Academia: Exponential Growth & Post Docs Till 40?

[Vanadium 50]

I don't see what problem making postdoctory a career solves. Yes, if you were one of the lucky few who landed such a position, you'd be in good shape, but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

Some things to think about:

Each professor graduates of order 10 students. Only one of them is needed to replace him. That fact that many of the other 9 would also like to replace him doesn't change how many are needed. In times of growth, that 1 might become 1.5 or even 2, but it can't be 10.

Next, the normal path for PhDs is to enter industry. That's why the political bodies are funding physics. Congress does not care about the spectrum of glopolium, but they understand that research on he spectrum of glopolium produces PhDs that then go on to aerospace, energy, finance and other fields. They know, as do the leaders of these industries, that this might not be the PhDs first choice. Their attitude is 'So what? As that great philosopher, Willie Nelson once said, "Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play."'

For some reason, physics graduate students are amazing at denial. They read the above and are sure that because they have been at or near the top of their class all their lives, that the odds don't apply to them. It's impossible to get a PhD in physics and not understand exponential growth, and anyone who is even slightly observant can compare the number of faculty hires in their department with the number of graduates.

Finally, I am continually astounded at the number of people who confuse the purpose of a research university with the purpose of a trade school.

 

[chill_factor]

A lot depends on the area of physics. There are some areas (string theory and mathematical physics) that are prone to the "second Einstein effect" than others. But even in areas that are more communal, the number of jobs produced is relatively small, and the jobs that are produced are often not directly related to research.

If you increase the number of string theorist from 5 to 100, then you can use the extra ones to research other approaches, but if you increase them from 100 to 10000, it's not clear what the other people will do.



But we are still talking about thousands of jobs in a nation with 30 million people.



But we are still talking about 100 or so people that changed the world. The fact that a small number of physicists can change the world is paradoxically not a good thing when it comes to generating large number of things for physicists to do.

whats wrong with non-research technical fields? just like mechanical engineering needs people mostly to size a valve and design nails (exaggerating here but you know what I mean) and not to design new rockets, physics, especially condensed matter/materials, biomedical and optics, needs people to build, design and operate complex machinery or complex processes in semi-routine jobs, and do so competently.

even some high school level problems in physics, are very hard for many people to actually apply to real world applications.

 

[deRham]

If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job.

You wouldn't be "spending years going after this job" - why should you? As ParticleGrl suggests, a lot of people pursue the career because heck, researching physics is just pretty awesome to some people. So they wouldn't be doing it just to get a permanent job.

because he hasn't been able to convince anyone that he won't stop once he has gotten rid of tenured faculty.

Yikes. Yeah, obviously we don't want to just get rid of researchers altogether. I don't even propose getting rid of tenure myself. What I do believe is that tenure is an elite thing, and it isn't so bad if the middle is widened and the elite is slimmer; after all, the IAS consists of some of the most elite positions around, yet its faculty is downright scarily accomplished, and I can hardly complain that they're put on a pedestal.

My main problem is that the current system just seems less efficient in a way. For a field like theoretical mathematics, I just can't see a graduate student or postdoc providing enough "cheap labor" to justify even having them around; they're around because they're steadily building publications and skills that will hopefully result in significant results. Keeping more of these people around to actually continue with their research can only result in better productivity overall.

But the beauty of the system is that there isn't an easy choke point.

Very good point. At least I'm beginning to see why it's so hard to change the system.
The crux of my belief is this: whether it be admission to an undergraduate or graduate school, getting a job, etc, at some point when you just make it too hard to get a position, you'll weed out talent and introduce a high level of luck and randomness. Some of that is always there, but pointedly creating a lottery-jackpot scenario is crazy. I never used to object when I was young and thought the reason it's so hard to get is that only the most talented are chosen. {This goes back to my point about the IAS. I'm not complaining how they're treated. They're probably the reason the fields I study even exist.}

 

[Mute]

I strongly disagree. The current system is loaded with people who would pursue a career in physics regardless of how awful the outcome.

