Where do ex particle theorists work?

ParticleGrl

So I finished up a phd in particle phenomenology very recently. After much soul searching, I've given up on the academic dream (6 years of postdocing? No thanks!). My significant other is working in San Diego, so I'm hoping to land a job there, which seems to preclude the traditional route for ex-theoretical physicists (finance).

Career services at my university has proven worthless ("we are experts in the PROCESS, not what jobs are out there.") So my question is this- what kind of industries hire ex-theoretical physicists? Any ex-physicists out there with experience aiming at one geographic region?

twofish-quant

One thing that you might want to find out is whether your SO would be willing to relocate, if you ended up with a job offer in finance with a higher salary than what he currently makes. Entry level jobs for physics Ph.D.'s in finance are typically $90K + $30-50K bonus. The other thing is how long he is going to be in SD. If he has academic or military commitments, then long distance relationships are a pain, but they do work for several years.

The problem is that those jobs are all in NYC, London, or somewhere in Asia (HK/Singapore/Tokyo/Shanghai). There are finance jobs outside the the major centers, but employers are *EXTREMELY* reluctant to hire physics Ph.D.'s, because they worry that they will run off to NYC after a few months.

The typical employers of physics Ph.D.'s are high technology companies. To get in touch with those, you need to start with boards like www.dice.com and start spamming your CV to recruiters. Also, it helps a lot if you start networking with alumni from your department.

The big three are finance, oil, defense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfxfnokQuLM

ParticleGrl

Basically at this point, I'm determined to work in San Diego. Most of the tech work out here seems to be bio related and people judge me unqualified. My significant other can relocate after two years, would it kill my career to spend a year or two bartending while I hone some practical skills (c++, etc) before relocating? In short, what kind of shelf life does the degree have if I'm applying for science policy or defense jobs in D.C.? (which is where most of the contacts in my alumni network seem to live and work now.)

chiro

I don't know about you but if I were an employer I might not look favourably on seeing your career going from PhD to bartending: it might send a negative signal.

I think the best thing you could do is find some job that gives you room to learn things like C++ where you get some experience. That way when you get a new job you can say "I did X and Y for company Z" rather than "I spent two years doing X by myself".

With programming there is a lot you can learn by yourself but you'll need teamwork experience in some form whether its from a project like an honors or postgraduate research project, or through prior employment.

I can't really say anything about the other jobs you mentioned though since I have no experience in them.

twofish-quant

For the jobs I'm familiar with, it wouldn't. Something that you might consider is contacting the local community college to see if they have any adjunct positions. Also, keep attending conferences, and keeping your research connections intact. Network with other alumni.

One good thing about an adjunct position or even a substitute high school teacher position is that it avoids having a gap in the resume. The gap itself isn't bad. The problem is that when HR sees a missing spot in the resume, they are going to imagine that you were in prison for dealing crystal meth, and having a job as a adjunct community college teacher or something else explains that.

Also if you have time, then it would be really useful to get involved with some open source C++ project. If you spend a year putting together an Android app, that looks good.

The one big mistake that I regret is that after I got my Ph.D., I was ashamed that I didn't to the post-doc route, and so I didn't keep my research network intact. It took me about five years to get over that, and by that time things had gotten cold.

Wow!!!

I'd be interested in that sort of question myself, since I'm interested in getting in touch with people involved in US science policy for my own nefarious purposes.

twofish-quant

I am an employer, and it wouldn't bother me. The only place where this could get you in trouble is if you leave a gap in your resume, at which point someone in HR may assume that you did something awful (i.e. felony in prison awful), but this is more of an issue of resume writing than anything else.

Much of the reason I wouldn't hold it against you if you worked for two years as a bartender was that I wouldn't want anyone to hold it against me if *I* worked for two years as a bartender.

Depends on the employer. In my situation, I'd be more impressed if you spent two years by yourself. The hard part is having something to show that you did something for those two years.

Also different employers look for different things which is good. If employer A rejects your resume because you worked as a bartender, but employer B doesn't care. Then A won't hire you and B will.

That's why open source projects are useful.

ParticleGrl

twofish-quant, thanks for your input. Hopefully some other phd level ex-scientists will also chime in (more perspectives are always fantastic).

Its good to know that the shelf-life is longer outside of academia than in, at least for some jobs (I assume in the financial sector?)

Tending bar, I take it doesn't quite fill the same role? The problem is, of course, I can make far more money bartending or waiting tables at a trendy place than I can adjuncting. On that note- is $2000 for a 4 credit course really the standard? Why do people take these jobs?

Do you feel bad about losing that network on a professional level, or because you wish to keep a toe involved in the research? I was under the impression that the odds of crossing back into academia are essentially zero?

Ryker

This suggestion really got me thinking. Are job prospects for some Physics PhD's really so bleak as to suggest someone to move out of a city of 1,306,300 people, 8th in the US (according to Wikipedia), and look for a job elsewhere?! If yes, then that is just ridiculous and not what I expected at all.

ParticleGrl

Inside academia, I can say certainly yes. You have to follow the work, and you really won't have any choice in where you live. You are unlikely to ever have multiple employment offers (and hence, at least some choice), and will probably move internationally for at least one postdoc.

Outside of academia, my experience is highly limited. I can only speak for the friends of mine that have found work. All of them did it by being willing to be highly mobile- willing to move to financial centers, willing to move to DC for science policy work, etc. People with more industry experience will hopefully come through the thread and tell me how I wrong I am, and point me to companies in San Diego looking for my deep knowledge of quantum field theory :)

chiro

In reply to the first comment, I would not agree on all fronts. Some people work great by themselves and lock themselves up in a room or a library and can work that way, but end up being horrible in a team environment due to their personality, maybe their ego, and maybe even due to their social skills which may be non-existant.

