Programs So you want to get a PhD in physics? The video

[twofish-quant]

What I mean is that I personally know many successful physics PhD's who are employed in industry.

So do I. Me for example. :-) :-) :-)

I'm pretty sure most of them didn't do more than one post-doc

A lot of people who end up in industry such as myself, didn't do any post-docs. I didn't think that I was likely to get a post-doc, and I didn't see much point in trying. People that try to go into industry after getting two post-doc tend to find it much harder than going in after just getting the Ph.D. The trouble is that in order to be successful at business, you have to "unlearn" a lot of academic habits, and the longer you are in academia, the harder it is.

Physics PhD's are very employable at high tech Fortune 500 companies. If I were to do a PhD it would be in hopes of getting a job like that, not with some pipe dream of being a professor at Princeton.

There is a pretty big caveat there. The reason physics Ph.D.'s are employable is that employers assume that you *liked* graduate school and are some odd freak of nature that happens to have this masochistic fetish at having equations tossed at you for twelve hours a day, which they can exploit to make themselves filthy rich.

Great if it happens to be true. Total hell if it is not.

The other thing is that there is a reasonable chance that all of the jobs that Ph.D.'s are currently doing will self-destruct by the time you get out. I honestly don't know if my job will still exist in five years. Personally, I think the challenge of figuring out what to do with your degree is part of the fun of the game, but other people have different priorities.

Personally, I think that anyone that thinks of physics as a *career* you are thinking about things in the wrong way. Getting a physics Ph.D. is in a real sense like joining the priesthood or enlisting in the military.

 

[kramer733]

If the opposite of pro is con, then what is the opposite of progress?

getting brain damaged and losing all intelligence is loss of progression. Or if you consider "stagnant" it could mean tyhe opposite of progress.

 

[eliya]

All those people who just started their undergrad in Physics, or are still in high school and know exactly what field they want to research are depressing me. I'm a freshmen studying Physics and I have NO IDEA what field in Physics is interesting me, and I don't even know if I want to go to gradschool. Sure, it sounds cool to be a scientist and work your brain hard, but I don't even know what it takes.
Luckily, I think that my way of thinking and uncertainty about what I'll want to do with a BS in Physics is what should be normal. Sometimes I don't even tell people that I'm a Physics major, because it makes me feel like one of these guys who say they want to research string theory. It's only my first year of it! I'm sure it's very different than upper division classes, and I might not want to do a BS in Physics then.

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

All those people who just started their undergrad in Physics, or are still in high school and know exactly what field they want to research are depressing me. I'm a freshmen studying Physics and I have NO IDEA what field in Physics is interesting me, and I don't even know if I want to go to gradschool. Sure, it sounds cool to be a scientist and work your brain hard, but I don't even know what it takes.
Luckily, I think that my way of thinking and uncertainty about what I'll want to do with a BS in Physics is what should be normal. Sometimes I don't even tell people that I'm a Physics major, because it makes me feel like one of these guys who say they want to research string theory. It's only my first year of it! I'm sure it's very different than upper division classes, and I might not want to do a BS in Physics then.

Define what is it to be normal?
To be like you?

 

[Pengwuino]

All those people who just started their undergrad in Physics, or are still in high school and know exactly what field they want to research are depressing me. I'm a freshmen studying Physics and I have NO IDEA what field in Physics is interesting me, and I don't even know if I want to go to gradschool. Sure, it sounds cool to be a scientist and work your brain hard, but I don't even know what it takes.
Luckily, I think that my way of thinking and uncertainty about what I'll want to do with a BS in Physics is what should be normal. Sometimes I don't even tell people that I'm a Physics major, because it makes me feel like one of these guys who say they want to research string theory. It's only my first year of it! I'm sure it's very different than upper division classes, and I might not want to do a BS in Physics then.

I wanted to be a firefighter when I was a kid. Then a teacher. Then an ice cream truck driver. Then a CFO. Younger people don't really have a clue what their fields are about or the implications of choosing that field until they're a bit more grown up. Like the video says, people read stephen hawkings books and think they want to be an astrophysicist without having really a clue what physics is about. It's the same with people who watch CSI and want to be a forensic psychologist.

 

[twofish-quant]

All those people who just started their undergrad in Physics, or are still in high school and know exactly what field they want to research are depressing me. I'm a freshmen studying Physics and I have NO IDEA what field in Physics is interesting me, and I don't even know if I want to go to gradschool. Sure, it sounds cool to be a scientist and work your brain hard, but I don't even know what it takes.

