing your teachers, and curiously that can be dysfunctional in job interviews. One thing to remember about job interviews is that if you are not going to get the job, it doesn't matter how badly you bomb the interview. The other thing to remember is that if you aren't going to get the job, it's better to know earlier than later.

Nursing school seems reasonable, but I'm seriously, seriously worried about the guy that is getting a masters in actural science. He'd be better off getting a job as a waiter or selling used cars. One big worry that employers have with Ph.D.'s is the idea that they can't function outside of academia. People get this idea because often it is true, and having something on your resume that says you've sold used cars, gets you passed that issue. Also watching a good salesman in action is truly educational.

Among the "non-useful" things that you learn in school are. Since kindergarten, you've learned that it's a sin and a serious shame to fail, and you get ahead by pleasing authority. You've also been taught that problems are list of questions and ahead by getting the right answers. In high school, you probably learned that geeks were better than football jocks. In college, you learned that you should hyper-specialize and that anything that keeps you from your main goal is a distraction.

And then at 30, you find that none of that is true.

I found that in looking for a job, I had to unlearn a lot of the stuff that I learned in school, and one thing that made it easier was that I had significant people in my life that taught me thatt some of the "hidden lessons" that I was learning in school were bollocks. Something else that worked really well for me was to get angry. Anger is good because it gets you out of bed.

 

[maverick280857]

One thing that happened in my undergraduate years was that I was extremely curious about things other than physics, so rather than study only physics, I spent a fair amount of time studying things like economics or C++ or French postmodern philosophy or Chinese constitutional law. This really hurt my grades, it hurt me when I went into graduate school and pretty much eliminated any chance that I had of being faculty.

Just curious (and possibly off-topic), but since you obviously earned your PhD in Physics, why would your undergrad grades eliminate your chance of becoming a faculty member? Aren't your most recent degree, your research experience and contributions more important than what you did in college (which was obviously good enough to get you to grad school)?

 

[Vanadium 50]

At literally EVERY interview (even for bar-tending and waiting tables!) I've gotten, the question "why should we hire you when these other guys have more directly relevant experience?" has come up.

As it should. And you should have a good answer.

 

[creepypasta13]

Just curious (and possibly off-topic), but since you obviously earned your PhD in Physics, why would your undergrad grades eliminate your chance of becoming a faculty member? Aren't your most recent degree, your research experience and contributions more important than what you did in college (which was obviously good enough to get you to grad school)?

From what I've gathered, his undergrad grades weren't good enough to get into a grad school with an elite brand name like Caltech, MIT, Harvard, etc. From what people have told me about the statistics of being hired as a faculty member, you have a 1 in 4 chance if you get your phD from Caltech, Harvard, etc. But only 1 in 10 from anywhere else.

 

[twofish-quant]

Just curious (and possibly off-topic), but since you obviously earned your PhD in Physics, why would your undergrad grades eliminate your chance of becoming a faculty member? Aren't your most recent degree, your research experience and contributions more important than what you did in college (which was obviously good enough to get you to grad school)?

Because things snowball. Because my undergraduate grades weren't that hot, I didn't get into my choice of graduate schools, which was really annoying because my study-partners *did* get into their top choice of graduate schools.

Also something that was more significant was the "bad habits" that I had as an undergraduate continued in graduate school. Because I was around people that thought it was a good thing to be well-rounded, the things that kept me out of my choice of graduate school were even more harmful when I was looking for post-docs.

Not that this is a bad thing. It worked out for me in the end. But this does point to a major dilemma for Ph.D. students, if you make yourself super-competive for a faculty position, and you don't make it, then you are dead when it comes to looking for something else. However, if you make yourself able to get something other than a faculty position, then you have no chance of getting a research faculty position.

 

[twofish-quant]

From what I've gathered, his undergrad grades weren't good enough to get into a grad school with an elite brand name like Caltech, MIT, Harvard, etc.

Which was particularly annoying because I was getting rejection letters from universities that my friends had no trouble getting in to.

Also I just had the wrong "attitude" to get a faculty position. I suppose if I had surrounded myself with "get a research faculty position or die trying" people, I could have changed, but the people that are like that would in fact have tossed my application out of hand. Which meant that the people I ended being around weren't totally obsessed with getting a faculty position, so the "bad habits" I had as an undergraduate (and before) just got reinforced.

The weird thing is that I seem to be one of the few people that is happy about their graduate school experience.

In particular, one thing that helped me was the fact that I read quite a bit of poetry, literature, and history. That way when I got caught in a Kafka-sque situation, I could remember reading Kafka and laugh at the situation. Also I could imagine myself being a salesman for Mitch and McConnell in Glen-Garry Glen Ross and that got me into the right mindset to make the phone calls that I needed to make. One other psychological trick that worked for me was to pretend I was acting. I get really nervous on the phone, but it helped me to "pretend" I was Gordon Gekko or Nick Roma. If I was in a really bad mood, I'd think of myself as Willy Loman.

Literature is useful because just like quantum field theory is about interacting particles, great literature is a lot about interacting people. All that stuff that I learned in high school about figuring out symbolism from a novel really turned out to be useful in the job hunt.

Just to give you an example of Kafka in action. You'll notice that most help ads for technical jobs will never tell you want the job is. This is intentional. If you mention that they are looking for someone experienced in scipy, you'll get a million resumes claiming scipy experience. So if the real requirement is scipy experience, they won't mention it. Trying to figure out what a job is is the type of thing that salesman do.

 

[twofish-quant]

One other question that I am wondering is whether or not people have unrealistic job expectations of the physics Ph.D. or unrealistic expectations of the job market in general. There seems to be this idea that "I was an idiot for getting a physics Ph.D. and if I had gotten a masters in X, Y, Z, I'd be set with my perfect job." Looking at people with masters in X, Y, and Z, I just don't think this is true, since people I know without physics Ph.D.'s are finding it harder to get a job than people with physics Ph.D.'s.