By why are they willing to pursue it? Part of it is a misguided love of science above everything else, perhaps, but part of a person's ability to rationalize doing multiple postdocs upon postdocs at all is that they can potentially ultimately obtain a permanent position. If you were to take away the permanence of that position, then it becomes harder to rationalize spending so much of your life to go after it. If professors then start getting fired because they no longer have that job security, then it becomes much harder to rationalize to yourself that you should spend all of your youth going after this job. Sure, some people will still do it, but I think most people would opt at that point to look at more lucrative options, since you'd have just as much job security in industry but a much higher salary. A love of science can only carry you so far. I think that the number of quality candidates going after faculty positions would drop in this case. As a result, to really remain competitive with industry, the salaries of non-permanent faculty jobs would have to go up - or hiring from other countries will increase. If university administrations could get away with eliminating tenure without increasing salaries or foreign hirings and still have quality candidates, why haven't they tried?

But even if tenured profs made half of what they do now, you'd still have people chasing the positions. CS and economics professors make substantially more than theoretical physics professors, even at liberal arts colleges, and yet the physics professorships are much more competitive.

To a certain point I'm sure you can decrease a tenured prof's salary and people will still chase the positions, but there is a limit to how much you can decrease it - and that's if the position is permanent. If the position is not permanent I suspect that eventually the salary will have to increase to remain competitive with other options, all other things being kept the same.

Under the current system you can exploit some people all of the time, but if you change the system by removing one of the best 'rewards' of the long and arduous process of getting a faculty position, I think most people won't be as willing to be exploited anymore.

 

[deRham]

but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

I suppose it comes down to a judgment call; it will certainly become just as hard to get for those remaining. However, I'm hardly proposing that every last person in the planet should have a faculty position.

To be totally honest, I think many people who pursue a PhD in, say, theoretical mathematics (I imagine this is true for physics) would not even want to put up with the stress of achieving amazing publications at the levels which many mathematicians work at. For instance, I think even if you offered them a position at Harvard pure mathematics PhD, they'd probably end up leaving or something, because it's intense enough that few would even want to keep up with that pace (despite the many who would like to try to get admitted).

I think the problem is when people show themselves very capable of handling the pace, rigor, etc and still have an absurdly low chance at continuing their research. It's hard to deny that's wasteful.

 

[deRham]

If you were to take away the permanence of that position, then it becomes harder to rationalize spending so much of your life to go after it.

To be clear: we don't even have to reduce tenured professors' salaries or the permanence. I just mean that tenure sounds like hitting a jackpot, and a few superstars can have that. I think we'd just have a total of more productive researchers if they had a reasonable way of pursuing their research other than hitting that jackpot.

If you were to take away the permanence of that position,

There is clearly something between permanent and strictly temporary, which probably would be a desirable enough alternative for someone who spent 7 years doing a physics PhD out of liking it, instead of doing a different job which pays much more for roughly that energy.

 

[ParticleGrl]

I don't see what problem making postdoctory a career solves. Yes, if you were one of the lucky few who landed such a position, you'd be in good shape, but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

I think you don't understand the proposal. The idea is to have career postdocs who work in place of some of the graduate students. That means a team of 2 or 3 physicists (1 full professor, 1 or 2 "permenent postdocs") train 3 or 4 students over their careers, instead of 1 professor training 7 or 8 students. The hope is that the extra postdocs, because they are well-trained scientists, keep productivity in the lab up and reduce the need for students.

Next, the normal path for PhDs is to enter industry. That's why the political bodies are funding physics.

The implicit assumption I made when I heard "PhDs in physics enter industry" was that phds in physics enter industry TO DO PHYSICS. After all- most of the numbers report on the salary of "physicists" at early career, mid career, late career. You don't see numbers for "physics phd working in management consulting, physics phd working in insurance, physics phds working in finance."

The political bodies fund physics to get research done, not to produce physicists for the finance industry. The system is set up to get research done cheaply, hence the production of lots of students, most of which are just waste products of the research machine. The funding agencies don't care at all about the number of students leaving the field or else when professors write grants, they'd list all the phds they've sent into the world of finance/insurance,etc.

For some reason, physics graduate students are amazing at denial.

