what to do with a PhD in material science?

aihaike

Dear all,

I got a PhD in computational material science (classical Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics).
I'm doing a postdoc but I wonder if I will keep going that way for my next position.
I've no idea about what to do afterward if I decide to do something else.
I do not know if there are really opportunities for someone with my profile.
I have some computer and programming skills but people from computer science do a better job I figure.

Does someone have any experience with a somehow "reconversion" from my field?

Thanks in advance,

Eric.

kote

You could check out jobs in industry. See https://xjobs.brassring.com/1033/ASP...6&jobid=731948 for example from http://www.ge.com/research/grc_6.html.

You may not need to convert at all depending on the openings when you are looking. I'm not sure what the general job market is like for computational material science, but the job above looks like a potentially great fit. I'm sure similar jobs exist at other companies.

comp_math

Isn't multiscale problems in materials a hot area? Can't you find a position in a national lab or private sector doing materials research?

aihaike

Thanks,

I did not know those links ....
I'll have a look.

aihaike

well the hot area the domain of biology ...
I'm actually thinking about going to that way.

Is there really "private sector doing materials research" ?
Thank you for your reply.

twofish-quant

If you develop some minimal c++ skills, there are a lot of programming jobs in private industry. Wall Street, oil and gas industry, logistics.

Tons of them. Start with www.dice.com and www.efinancialcareers.com

No.

1) Just because you are a literature Ph.D. or even a brilliant literature Ph.D. doesn't mean that you can write decent novels. There are lots of CS people that really can't program. There are lots of people that can, but the two skills are correlated less than one would think.

2) algorthimic code requires some special skills

3) Even with the above, you need lots of warm bodies. If you have 10 million lines of code to babysit that means thousands of programming jobs. If you have this massive giant spawling system, then one genius is not going to be able to deal with this no matter brilliant they are. You want a thousand geniuses. Now since you probably can't get or couldn't afford a thousand geniuses, you probably will have to settle for five or six geniuses and a thousand reasonably intelligent people. Which is where you come in.....

aihaike

Thanks for your answer,

I really did not see it like that.
That's an interesting point of view.
Does that mean the world is mine?
I'm happy to see that this topic attracts more people that I thought.

twofish-quant

Not really. It does mean that you are unlikely to be poor and unemployed.

aihaike

year, I was just kidding.
It's very helpful.
Thanks