One thing that particularly concerns me is that universities are feeding into this "pay us $20K to get a masters degree that will get you a job." Universities now have pretty extensive sales and marketing departments, and none of them are going to tell you that you can get the same education by buying a $20 book on Amazon.

Anyway. One thing that has helped me a lot is just being damned flexible. If I have to learn skill X to get a job, I learn skill X. If I have to move to get a job, then I move. The problem is that the more conditions you put on a job, the less likely you are to get anything, and this is a bad thing when the economy stinks. Even when the economy is good, this can hurt you. If during the dot-com boom, you took the attitude "I don't code" then this really ends up hurting you. Also it hurts you in the interview for the jobs that do exist. One thing the interviewer will look for is whether or not you really want the job, and if it's obvious to the interviewer that you really aren't that interested in the position, they'll find someone else that it. Yes you can fake interest, but even faking interest takes some genuine interest.

But this goes back to the usefulness of the physics Ph.D. degree. If you take the position that you simply will not do certain jobs, then that is going to limit the usefulness of the degree, but if that is the core issue, then getting another degree is not going to help.

One other thing about statistics jobs. I know a few people (not in physics) that have taken those jobs, and I have a good idea what those jobs involve. In the campus newspapers you often see big drug company put out ads for people willing to do drug trials. Once they've done the drug trial, then end up with a mound of data that needs to be processed, and so they need people with basic statistics knowledge to crunch the numbers and generate reports. One thing about these jobs is that the statistics that get used is typically "plug and chug." There are standard statistical tests for checking for drug efficacy, and the last thing anyone wants you to do is to do anything "original." You see a lot of want ads, because there is a lot of money in biotech and the work needs to get done, but something to remember is that there are a ton of people that can do the work (ever wonder what a Ph.D. in sociology ends up doing?)

 

[ParticleGrl]

One other question that I am wondering is whether or not people have unrealistic job expectations of the physics Ph.D. or unrealistic expectations of the job market in general. There seems to be this idea that "I was an idiot for getting a physics Ph.D. and if I had gotten a masters in X, Y, Z, I'd be set with my perfect job."

In this economy, I think that no degree is necessarily a magic bullet. When I interviewed for a mech E research position, it was a handful of mech Es and myself up for one job. After the hiring, there were still one physicist and a handful-1 of mech Es unemployed. When I interviewed in business consulting, it was me against a handful of MBAs, etc.

The flexibility of my background (and the tremendous amount of time I have on my hands) has allowed me to learn enough to get a handful of very diverse interviews, and its possible that other degrees have less options. After all, I haven't been competing against engineers and MBAs for the same job. Unfortunately, I think the flexibility that would be great in a better job market is an achilles heel right now- right now the perfect candidate (or a simulacrum thereof) is much more likely to need a job, and be willing to work cheap.

The frustrating thing is how few jobs doing scientific research a. exist, and b. don't require benchwork (you cannot self-teach cutting edge experimental techniques in your apartment). When various academic advisors said things like "don't worry, there are exciting industry opportunities for physicists" I assumed they would be in scientific research. Learning that your phd has not prepared you for a career doing science, but rather a career in business,insurance or finance is a bitter pill that takes a few months to swallow.

 

[maverick280857]

From what people have told me about the statistics of being hired as a faculty member, you have a 1 in 4 chance if you get your phD from Caltech, Harvard, etc. But only 1 in 10 from anywhere else.

Okay, but why? There are a number of other good graduate schools, and a large number of PhD students graduate every year from them. What about those schools makes them less snazzy?

 

[ParticleGrl]

Okay, but why? There are a number of other good graduate schools, and a large number of PhD students graduate every year from them. What about those schools makes them less snazzy?

Nothing really. What happens is that the very top few schools graduate enough people to fill the overwhelming majority of the faculty spots.

 

[maverick280857]

Nothing really. What happens is that the very top few schools graduate enough people to fill the overwhelming majority of the faculty spots.

I see (I'm unfamiliar with the recruitment system in the US). So, if this is consistently the case, what are grads from other universities supposed to do?

 

[hadsed]

Well, that's what is being discussed in this thread right now.

Fantastic discussion. Everyone talk some more! Seriously, it's very useful information.

 

[Diracula]

At literally EVERY interview (even for bar-tending and waiting tables!) I've gotten, the question "why should we hire you when these other guys have more directly relevant experience?" has come up.

As it should. And you should have a good answer.

I think the problem is that the best and most relevant answer is, "because I'm smarter than them." While this may be true, I see no reason why this trumps the other guy saying "you know I can do this work because I've done it before."

 

[Diracula]

Yeah, those jobs exist but again not in huge numbers. A lot of the ones I see that I think look very interesting want some significant background in statistics, with experience using statistical software such as SAS.

Then get it. Go to amazon, by a book on SAS, and teach it to yourself. If you can learn quantum field theory, then with about a month of independent reading, you can do SAS better than 90% of the people that are applying for those positions.

I don't think this works. Putting on your resume "experience with SAS -- read a book about it" doesn't get you very far when applying for jobs at a new company. If you're already working there and simply gaining new skills, that's different. But to get your foot in the door you need to have demonstrated experience with SAS (for example).

 

[Diracula]

I see (I'm unfamiliar with the recruitment system in the US). So, if this is consistently the case, what are grads from other universities supposed to do?

Get a job somewhere else. By itself, I don't think this is much of a problem. The problem is, I think, with the way the current system works, there are some perverse incentives for an employer NOT to hire a new employee who is eager and willing to learn and work hard. Cost of hiring a new employee, cost of benefits, wage laws, etc.

I recently started working at a biotech company. Freaking love the work. I've been told by my direct supervisor that I'm overqualified for this job, in a sense (long-term they expect me to move on rather quickly). However, I've pretty much been looking for a job like this since early 2009. I would have done this same exact work 2 years ago for half the wage just so I could be working and gaining experience and building my resume. For a time, I would have done it FOR FREE. I applied to hundreds of jobs over that time period. Got like 2 interviews (denied due to being overqualified. Durrrr). Well, I'll do the ****ing work for minimum wage people. Christ.