I think its more likely that the system is full of people suggesting that science is an amazingly great career path, and that not enough Americans go into math and science, etc. Look at the statistics the UT system uses to encourage its physics majors (posted earlier in this thread, I believe). If everyone (including your professors) tells you what a great career path science is, why wouldn't you believe them? If everyone says there is a huge shortage of American scientists, why wouldn't you believe them? The people I know in phd programs all put too much faith in what scientists told them about career prospects. You look around and say "well, not everyone gets to be a professor, but surely all these physicists go on to work as industrial physicists of some kind."

Very few people at the university seem to be willing to say "science is a dead end career path. Odds are, after a very short career you'll have to reinvent yourself to get a job in a field unrelated to science."

Finally, I am continually astounded at the number of people who confuse the purpose of a research university with the purpose of a trade school.

The problem is that companies doing hiring treat the research university like a trade school. Need an expert on finite element analysis of fluids? Hire a recent phd who did exactly that. Need an expert on RF electronics, hire a recent phd who did exactly that. So if you do a phd in an area without specific industrial demand, odds are you are just wasting your time honing a skill set you'll never get/need to use.

If you want to work in a traditional technical field and you don't treat the research university as a trade school, you aren't likely to find the job you want.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The political bodies fund physics to get research done, not to produce physicists for the finance industry.

That's simply not true. One of us has worked at the agencies, and one of us has discussed this in depth with members of Congress from both parties. The reason physics is funded better than, say, art history, is not because Congress is more interested in the spectrum of glopolium than the development of pre-Impressionism. It's because people who get degrees on glopolium are likely to work important projects in industry - projects that they can tax and projects that will employ others.

PI's are evaluated on how many students they produce and how well these students do post-PhD.

While in the past, they were interested in how many physicists worked at Raytheon and Schlumburger, now they are also looking at places like Chase.

I'm curious - did you really think that some place in industry would pay you to do particle phenomenology when you graduated? If not, did it not occur to you that developing some more immediately useful skills would be a good idea?

 

[deRham]

The reason physics is funded better than, say, art history, is not because Congress is more interested in the spectrum of glopolium than the development of pre-Impressionism. It's because people who get degrees on glopolium are likely to work important projects in industry - projects that they can tax and projects that will employ others.

On what basis? Is it clear that in a majority of such cases, the pursuit of a 5+ year physics graduate degree had them contribute to more/better projects in industry than would have been the case if they never obtained the degree?

I'm sure for many people the path is worth it even if they take jobs outside physics, but even for instance twofish-quant has said that he was developing useful skills even as an undergraduate (emphasis: quite distinct from getting a physics PhD), and that it wasn't forced and came somewhat naturally.

It's perfectly possible to obtain a physics PhD with an emphasis in representation theory, geometry and topology and hardly anything employable. That's exactly what at least some people I know (note, in a physics, NOT mathematics department) seem to do. How do these cases fit into the above scheme?

 

[ParticleGrl]

I'm curious - did you really think that some place in industry would pay you to do particle phenomenology when you graduated? If not, did it not occur to you that developing some more immediately useful skills would be a good idea?

No, I assumed having a broad physics background (thermo, electrodynamics,mechanics, etc) would make me nicely trainable for calculational/numerical work in engineering/science areas, or for inter-disciplanry work in engineering. When I asked several different professors in the field what their students did when they finished their phd, these were the examples they gave me. I took them at their word.

Oddly enough, neither my advisor nor any of my collaborators answered the question with the truth- i.e. "most of my students work for banks." I didn't find out until I started to track down former students to get advice on breaking into a work field. To be fair, this seems to be largely because they didn't know- which is another reason why I am doubtful that grants are awarded based on how many phd students an advisor sends to non-scientific companies (or to scientific ones, for that matter)- do the funding agencies have better data than my advisor and his collaborators have on where their own students ended up? If this information is useful for getting money, why don't professors keep really good track of it? If funding agencies are keeping track of this information, why isn't it published somewhere?

 

[chill_factor]

the thing with industry, according to someone working there (my closest experience was lab serf) is that they want VERY SPECIFIC PEOPLE.

if you want to do optical communication (for example) in industry at anything other than lab serf level, your MS or PHD thesis had better be, in optical communication. if you want to do OLEDs and displays, your MS/PhD had better be in OLEDS or display technology.