Nowadays there are enough resources out there to learn pretty much anything, but one thing that a social learning does that an isolated one may not do is essentially give everyone in the social environment a reference. By reference I mean that everyone in that class can make a comparison among their peers about what is right and what is wrong or some interpolation between the two extremes.

Another thing is that work in social situations forces people to carry out work until its completion and that work may contains things that you may hate or not want to do, but you get it done anyway.

If someone was in isolation working on stuff, then I would bet that most of that "stuff" was something they actually enjoyed doing, and the stuff that they didn't enjoy they would most likely toss it.

You could put the same person in a team environment, and the person may simply just shutdown or be unresponsive because they may not want to deal with **** that they find boring.

There are some jobs where the kind of "isolated" personality is a strong point, but the day of the maverick is something of the past and to a large extent I would say looked down on.

DR13

Check out General Atomics. They may be looking for someone with your background.

twofish-quant

One other nice thing about finance is that people want diverse skills. For example, if you are in the business of giving loan to trucking companies, then you *really* want someone on your team that was once a truck driver.

Also, at least where I work, people that look at resumes are interested in "odd but useful skills". If you have a stack of 20 resumes from computer programmers, and one of them happens to be a world champion gin rummy player, then that person is likely to get an interview just because they are different with a useful skill.

Also with bartending, I can imagine getting some very useful and relevant skills to finance.

As far as adjuncting, it makes sense if you think of it as paid charity work or an extra second job. One very interesting policy of University of Phoenix is that they will only allow you to adjunct as a second job, and they won't hire you unless you have two years of work experience outside of academia.

It's because I might be useful as an volunteer research assistant. The problem is that once the networks go cold, it's hard to restart them. Also, there are things that I'm working on in my day job that could be useful for computational physics.

It depends on how you define academia.

Curiously I think my odds of teaching at a major university are rather higher now than they were ten years ago, although I'm more likely to end up in the business school than the physics department. I know of people that have non-tenured positions in the B-school of some universities.

twofish-quant

The problem is that jobs for physics Ph.D.'s are geographical. To take an extreme example, if you find yourself in the middle of the Sahara desert, your Ph.D. is just not going to be useful. In order to make physics Ph.D.'s "useful" you need a pretty intensive infrastructure, and so this tends to cause jobs for physics Ph.D.'s to centralize in some cities.

In finance, the "big leagues" are NYC, London, and HK/Singapore/Tokyo. There are jobs for physics Ph.D.'s outside of those cities, but if your experience is similar to mine, you'll run into the overqualification problem. I tried to look for jobs outside of NYC, but I had *four* different companies refuse to hire me, because they said (and they were quite open about this) that they figured that once I got hired and found out that much more I could get in NYC, that I'd leave.

After a few months, I took the hint. It turns out that they were right in not hiring me.

The question "do you want to go into finance?" is pretty close to the question "so how do you like living in NYC?" You put eight million hyper-competitive ambitious people in one place, and it gets really interesting. Culturally it's *VERY* different from San Diego.

twofish-quant

One weird thing is that the internet has actually caused things to centralize. Before the internet, you had to have people pretty widely distributed so that you could get local service, but with the internet, it turns out to be more efficient to put all of the computers and people in one place.

twofish-quant

But I expect that to change in the next few years. It's clearly possible to have social networks online, and I expect that very soon, some one is going to "put the pieces together" to do something quite different.

Also all of the "raw materials" for learning online, but so far no one has put the pieces together. If you want to do an physics degree online, you need things like career services, academic support, mental health services, and a dozen other things. All of the pieces are there, and it's only a matter of time (i.e. three years or so) before they connect.

Something I do expect is that ten years from now, people will look at MIT Open Courseware and say "what morons!!!!" in much the same way that people are looking at recording companies and Xerox PARC.

Also application programming is hard because you are working on several million lines of code that are being worked on by several hundred other people.

I don't think so. I know some programmers and network engineers that are so freaking brilliant that people don't mind their quirks. I know of someone that is impossible to work with, but he is a total genius at graphics programming. He's gotten laid off before, but he's in a situation that whenever someone lays him off, then he gets rehired a month later by the same company, because no one else can do what he does. What he does is that people give him a well defined problem, and then put pizza in his office, and he spits out code.

This is "nice work if you can get it." The problem is that there aren't that many jobs for super-geniuses. This one programmer can do the work of 20 people. So you just hire him and you don't have to hire 19 other people. Great for him, but it's a bummer if you are one of the 19 that don't get hired.

The typical software job is that you have this monster of a program, and you just throw people at it until it works.

twofish-quant

I should point out that if it's an issue of picking up social skills, I think bartending experience would be quite useful.

chiro

I'm aware that there are mavericks out there that are employed and in fact some industries prefer the maverick personalities and egos over the more conservative, obedient non maverick types.

Also you kind of illustrate my point with the case of the guy being laid off. That's pretty much what I was getting at. If a business has a choice of hiring two people with one person being great but an ******* and another that is maybe not so great but still has the potential to get the job done and isn't an *******, then it would in the interests of the business to hire the non-maverick.

I'm aware of the realities of the complexities of modern day software from prior work experience. You'll get your so called "god programmers", but if there isn't the cultural fit, things can get ugly. Any HR department knows (or should know) that to get things done, you need people motivated towards a common goal and this is especially important nowadays since most projects aren't done by "lone gunmen", but by dozens, maybe even hundreds of people. If you've got divisions in the team, things can get ugly, time can be wasted, and **** can hit the fan.

Some corporate cultures love mavericks, but personally I think it would be hard to have a culture where every single person is a maverick: to me it would be like a house of cards.