The system is broken. Being in a growing, strong economy masks the problems. When you hit a massive economic downturn and you're more than qualified and eager to work yet getting rejected every step of the way the problems become obvious.

 

[hadsed]

I found this link to the IOP site where, at the bottom, it shows a link to an article by a physicist who broke into one of these industries. It was somewhat informative (though I wish there was some more detail).

http://www.iop.org/careers/directions/forces/page_39275.html .

I wasn't aware that there was fundamental research in materials and condensed matter, etc. going on in defense. This gives me a little confidence in that being a viable outlet, perhaps I can see if there's a way that I don't have to build nuclear weapons to put food on the table while still working in a well-funded environment for research.

 

[daveyrocket]

And since you already have your Ph.D., it's too late since there is this rule that you can't learn anything new once you have your Ph.D. (that was sacarsm).

1) there is this thing called google and this other thing called amazon. I hear that you can get information on how to run SAS.
2) yes it's a bummer to know that you could have done something different, but that's life. One thing to remember is that there are times in which you have new jobs with new skills in which no one *could have known* what skills would be useful. If five years ago, it was obvious that there would be a ton of jobs in SAS, then everyone would take SAS courses, and we'd have a glut of SAS programms.

Do you really think that I'm saying that you can't learn stuff after you get a PhD?
I'm saying that you shouldn't just be figuring out that there are significant gaps in your knowledge that you should bridge to get a non-academic job a few months before you need a job. The earlier you think about this stuff the better off you will be.

I've never heard a professor give advice that you should spend time learning skills that aren't directly relevant to your current research. I *have* heard at least one professor give the advice that you shouldn't pursue any interests outside of physics. The academic physics environment, at least in my experience, is chalk full of the attitude of "give me a faculty position or give me death." Another really common attitude is that if you don't get an academic job, you can always get a job in industry easily because physicists are smart and you can learn anything you need on the job. It's rather arrogant and if you carry that attitude to a job interview you can kiss the job good-bye.

You've said it yourself that one of the reasons you found success outside of academics was because you spent time learning skills that are useful outside of physics. Not a single one of my peers has ever mentioned being encouraged to do that.

Regarding #2: one of the reasons for talking about this is so that people who are younger than me career-wise might get to thinking about what they should be doing differently. And just because you can't know what's going to be useful in five years doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to look at what's useful now and learn some of it. Stuff that's useful now will probably still be useful in 5 years. But if you count on your dissertation research being useful in industry 5 years after you start it, you may find yourself in for a rude awakening. (Mine is not nearly as useful as I'd like.)

But this does point to a major dilemma for Ph.D. students, if you make yourself super-competive for a faculty position, and you don't make it, then you are dead when it comes to looking for something else.

This is where I'm at, and I've decided I simply can't stand the academic life any longer. Actually I'm quite competitive for coding jobs, because I did spend a lot of time doing C++ and C# just for fun, and I've worked on a lot of large projects. But in the past two years my back pain has really flared up. There are several activities that make it worse, with coding at the top of that list. And it's not a matter of just getting better workstation ergonomics... I can't count the number of times I've gotten the advice to get a better chair, as if that wasn't the very first thing I tried. I've been seeing a spine/pain specialist for the past year, I've had x-rays, an MRI, I've tried yoga, pilates, physical therapy, massage, and chiropractic with only minor improvements. This week I will go in for an epidural injection to see if that helps, but I'm not optimistic about finding a long term solution at this point. This really takes coding jobs off the table for me, but other computer tasks are not nearly as bad.

Then get it. Go to amazon, by a book on SAS, and teach it to yourself. If you can learn quantum field theory, then with about a month of independent reading, you can do SAS better than 90% of the people that are applying for those positions.

There are positions that require total expert knowledge of SAS, but there you'll find that most of the statistics positions are "burger flipping" that just needs someone to run some data through a program. You can pick that up pretty quickly.

If you don't know something then learn it. It so happens that I've used both SAS and R. It's not QFT. Now convincing someone that you have enough SAS and R ability to get the job done takes a bit of doing, but all you really have to do is to take SAS run some experimental data against it, and boom, you have something on your resume.

Neither have I. I've also never taken a course on C++, and I've only taken two courses in computer programming in my entire life. I hate taking courses. I like learning new stuff.

...

ANOVA is just basic algebra. If you can figure out how to do QFT, you can do an ANOVA. It took me about two days to learn how to do it. Chi-square and T-tests are also things that will take you at most a week to learn.

Yeah I've never had a class in C++ either. But if an interviewer asks me, "so, what have you done with C++?" I can list off several projects I've done, the problems I encountered and how I solved them, the results I obtained and papers I published. In other words, I can say "because I have [skill X], I accomplished [achievement Y]." It doesn't matter what I do now with R, I won't be able to say much other than "well I've played around with it in my spare time." You can put a positive spin on it, but it's just not going to carry the same weight as being able to point out specific achievements.

ANOVA might be simple, but if you put "statistics" on your resume because you've done statistical mechanics, and an interviewer asks you if you've ever done an ANOVA, you don't want to say, "I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's easy to learn."

Graduate school is a fairly unique opportunity where you get to pick your tools and make them work for you. If you learn to use SAS and an interviewer asks you what you've done with it you can say "I did this project with SAS, and we published this paper thanks to that work," that's a lot better than saying "yeah I spent two days learning how to do an ANOVA, so it's cool."

 

[Andy Resnick]

Another really common attitude is that if you don't get an academic job, you can always get a job in industry easily because physicists are smart and you can learn anything you need on the job. It's rather arrogant and if you carry that attitude to a job interview you can kiss the job good-bye.

Indeed:

At literally EVERY interview (even for bar-tending and waiting tables!) I've gotten, the question "why should we hire you when these other guys have more directly relevant experience?" has come up.

There are two standard answers that I pull out.