And if you did your MS/PHD in theoretical astrophysics, then start practicing your banker face.

 

[Vanadium 50]

If funding agencies are keeping track of this information, why isn't it published somewhere?

Do you remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark is being placed in a huge warehouse of a million identical boxes? Same reason. You have information scattered across grant proposals, mail-in evaluations, panel reports, site visits, etc. Most of it is correct, but some of it is wrong, or even self-contradictory.

If your goal is to rank N proposals and not do too bad a job of it, this is fine. If you want publishable quality data, you're going to have to pay someone to sort this all out.

 

[dipole]

So it sounds like if you want to get a PhD and aren't the next Feynman, you should do it in a field that is valuable to people other than other Physicists?

Threads like this scare me.

 

[ParticleGrl]

You have information scattered across grant proposals, mail-in evaluations, panel reports, site visits, etc. Most of it is correct, but some of it is wrong, or even self-contradictory.

But that doesn't answer the fundamental question- how can they possibly have better information on where my advisor's former students are than my advisor does himself? It seems like the proposal information has to be mostly self-reported.

Also, consistently professors I interact with seem to be in touch with their students still in the field (for obvious reasons), but rarely do they know what the students who left are doing now. If this knowledge is lucractive I would assume they would at least keep a spreadsheet somewhere with what their students are doing. Is keeping track of students normal behavior, and I just had a particularly strange subset of collaborators?

 

[Pyrrhus]

ParticleGirl,

Why don't you try consulting?

Many of the big consulting groups hire PhDs (in pretty much any technical area).

 

[twofish-quant]

Is becoming a stockbroker that easy? In the UK, at least, daddy better have the contacts and money

US and UK have very, very different financial systems, and in the US it's pretty straight forward to be a stockbroker, but because it's not that hard, it's not a particularly high status position. (I'll avoid the temptation to explain why the US and UK systems are so different, but there are deep cultural, historical, geographical, and legal reasons for it.)

I often wondered if I should have applied for a stockbroker job. Now I see that I would have had 0% chance! Makes me feel a bit better... I never had a chance of earning easy big bucks :)

In the US, stock broker jobs are relatively easy to get, but they don't pay very well and aren't high status, and involve skills that I'm awful at. In the US, most retail stock brokers are glorified bank tellers, and you aren't going to make big bucks being a stock broker.

I suppose it's obvious - those with big money and power are going to make sure that the jobs that easily provide big money and power are kept for their kids.

Yes and no. There is a balance here, because if you keep money and power *only* for your kids, then eventually people on the outside will form their own counter-elite and you lose. So you have to keep the bulk of money and power for your kids, but you have to keep the system open enough (or at least provide the illusion of openness) so that people try to preserve the system rather than overthrow it.

Also, you are in trouble if your kids are idiots, and don't have the brains to preserve the system you hand down to them.

In China about a 1000 years ago, they figured out a way around this by creating an examination system, which evolved over the years and in my case "getting a Ph.D." became the functional and social equivalent of "passing the imperial examinations."

 

[twofish-quant]

whats wrong with non-research technical fields?

Or research technical fields.

A lot of the barriers turn out to be psychological. There is part of me that says "finance... eehhhhhhwww", but after a lot of effort, I've managed to get that part of me to shut up.

Now getting around psychological barriers turns out to not be the easiest thing in the world, since you are going against decades of socialization. But it's doable, and changing the way that you look at the world is easier than changing the global economic and political system, and in a lot of situations, it's not as if you have much of a choice.

 

[twofish-quant]

To be clear: we don't even have to reduce tenured professors' salaries or the permanence.

Yes you do.

Once you have a department that is mostly long term researcher, then the next question is why those people aren't on the major committees and in administration. Once you put those people in positions of power, then the question comes up as to why the tenured professors have tenure.

Now you can reach a deal in which *current* tenured faculty are grandfathered, and tenure is dead for *new* hiring. But make no mistake, that this is the end of tenure. In some industries, notably the auto industry, this was the "grand bargain" that was reached in the 1980's, and even there you had to do a lot of financial stuff to keep paying pension and retiree medical benefits.

