Can Data Science Skills Lead to Careers in Physics?

[friendlyProgrammer]

Hello everyone, sorry in advance for the long post

I am about to finish up with a masters degree in Data Analytics within a year and will soon be switching careers from being a Systems Admin, which I am quickly burning out on. As an undergrad, I wanted to major in Physics, but the college I attended did not offer it as a major and I was not able to afford switching colleges without borrowing more money than I wanted at the time. Fast forward to today and I very much enjoy Data Science and have experience with R, Python, machine learning etc, but the world of Physics keeps calling out to me like an old flame you wish things would have worked out with (lol).

So my question here today is, is there any opportunity for a person with data skills to get any kind of jobs related to Physics? I can only imagine the large amounts of data that is being produced where my skills would be useful, but given the strong mathematical background any Physicist has, and I become uncertain as to how much I would be able to contribute compared to a person with a Physics degree.

I have searched the forum and have generally found Physicists wanting to jump in the opposite direction over to Data Science, which probably tells me there are more jobs in corporate environments for Data Science and I should go that direction, but if anyone has any input I would appreciate it.

 

[jedishrfu]

The corporate route is probably more lucrative too.

Indeed shows several Data Scientist positions from which you can see what kinds of jobs does Physics in particular:

https://www.indeed.com/q-Data-Scientist-Physics-jobs.html

Most of the jobs would involve image analysis or acoustical analysis.

 

[mfb]

It is possible, but probably not easy. Physicists are often hired if the job requires a large range of different tasks. It is very common that a physicist designs and builds an experimental setup, then takes data, and then analyzes this data.
As data scientist, the last part should be fine - there are some analysis methods unique to their applications but they are easy to learn. But what about the other parts? How fast can you learn these - and can you convince a potential employer that you can do that? You usually focus on something, but doing data analysis exclusively rarely works well.