[]
2) "I learn quick" - if you hire someone that knows bottle cap washing then they are going to freeze when the bottle cap industry changes. Now if you hire me, I can learn new techniques for bottle cap washing really fast. For example, six months ago, I knew *nothing* about bottle cap washing, and as you can see from the test that you gave me, I've taught myself the basics at it...

I think the problem is that the best and most relevant answer is, "because I'm smarter than them."

I've had plenty of experience getting industry jobs and now, a tenure-track faculty appointment. Complaining about how tough/unfair it is to get a job or faculty appointment is self-defeating and a waste of time- and inexcusable, given the sheer amount of sob stories posted online.

The bottom line is, someone will hire you if they think you can solve *their* problems, not work on whatever problem *you* happen to think needs solving. By confining yourself to a narrow range of experience (whatever that experience may be), you limit the number of people who think you can solve their problem.

 

[creepypasta13]

I wasn't aware that there was fundamental research in materials and condensed matter, etc. going on in defense. This gives me a little confidence in that being a viable outlet, perhaps I can see if there's a way that I don't have to build nuclear weapons to put food on the table while still working in a well-funded environment for research.

In the US, I think there's only fundamental research in materials and condensed matter, etc in defense at the national labs (ie Los Alamos) and the military labs (ie Naval Research Lab). Other than nuclear weapons simulations, I'm not sure how many of those are open to theorists as a lot of them seem to require experimental skills

 

[Vanadium 50]

I see (I'm unfamiliar with the recruitment system in the US). So, if this is consistently the case, what are grads from other universities supposed to do?

Technically, she is right - the number of grads from a handful of schools is enough to saturate the positions. However, she has not been able to come up with any evidence to support her stronger claim, that if you don't go to that handful of schools, your odds are seriously reduced.

I don't think she's going to be able to. It certainly runs counter to my experience, and it runs counter to the recent hiring data I've found. It also doesn't make logical sense: typically people are offered faculty positions after two three-year postdocs. Why would the key factor be what you did before then?

If you look at recent hires, you will find lots of graduates of Top 20 schools, and the occasional outlier - e.g. the University of Chicago has an assistant professor who graduated from the University of South Carolina.

Does it help to go to the Famous Ivy-League School? Probably - both because they have strong programs and because of the simple fact that smart people come out of those schools because smart people go into those schools.

Finally, the best schools in many subfields are not necessarily the big names. Nuclear physics? Michigan State. Next is probably Stony Brook. Astronomy? Arizona and Hawaii. Condensed Matter? Illinois is up there.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I think the problem is that the best and most relevant answer is, "because I'm smarter than them."

And a useful skill in business is to find a way to say that without coming across like a grad-A jerk. A very useful skill.

 

[twofish-quant]

t certainly runs counter to my experience, and it runs counter to the recent hiring data I've found

This may be field and adviser dependent. In any case, this is something that we can discuss with data.

It also doesn't make logical sense: typically people are offered faculty positions after two three-year postdocs. Why would the key factor be what you did before then?

Because certain schools and certain advisors are just pretty good at putting their students into post-docs. Advisors are more important than schools. Also, when you get into post-doc hiring, things start getting more informal and reputation becomes important.

Finally, the best schools in many subfields are not necessarily the big names. Nuclear physics? Michigan State. Next is probably Stony Brook. Astronomy? Arizona and Hawaii. Condensed Matter? Illinois is up there.

Sure but that's but the statement that some schools saturate hiring is a completely different statement than talking about *which* schools saturate hiring. Personal observation says that getting a degree from certain schools (and more importantly certain advisers) will get you a much better chance of getting a faculty position, but then the question of *which schools those are* is a different issue.

Also the fact that things are field dependent causes hyper-specialization to happen even earlier, which may not be a good thing. If you are sure you are interested in observational astronomy, go to Hawaii. But 1) the University of Hawaii astronomy program is harder to get into than Harvard'ts and 2) you are stuck if you get admitted to Hawaii, but then you figure that you like nuclear physics.

 

[twofish-quant]

I've had plenty of experience getting industry jobs and now, a tenure-track faculty appointment. Complaining about how tough/unfair it is to get a job or faculty appointment is self-defeating and a waste of time- and inexcusable, given the sheer amount of sob stories posted online.

I don't think it is. One thing that helps you go through a difficult and painful experience is to talk to other people that have gone through a difficult and painful experience. Also, you get a lot of useful information. For example, getting an industrial job can be as painful and tough as getting a faculty position, however, the big difference is that most people that go through the effort end up with a job because the jobs are there. This isn't true with faculty positions.

It's *NOT* a waste of time. It helps make things easier for the next crop of people. Also it let's you feedback that gives you some very useful information about what to do next. For example, one key fact about faculty positions is that there aren't many out there, so if you run through five interviews and bomb them, then the odds are pretty good that you should just give up. For industry it's different, and if you bomb five interviews, you are doing pretty good and should keep going.

Also complaining helps if you find other people with the same complaint. Powerful people ain't going to do nothing unless they have to. If one person is annoyed there ain't no jobs, then nothing is going to happen. If a million people start screaming about this, then you'll get the attention of people that can change things fundamentally. This isn't a waste of time.

One of the main problems that you will have in doing anything difficult is the "so why should I get out of bed" problem. One thing that helped me get through this is is the "well, I want to be professor, right? So if I go through the pain and effort of going through the job search, I may learn a few things that will make it easier for the next person."

The bottom line is, someone will hire you if they think you can solve *their* problems, not work on whatever problem *you* happen to think needs solving. By confining yourself to a narrow range of experience (whatever that experience may be), you limit the number of people who think you can solve their problem.

That's true for industry positions. The rules are different for academic positions, because if you have background in nuclear physics, and the job calls for an astrophysicist, you are doomed. This isn't true for industrial positions. In academia, you get a job by hyperspecializing, this will kill you if you look for a job in industry.

But the important thing is that this isn't obvious if you've spent all your life in school.

 

[twofish-quant]

In this economy, I think that no degree is necessarily a magic bullet. When I interviewed for a mech E research position, it was a handful of mech Es and myself up for one job. After the hiring, there were still one physicist and a handful-1 of mech Es unemployed. When I interviewed in business consulting, it was me against a handful of MBAs, etc.