I just mean that tenure sounds like hitting a jackpot, and a few superstars can have that. I think we'd just have a total of more productive researchers if they had a reasonable way of pursuing their research other than hitting that jackpot.

One thing about tenure is that if you go back to the 1950's, it *wasn't* that unusual. Most unionized industrial workers in the 1950's were under contract with tenure like provisions. These mostly disappeared in the 1970's and 1980's.

OTOH, maybe it's not such a bad thing. The reason those provisions disappeared was the belief that inflexible labor regulations prevented economic flexibility by making it difficult for people to go into the industry where they would do the most economic and social good. One reason this argument needs to be taken seriously is that it might be true. I'm not doing exactly what I want, but it's hard to make an argument that I'd be generating more economic or social value working in university versus what I'm doing now.

There is clearly something between permanent and strictly temporary, which probably would be a desirable enough alternative for someone who spent 7 years doing a physics PhD out of liking it, instead of doing a different job which pays much more for roughly that energy.

I don't think there is politically. One other problem here is that one has to look from the point of view of society. My personal job satisfaction really isn't that important to most people in the grand scheme of things.

One other problem is that if there were a politician who could credibly argue for fewer tenure protections in exchange for better treatment of non-tenure faculty and graduate students, I'd at least listen to them, but the politicians that are anti-tenure are also strongly anti-academia, so I'm going to side with the tenured faculty when there is a dispute (and it's been a major issue in Texas.)

 

[twofish-quant]

If university administrations could get away with eliminating tenure without increasing salaries or foreign hirings and still have quality candidates, why haven't they tried?

Because most university administrators come from the tenured faculty, and political power in most universities is in the hands of the faculty committees who are composed of tenured faculty. The other thing is that professors aren't line workers, and if they get pushed too hard, they will strike, and get the President removed.

In the case of public universities, you have some power in the hands of politicians, and at least in Texas, there's been a major war on tenure, which Governor Perry (fortunately) has been losing.

Also *new* universities have effectively gotten rid of tenure. Witness University of Phoenix, that has a ton of adjuncts, and a very, very few permanent faculty.

 

[twofish-quant]

I suppose it comes down to a judgment call; it will certainly become just as hard to get for those remaining. However, I'm hardly proposing that every last person in the planet should have a faculty position.

I don't think it would be bad. Everybody has something to teach, and everybody has something to learn.

Personally, I think that the world would end up better off if instead of graduating 1000 physics Ph.D.'s/year it was graduating 100,000. Part of what I've been trying to figure out is what that sort of world would look like.

I think the problem is when people show themselves very capable of handling the pace, rigor, etc and still have an absurdly low chance at continuing their research. It's hard to deny that's wasteful.

It really depends on what else they end up doing. It's worked out pretty well for me.

 

[atyy]

Isn't it a good thing that most PhDs don't stay in academia? What good is it to society if they stay in the ivory tower? I think as long as students get realistic career advice, they won't be so bitter. (But really, are most bitter about academia because of bad career advising, or because of unfair treatment?)

To be fair, this seems to be largely because they didn't know

If they didn't know, they should have said they didn't know. They must have at least known how many students they had, and how many they knew and didn't know about. So they probably knew they didn't know, in which case they were fabricating numbers.

 

[chill_factor]

Or research technical fields.

A lot of the barriers turn out to be psychological. There is part of me that says "finance... eehhhhhhwww", but after a lot of effort, I've managed to get that part of me to shut up.

Now getting around psychological barriers turns out to not be the easiest thing in the world, since you are going against decades of socialization. But it's doable, and changing the way that you look at the world is easier than changing the global economic and political system, and in a lot of situations, it's not as if you have much of a choice.

what if your math is anywhere from horrible to average? how is finance even remotely an option for those in experimental fields?

i do not think this is just a psychological barrier. sorry. most people in experimental aspects of biomedical engineering, materials science, condensed matter physics and chemistry would not be able to go to finance because they do not know enough math and programming.

 

[twofish-quant]

The hope is that the extra postdocs, because they are well-trained scientists, keep productivity in the lab up and reduce the need for students.