Don't worry. It's probably better for you that you don't know what you are going to do. Experiment with a few things, and see how it goes for you.

 

[cdotter]

Outside of finance, what types of industry jobs are available for a physics phd?

 

[twofish-quant]

Outside of finance, what types of industry jobs are available for a physics phd?

The video went through the three big ones. Defense, oil/gas, and finance.

 

[cdotter]

The video went through the three big ones. Defense, oil/gas, and finance.

Is that really it? I thought they were kidding.

What would a physics phd be qualified to do in a defense setting? Engineering?

 

[D H]

The video went through the three big ones. Defense, oil/gas, and finance.

They missed civilian government: NASA, NIST, NOAA, ... They also missed industry not related to defense, oil, and gas. The stats at AIP to me that the number of physics PhDs who completely switch gears and become quants is a smallish percentage.

What would a physics phd be qualified to do in a defense setting? Engineering?

A lot of engineering is applied physics. Physicists still work on things that go boom, and on making those things that go boom do so in the right place.

 

[twofish-quant]

The stats at AIP to me that the number of physics PhDs who completely switch gears and become quants is a smallish percentage.

The stats that I've seen from AIP are just want people do immediately after their Ph.D. I haven't seen too many statistics that track careers over time. Would be really interested in seeing those.

A lot of engineering is applied physics. Physicists still work on things that go boom, and on making those things that go boom do so in the right place.

Yup. I know of a number of people from theoretical astrophysics that design hydrogen bombs. Someone has got to do it.

During the early-1990's, there was an largely successful effort by the US to hire ex-Soviet bomb builders and get them into the US. The logic behind this was that the Russian economy was a mess, and both the US and Russia had an interest in getting Russian scientists into the US. There's very little about hydrogen bombs that the US knows that the Russians don't and vice versa, and the point of getting Russian scientists into the US was so that they wouldn't end up in Iran, Pakistan, or North Korea.

 

[cdotter]

The stats that I've seen from AIP are just want people do immediately after their Ph.D. I haven't seen too many statistics that track careers over time. Would be really interested in seeing those.



Yup. I know of a number of people from theoretical astrophysics that design hydrogen bombs. Someone has got to do it.

Does that still happen? I thought that field largely died off (or went to simulations) after the nuclear test ban treaty.

 

[twofish-quant]

Does that still happen? I thought that field largely died off (or went to simulations) after the nuclear test ban treaty.

Someone has to write/maintain/debug the simulations.

For the most part, much of the work today involves running computer simulations to make sure that the bombs will still go off, and making sure that the knowledge is still there to be able to maintain and build new hydrogen bombs if necessary. It would *really* be a bad thing, if we found ourselves in a situation in which it turned out that the US couldn't build H-bombs, but Iran or North Korea could.

One of the reasons that all of the major powers were willing to sign the CTB, is that all of the major powers have enough computing power and physics Ph.D.'s so that they can be reasonably certain of their own H-bombs through computer simulations. This isn't true with Iran or NK, that don't have the computer infrastructure that the major powers have.

When I was an undergraduate in the early-1990's, there was this idea that soon all of the professors from the Sputnik generation would retire, and there would be a lot of new jobs in academia. This didn't happen in academia, because once someone retired they were willing to let the position go. This *did* happen at the national labs and defense industries, since apparently it's a very bad thing if no one in the US knows how to build an H-bomb, and so there's been a steady stream of hiring. Also, the number of people that are qualified for this position is reduced by security clearances. Most Chinese, Russian, or Indian physics Ph.D.'s aren't going to survive the security clearances.

 

[Pengwuino]

Someone has to write/maintain/debug the simulations.

For the most part, much of the work today involves running computer simulations to make sure that the bombs will still go off, and making sure that the knowledge is still there to be able to maintain and build new hydrogen bombs if necessary. It would *really* be a bad thing, if we found ourselves in a situation in which it turned out that the US couldn't build H-bombs, but Iran or North Korea could.

This reminds me of an article a couple years ago about a problem the Brits had with their nuclear subs (or something similar). Apparently a crucial material that had a fairly long shelf life required replacing... I think something about how they launched SLBMs. Well, long story short, they had forgotten how to make the material and no one had bothered to archive it and the company that made it had long gone bye bye. They had to track down everyone involved in that material to get more made . I hope someone remembers it better... it was a few years ago it happened.