I should point out here that if you are getting interviews, you are doing pretty good. Something that I found very curious is how the jobs search process in industry is entirely different than the application process for graduate school.

Just to give one example. If you send in an application, they will send you a letter saying they got your application, and even if you write it in crayon and your highest level of education is elementary school, most schools will send you a rejection letter. In industry, you will send out your resume, and even if it is an extremely well written resume, 95% of them will go into a black hole. This makes sense if you think of your resume as a advertising flyer. If you get a flyer for a restaurant, and you don't want to eat there, you aren't going to make an effort telling the person that posted the flyer that you've rejected them.

This means curiously that if someone is willing to take the time to say "you stink" you want to hug them and jump for joy. If some one tells you "you stink" that gives you important and valuable information. Also the job search is a lonely process, so even having someone take the effort to say "you stink" makes you feel good in a weird way.

One other difference is that if you apply to graduate school, they will give you an address to send your application, an application, and a deadline. None of those things exist in most companies. Most newbie job hunters want to know the name and telephone number of the person or group in the company that handles job applications, and are shocked to find that this person or group does not exist.

Also schools are transparent. If you are applying to the physics department of Harvard, you send your application to the physics department. You can go to the Harvard website and find out who is the head of the physics department.

In most major companies, the org structure is top secret, so they are not going to tell you what the departments are. They aren't going to make it obvious which departments are hiring, and they may not even know. This again means that information is gold.

Unfortunately, I think the flexibility that would be great in a better job market isn achilles heel right now- right now the perfect candidate (or a simulacrum thereof) is much more likely to need a job, and be willing to work cheap.

Except that being flexible makes you a better candidate. Also, curiously companies sometimes don't want candidates that are willing to work cheap. I'm not willing to work cheap.

Also if you have a job in which a company is looking for "cheap" the odds are that that job has already left the US, and someone in India is doing it already. So if you are getting in an interview in the US, you already know that cost isn't the big factor.

The frustrating thing is how few jobs doing scientific research a. exist, and b. don't require benchwork (you cannot self-teach cutting edge experimental techniques in your apartment).

Not sure I agree with this as a general statement, although it may be true for your field. I'm doing the same sort of computational research that I did in graduate school. Also, you *can* self-teach cutting edge computational techniques in your apartment. The cutting edge of computers is grid and GPU parallel computing involves massive grids, but you can spec out a one/two node machine in your apartment.

The one big catch is that the jobs I know are all in NYC, London, or some Asian city. San Diego is a problem because it's on the wrong coast. If you had been living in Kansas or South Dakota, you could commute weekly from Kansas to NYC (and a surprisingly large number of people do something like that).

When various academic advisors said things like "don't worry, there are exciting industry opportunities for physicists" I assumed they would be in scientific research. Learning that your phd has not prepared you for a career doing science, but rather a career in business,insurance or finance is a bitter pill that takes a few months to swallow.

I think you are making assumptions about what physics Ph.D.'s in finance do.

In my mind, what I'm doing is science. The *only* thing that I can't do is publish, and I'm trying to figure out how to get around that, since I've done stuff that is clearly publishable. In academia, if you figure out a clever way of doing a calculation twenty times as fast, you want everyone to know. In industry partcularly finance, people want to keep this secret. Even letting your competitor know that a) you *can* do the calculation 20x as fast and b) you are doing that calculation is information that people want to keep quiet.

But computational finance is basically the same as computational astrophysics, and I think of myself as a scientist. More importantly, my bosses and immediate social circle doesn't complain when I call myself a scientist. My bosses have a strong financial interest in keeping me "delusional." When I say 'I'm willing to do science relatively cheap, my bosses figure out that it's in their strong financial interest to make me think that I'm a scientist' and so they do. Also, I'm not the only one like this.

As far as being a professor. There is one fun story. At one point, I ended up at this academic conference, and after attending a few of the talks, I noticed that people addressed me as "Professor so-and-so". For the first day, I was correcting people, but after the first day, I stopped because I figured that if I can go into a room and based on what I was saying, other academics assumed that I was a professor, then I was a professor.

This is where deep philosophy comes in. I like thinking about deep questions. What is science? What is a professor? What do I want out of life?

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't think this works.

It does. I did this with R. Also remember that it's a numbers game. If 95% of the times it doesn't work, that's ok.

Putting on your resume "experience with SAS -- read a book about it" doesn't get you very far when applying for jobs at a new company.

So put on your resume "experience with SAS" and then mention that experience involved you crunching real data for an experience, and oh, if you want to know my SAS experience, ask me questions about SAS. At the interview, you can mention the fact that you learned SAS on your own as a *positive*.

One thing that makes technical hiring difficult is that if you put SAS or C++, you are going to get a thousand resumes claiming SAS or C++ experience, and in the phone screen, it becomes obvious that the person you are talking to really has very low levels of SAS and C++.

One thing that most physics Ph.D.'s can do is to learn very quickly. I can give a physics Ph.D. a book on SAS, and within a month, you will be more technically proficient than 95% of people that take SAS courses, and 80% of the people that are sending in resumes.

If you're already working there and simply gaining new skills, that's different. But to get your foot in the door you need to have demonstrated experience with SAS (for example).

And it's not that hard to come up with a project that you can put on your resume. I did this with R (which is easier because the code is open). I noticed that people were working on R, so I taught myself R, and I added a major extension to the system which is now used in production.

 

[ParticleGrl]

However, she has not been able to come up with any evidence to support her stronger claim, that if you don't go to that handful of schools, your odds are seriously reduced.

Look at this chart- http://particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/rumor/lib/exe/detail.php?id=statistics&media=schools.png

A handful of schools are providing the majority of the faculty members. Go through the rumor mill year by year, and you'll see that the trend is consistent.

I don't doubt that different schools dominate different fields, but I'd be willing to bet the pattern is the same- a handful of schools produce most of the nation's faculty in a given field.