The trouble is that this starts looking a lot like how business and law schools work, and to me it seems that the cure is worse than the disease. Personally, I think that we are going the wrong way when we start talking about *reducing* the number of physics Ph.D.'s. We really should be talking about *vastly increasing* the number of physics Ph.D.'s.

There's an old joke. A genie shows up and tells a farmer that he can wish for anything. "My neighbor has a cow and I don't, I want you to kill his cow." If we are going to do fundamental social engineering, it would be better to increase demand than reduce supply.

The implicit assumption I made when I heard "PhDs in physics enter industry" was that phds in physics enter industry TO DO PHYSICS.

If the problem is definitions, then just tell my boss to change my business card to read "econophysicist." As far as I'm concerned, I'm doing physics.

The political bodies fund physics to get research done, not to produce physicists for the finance industry.

You know you have a good system when good things happen even though people didn't intend for it to happen. I need to point out that I don't sell insurance. I'm actually doing pretty cool physics research. My one big annoyance is that I can't publicly tell anyone exactly what I'm doing without getting into trouble with my boss and the SEC.

But it's cool.

If everyone (including your professors) tells you what a great career path science is, why wouldn't you believe them?

A lot depends on what you consider a "great career." I've had a great career so far, and it doesn't look like its going to stop anytime soon. Some of it is personal. For me "adventure" is more important than money, and it's been a wild and interesting adventure so far.

If I wanted a "connect the dots" life, I wouldn't have gone physics.

If everyone says there is a huge shortage of American scientists, why wouldn't you believe them?

I think that people stopped talking about a shortage of American scientists around 2005. Also, none of my professors talked a lot about the shortage of scientists, because they came from the generation that was screwed over in the physics crash of the 1970's.

You look around and say "well, not everyone gets to be a professor, but surely all these physicists go on to work as industrial physicists of some kind."

And physics Ph.D.'s that work in investment banks are industrial physicists.

 

[twofish-quant]

what if your math is anywhere from horrible to average? how is finance even remotely an option for those in experimental fields?

It depends on the meaning of average. If your math skills are "average or somewhat below average for a Ph.D." that's not a problem. Also people from experimental fields usually have lots of experience in computer programming, instrument design and statistics which is very, very useful in algorithmic trading.

There are some issues with finance:

1) People in finance are extremely closed lipped about what they are doing. Part of this is cultural (i.e. would you put your money in a bank that gives out account numbers to anyone that asks) some of it legal. For example, if you are working on an algorithm for a new financial product, even *hinting* that you are about to market the product will get a ton of lawyers, regulators, and compliance people on your case.

2) It changes from month to month. Asking someone about the employment situation is like asking about the weather.

3) The only near absolute requirement for physics Ph.D. finance is that you have to be winning to move to NYC, London, or some city in Asia.

 

[ParticleGrl]

Isn't it a good thing that most PhDs don't stay in academia? What good is it to society if they stay in the ivory tower?

That implies its better for society to have trained physicists doing something other are than physics. That isn't obvious to me. Isn't it better for physicists to be doing physics/engineering and laying the ground work for tomorrow's ipads than for them to be doing jobs that require no knowledge of physics?

Sure, a physicist can learn to do data mining or finance, but what does society gain from paying to teach someone physics, only for them to leave and teach themselves some other field? Sure, a physicist can learn finance or data mining, but what does society gain from the superfluous training? They could have totally skipped the learn physics step.

 

[atyy]

That implies its better for society to have trained physicists doing something other are than physics. That isn't obvious to me. Isn't it better for physicists to be doing physics/engineering and laying the ground work for tomorrow's ipads than for them to be doing jobs that require no knowledge of physics?

Sure, a physicist can learn to do data mining or finance, but what does society gain from paying to teach someone physics, only for them to leave and teach themselves some other field? Sure, a physicist can learn finance or data mining, but what does society gain from the superfluous training? They could have totally skipped the learn physics step.

It's not superfluous - it's basic facts about the universe that everyone should know - just like knowing the sun goes round the earth;) - ok, maybe not now, but in 20-30 years. By the same token, I assume that by now, physicists all know about the double helix and action potentials, which 60 years ago was cutting edge biology.