I don't think she's going to be able to. It certainly runs counter to my experience, and it runs counter to the recent hiring data I've found.

Personal experience is at best anecdote, and we all know that we can't do much with anecdotes.

It also doesn't make logical sense: typically people are offered faculty positions after two three-year postdocs. Why would the key factor be what you did before then?

Good phd programs generally have a leg-up with getting top tier postdocs, which in turn have a leg up on getting faculty positions. Keep in mind- one mediocre postdoc can kill your career. A lot of studies (and my personal experience) is that productivity is highly dependent on environment.

If you look at recent hires

How recent? Two years of physics hires isn't enough to make a trend, especially since the last few years have been incredibly anemic.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm saying that you shouldn't just be figuring out that there are significant gaps in your knowledge that you should bridge to get a non-academic job a few months before you need a job.

But what happens with Ph.D.'s is that they often don't look for a job until they are "ready" which is a bad thing. If you find that there are a lot of jobs that call for R or SAS, then while you are waiting for the book to arrive from Amazon, you still should be sending out resumes and trying to get interviews.

One serious, serious mistake that I've seen people do is to put everything on hold until they get the right skills. This misses the issue that the job hunt is part of your education. For example, if you go into an interview for a SAS job, and it becomes obvious that you are just not qualified, this is *VERY* useful because it tells you what you should study for, for the next interview.

I *have* heard at least one professor give the advice that you shouldn't pursue any interests outside of physics. The academic physics environment, at least in my experience, is chalk full of the attitude of "give me a faculty position or give me death."

Sure, and that's a problem.

Another really common attitude is that if you don't get an academic job, you can always get a job in industry easily because physicists are smart and you can learn anything you need on the job.

This tends to be true. However, it is one of those "this is true but..." It's true that a physics Ph.d. can get a job in industry, but it requires learning a different set of skills.

It's rather arrogant and if you carry that attitude to a job interview you can kiss the job good-bye.

Depends on the details. Also, on the one hand, you don't want to look too arrogant in an interview, but on the other hand figuring out how to do that isn't quantum field theory.

Also, a little arrogance is a good thing. You can get into equal amounts of trouble by being "not arrogant enough." If you come into an interview with the attitude "I'm a loser that's begging for a job" that will kill your chances just as much as coming across too strong. Doing well in a job interview is a skill, and one thing that you should expect to do is to totally bomb your first few job interviews, but that's part of your education. You want to be humble but not desperate. Self-confident, but not arrogant.

Tricky, but it's not QFT.

You've said it yourself that one of the reasons you found success outside of academics was because you spent time learning skills that are useful outside of physics. Not a single one of my peers has ever mentioned being encouraged to do that.

I'm encouraging you. :-) :-)

One thing that is true is that I was *actively discouraged* from doing what I did.

But if you count on your dissertation research being useful in industry 5 years after you start it, you may find yourself in for a rude awakening. (Mine is not nearly as useful as I'd like.)

It turns out that mine was extra useful. One thing that's not clear to me is whether my dissertation topic is inherently more useful to industry, or whether I've just read enough about sales and marketing so that I was able to "sell" my research more effectively.

Sales and marketing is a "problem-solving" issue. I've got X. The customer wants Y. How do I bridge X and Y? Also part of it involves being *active*. How do I *make* my research useful to people with money.

It doesn't matter what I do now with R, I won't be able to say much other than "well I've played around with it in my spare time."

That's today. What can you get done in three months? What can you get done in three weeks? What can you get done in three days? What can you get done in three hours?

You can put a positive spin on it, but it's just not going to carry the same weight as being able to point out specific achievements.

Right, but if you have three weeks, you can make some specific achievements. Download the software distribution, go to the bug list, find a bug and fix it.

ANOVA might be simple, but if you put "statistics" on your resume because you've done statistical mechanics, and an interviewer asks you if you've ever done an ANOVA, you don't want to say, "I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's easy to learn."

The answer is yes I have done an ANOVA. I have some Ph.D. data that I ran ANOVA against, and this is what I got. It turns out that ANOVA isn't useful for my data because of X, Y, and Z.

Also, interviewer asks you want ANOVA is. Answer, I have no clue. Game over, you lose. But th at's not the end. You go home, go over the questions you bombed, study ANOVA. Next day, another interviewer with a different employer. What is ANOVA? ANOVA is a statistical technique for spliting up variances into those that are based on models and random non-model variances.

One thing that you'll find is that interviewers will tend to ask exactly the same questions, so if you bomb a question, go home, find the answer, and you'll be good when they ask you the same question.

Graduate school is a fairly unique opportunity where you get to pick your tools and make them work for you. If you learn to use SAS and an interviewer asks you what you've done with it you can say "I did this project with SAS, and we published this paper thanks to that work," that's a lot better than saying "yeah I spent two days learning how to do an ANOVA, so it's cool."

But if you've published papers using SAS, the interviewer may toss your application for being overqualified. At least for the jobs involving SAS, that I'm aware of, it involves data processing for medical experiments. If you've published papers using SAS, you are overqualified, and will not get the
job.

There *are* jobs in which they are looking for Ph.D.-level statisticians, and you will not get those jobs. However, there are a lot of jobs which are basically entry level data entry, and if you spend a week teaching yourself ANOVA, that's enough for those jobs. There are jobs in which I'm massively overqualified for, but statistics is not one of them.

Also different employers want different things. A job interview is a lot like dating, and what one employer will hate, another employer will love.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also most job interview questions are psychological questions disguised as skills questions. This is one of them.

I think the problem is that the best and most relevant answer is, "because I'm smarter than them."

Depends on the job. It's hard for people in academia to deal with this fact, but many jobs, perhaps most jobs, raw intelligence is not an advantage. In some jobs, being smart is a huge disadvantage. Smart people often ask too many questions and are generally annoying.

One funny interview story, I was interviewing for a major financial firm in which the interviewer explicitly told me "you have to be careful, smart people tend to get in trouble around here, but if you keep your mouth shut, you can make a ton of money." I smiled, and then after I left the interview, I told the recruiter to stop the process for that job, because I just couldn't work there.

Curiously enough, I was not surprised when said financial firm blew up a few years latter. Massively annoyed that it almost took down the world financial system. One of the reasons I like working where I do, is that people really want me to be smart and a little annoying. That job interview was one reason I support massive government regulation of the financial industry.

Also, for me, it's not true that am smarter. In a lot of jobs, I'm competing against other physics Ph.D.'s, and I'm *NOT* the smartest person that is competing for the job. One of the things that makes my job fun is that I'm in day to day contact with people that are tons smarter than I am.

In dealing with finance jobs, one of my advantages is that I really find finance interesting, so I'm likely to be more productive than someone that is smarter, but hates the job because it reminds them that they don't have a postdoc.

While this may be true, I see no reason why this trumps the other guy saying "you know I can do this work because I've done it before."

Depends on the job. For some jobs, you can argue that because you don't have the standard training, you can take a fresh approach.

Also, you can make overqualification work for you instead of against you. You can say "hey, everyone else has five years of experience, whereas I'm entry level, and as you can see all those people are massively overqualfied, whereas I'm exactly what you are looking for,"

 

[twofish-quant]

fFor a time, I would have done it FOR FREE.

Which curiously enough can be a bad thing. There are a lot of interesting psychological things that go on in a job interview, and if you look too desperate often people will assume there is something fundamentally wrong with you and skip you for someone that has higher demands.

I'm absolutely not willing to work for free. If you aren't going to pay me anything, I'm better off doing something that is more interesting to me. You can tell me that I'm working for the "experience" and that once I work for nothing, that I'll get this nice big job later on.

Bull****. I've been burned by that once before. If you can get people to work for you for free, then there will *NEVER* be a need to work for a living wage. If you can build a system on graduate students, well...

One big problem is that if you live in the US, you just cannot compete on cost. There are people in India and China that will do the job for one-tenth your wage, and if the employer is looking for low cost employees, they aren't going to even be looking in the US.

The system is broken.

Sure, but trying to figure out how to fix it is non-trivial. There are all sorts of extremely complex things that are going on.

Being in a growing, strong economy masks the problems.

It doesn't mask the problems. It is the problem. If you have 100 people and 110 job openings, great! If you have 100 people and 90 job openings, someone is going to get screwed and it sucks to be one of those people. Personally, I think that the government should step in and create basic research positions using borrowed money that will get paid off from the inventions from said research, but that ing idea is not getting much traction.

When you hit a massive economic downturn and you're more than qualified and eager to work yet getting rejected every step of the way the problems become obvious.

One thing that makes the system weird is that it's possible to be overqualified and too eager. There is this quirk of human psychology that makes people want what they can't have, so if you are throwing yourself in front of someone begging for a job, they are curiously less likely to give it to you than if you show "interested disinterest."

Also, you do realize that you are in a different world with different standards. In academia you have been taught that the job *should* go to the smartest and most eager. Outside of academia, the rules are different. For example, you can be the smartest and more eager person for the job, but you ain't going to be King or Queen of England. The job requirement for that is that your parents are royals. There are jobs like that, and that matters a lot when there aren't enough jobs to go around.

You could argue that society should work like academia, but given that academic hiring is even more of a mess than industrial hiring, I'm not sure that's a good idea.

One thing that is good about a system that is "irrational" is that you get a lot of sympathy from people when you don't find a job. It's a bad economy, and you can do everything right and still end up with nothing. Unemployment is 10%. One in ten people are going to be screwed, and a lot of them are just going to be screwed because they were just unlucky. One reason that I try to help people get jobs, is because I might need to call in some favors if I get kicked out.

One problem with academia is that because hiring is "rational", people that do get positions end up extremely unsympathetic with "losers".

 

[elkement]

You have an IT department that is understaffed and underpaid, and so they get screamed at for being idiots. At this point, desperate manager brings in IBM who then brings outside consultants that get paid three times as much money for the same work and who aren't subject to the silly bureaucratic rules that keeps local IT from doing the same thing. You can make money in this situation, but you do realize that local IT will hate you, and your only solace is that you'll be gone before they hate you enough to do physical damage to you.

Yes, this is true for many long-term consulting engagements. And this is exactly why I - as an external consultant - am only doing short-term engagements, either in planning/design or review/firefighting. Typically it is the local IT guys at my long-term clients that call me to work with them on the 'really critical stuff they do not want to touch'.

This was also a reason why I became a self-employed consultant: I wanted to have to maximum freedom so define exactly what I will offer to clients. Typical consulting companies or consulting departments within large corporations tend to 'sell hours' and try to 'utilize' as much consultants as possible. I am on the other hand telling my customers that I try to finish my job as fast as possible and try to make myself redundant and minimize time onsite.

One good news is that if you have contacts, you can actually to into business for yourself. However, after 2007, this isn't as popular as it was before.

Yes, this is exactly what I did - fortunately long before the econimical crisis. Later - when companies started to lay off people, probably clients might have thought falsely that I was one of those laid off consultants that did not choose this way of working voluntarily.

In the US, there is one big thing that keeps people from doing independent consulting and that is health insurance. If you or your spouse have any pre-existing condition, then you can't get health insurance at anything decent, which means that you can't run your own business.

I am sorry to hear this, it seems we are lucky in Europe. Actually my spouse and I are running our our small busines together - this was one of the best decisions in my life. We are both phyiscs PhDs and found some very interesting and rewarding fields of expertise in IT.

And if you do it right, it helps to have the letters Ph.D. on your business card.

Yes and no. It is of course true for governmental customers and large corporations with rather buerocratic agency-like structures - people in such organizatins tend to appreciate academic titles.
If you work with young geeks and hackers who learned everything on their own, any type of title (academic or job / professional title) might be considered braggy. Of course a technical / science degree is still better in this respect than an MBA Senior Something Manager ;-). I was always rather cautious and did not emphasize my degree too much or too early in the hardcore IT security community that I am part of. I think it is better if you first are able to demonstrate your skills (and show that you are 'one of them') and somewhen later you casually mention you have a PhD in physics.