 

[chill_factor]

It depends on the meaning of average. If your math skills are "average or somewhat below average for a Ph.D." that's not a problem. Also people from experimental fields usually have lots of experience in computer programming, instrument design and statistics which is very, very useful in algorithmic trading.

There are some issues with finance:

1) People in finance are extremely closed lipped about what they are doing. Part of this is cultural (i.e. would you put your money in a bank that gives out account numbers to anyone that asks) some of it legal. For example, if you are working on an algorithm for a new financial product, even *hinting* that you are about to market the product will get a ton of lawyers, regulators, and compliance people on your case.

2) It changes from month to month. Asking someone about the employment situation is like asking about the weather.

3) The only near absolute requirement for physics Ph.D. finance is that you have to be winning to move to NYC, London, or some city in Asia.

A PHD in what? what if its not physics? what if its some other science or in engineering? and even if it is physics, there's a lot of things different now.

i am working with a Physics grad student. He takes pictures with an AFM and measures DC conductivity. I'm responsible for device fabrication. These are commercial instruments. There's no need to design anything new with them, just know how to use them. I've never seen an experimentalist in materials science program much. everything is on commercial instruments. just know how to use them and interpret their results.

what statistics? we use excel and find mean, median, mode, standard dev and fit it to a curve. i don't think this is the type of statistics you had in mind, it certainly isn't enough for finance.

 

[twofish-quant]

Isn't it better for physicists to be doing physics/engineering and laying the ground work for tomorrow's ipads than for them to be doing jobs that require no knowledge of physics?

I think "keeping the world financial system from collapsing again" is socially useful, and trying to do that involves a ton of "econophysics." I know fairly senior people with physics/math Ph.D.'s that are involved in these sorts of "fate of the entire world" discussions.

Sure, a physicist can learn to do data mining or finance, but what does society gain from paying to teach someone physics, only for them to leave and teach themselves some other field?

Because everything in finance has already been written down in textbook, the typical physics Ph.D. can learn in about a month or so. The important stuff isn't in a textbook, because either it's "tacit unwritten knowledge" or its stuff that no one knows. Also the textbooks are often wrong.

So what you need is someone that is good at research and mathematical modelling. It also makes sense to train these people on "known unknowns." I can't train someone to do mathematical modelling of the world financial system of 2020 or even 2015, because I don't know what the problems are going to be. So have them work on black holes or stellar nucleosynthesis, so that they have the skills necessary to work on whatever comes up in 2020.

Sure, a physicist can learn finance or data mining, but what does society gain from the superfluous training? They could have totally skipped the learn physics step.

If investment banks didn't have to hire Ph.D.'s, they wouldn't. The have to so they do.

 

[ParticleGrl]

It's not superfluous - it's basic facts about the universe that everyone should know - just like knowing the sun goes round the earth;) - ok, maybe not now, but in 20-30 years. By the same token, I assume that by now, physicists all know about the double helix and action potentials, which 60 years ago was cutting edge biology.

I think you have an over-optimistic view of the speed of information propagation, at least in physics. Grab a dozen condensed matter physicists, and maybe 1 or 2 can describe the standard model, and that's decades old. Grab a few dozen college grads and ask them to describe general relativity and probably none can, and that's approaching a century old. You'd be lucky if half could get the laws of thermodynamics.

But what does society gain if the guy pricing financial derivatives once calculated a 2 loop diagram?

 

[twofish-quant]

A PHD in what? what if its not physics? what if its some other science or in engineering? and even if it is physics, there's a lot of things different now.

Whatever is fun.

i've never seen an experimentalist in materials science program much. everything is on commercial instruments. just know how to use them and interpret their results.

My background is astrophysics and everything you build for a telescope has to be pretty much custom manufactured.

what statistics? we use excel and find mean, median, mode, standard dev and fit it to a curve. i don't think this is the type of statistics you had in mind, it certainly isn't enough for finance.

In HEP and astrophysics, there is a ton of what is essentially pattern recognition and time series analysis, along with dealing with massive databases.