However I was maybe too lucky to be really able to judge on this: All of my clients are either long-term clients or they are referred to me by somebody who knows me - so I had never been in this classical elevator-pitch situation where you hand in your business card to a potential new client.

 

[elkement]

The rules are different for academic positions, because if you have background in nuclear physics, and the job calls for an astrophysicist, you are doomed. This isn't true for industrial positions. In academia, you get a job by hyperspecializing, this will kill you if you look for a job in industry.
.

I do not believe that 'hyperspecialization' in industry is a disadvantage per se. It is subtle according to my experience: I am presenting myself as hyperspecialist (digital certificates / public key cryptography) - clients engage me because of my skills in a rather narrow range. I have repeatedly told how hard it was to find somebody with these skills. However what I am really doing requires some rather broad knowledge as well and it is maybe most important that I am able to 'hack' and 'reverse engineer' systems I have never seen before.
However I still feel that it would be slightly counterproductive to advertise the full range of skills.

Probably the trick (in industry) is just to find a niche that allows you to present yourself as one of a low number of experts. As soon as you get a foot in the door and clients / colleagues learn what you are capable to do you are not bound to the confinements of this specialization any more.

But the important thing is that this isn't obvious if you've spent all your life in school.

I could not agree more!

 

[Andy Resnick]

I don't think it is. One thing that helps you go through a difficult and painful experience is to talk to other people that have gone through a difficult and painful experience. Also, you get a lot of useful information. For example, getting an industrial job can be as painful and tough as getting a faculty position, however, the big difference is that most people that go through the effort end up with a job because the jobs are there. This isn't true with faculty positions.

[]

That's true for industry positions. The rules are different for academic positions, because if you have background in nuclear physics, and the job calls for an astrophysicist, you are doomed. This isn't true for industrial positions. In academia, you get a job by hyperspecializing, this will kill you if you look for a job in industry.

Faculty positions are there, too- I was able to get one two years ago. I've been through the job-seeking process plenty- the success rate between quality industrial jobs and quality academic jobs is about the same: dozens of resumes out, a trickle of interviews, and one or two actual offers.

The rules are not different for academic positions- a department wants someone who will compliment the team already in place, just like industry. Hyperspecializing also limits your opportunities in academia: it's highly unlikely a Department will want to hire someone with substantial overlap of research to someone already there.

It's a fine line between constructive discussion and pointless whining.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Look at this chart- http://particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/rumor/lib/exe/detail.php?id=statistics&media=schools.png

A handful of schools are providing the majority of the faculty members. Go through the rumor mill year by year, and you'll see that the trend is consistent.

I don't doubt that different schools dominate different fields, but I'd be willing to bet the pattern is the same- a handful of schools produce most of the nation's faculty in a given field.

Well, I took a close look at the data (something that you should have done before making these claims) and this is what I found. (There will always be a degree of interpretation here, since the numbers don't add up at the few percent level, and he has non-degree granting institutions like CERN listed as PhD sources. There's one school where I know for a fact two people got jobs, but only one is listed)

Yes, a few schools dominate. But these are big schools - with one exception, which I will come to later. If you look at the number of graduates who get faculty jobs, of course big schools will dominate. This would be true if it were based on chance alone. You need to look at the rate. I used the 2009 total number of graduate students as a proxy - assuming it is proportional to the average number of HEP theorists graduating over the period of interest.

The anomaly is Princeton. Whereas HEP theory is 5-10% of the faculty of most schools, it's 20-30% of Princeton, depending on how you count emeritus professors (of which they have many) and IAS adjuncts. So while Princeton is a small school according to my proxy, in HEP theory it's enormous - possibly the largest school in the country. Additionally, they really emphasize string theory (their lone non-stringer just left the department). In 1994, this was an asset. In 2011, not so much.

Dropping Princeton entirely, you find that 6 or 7 schools produce about a third of the faculty, and about 13 produce half the faculty. They have, respectively, a fifth and a third of the students. So while there is an effect - nobody argued that Oklahoma State was the peer of Harvard - it's nowhere near strong enough to support the common advice "if you can't get into a Top 5 school, stay home."

Including Princeton, I calculated the Gini coefficient for getting a faculty job vs. PhD institute. It's 0.045. Compare that to, as an example, income inequality in the Nordic countries of about 0.25.

Personal experience is at best anecdote, and we all know that we can't do much with anecdotes.

Yes, but you are pooh-poohing my experience while arguing we should accept yours. I don't see why - I have sat on the committee for four theory hires, and you've just graduated - and had you chosen the academic route, would be at least six years away from a faculty offer. Why is your experience more relevant than mine?

 

[ParticleGrl]

Well, I took a close look at the data (something that you should have done before making these claims) and this is what I found. (There will always be a degree of interpretation here, since the numbers don't add up at the few percent level, and he has non-degree granting institutions like CERN listed as PhD sources. There's one school where I know for a fact two people got jobs, but only one is listed)

That is the issue with rumor mill data in general. I know two hire in the time period that aren't on the list.

If you look at the number of graduates who get faculty jobs, of course big schools will dominate. This would be true if it were based on chance alone. You need to look at the rate. I used the 2009 total number of graduate students as a proxy - assuming it is proportional to the average number of HEP theorists graduating over the period of interest.

What source are you using for 2009 graduate students/school? While you should expect big schools to dominate, Berkeley, Texas, Wisconsin and Illinois-Urbana are all flagship state schools that produced (near as I can tell) 16,10,5,1. You are obviously better off being at Berkeley or Texas than Wisconsin, even though Wisconsin is a very good phenomenology school.

Also, I'm not sure that comparing GINI to wealth inequality is the best measure of this sort of effect. If most schools have an order of 1/10 chance and a small number have a 1/4 chance, this is like a society where most have 50k, and 3% or so have 125k, which isn't that unequal as these things go.