Theoretical Physics PhD worthless nowadays?

[arunma]

Marketable skill. Check

Good point. I'm sure a CSci undergrad could run circles around me, but I'll still be sure to put programming on my resume.

That's appealing to you?

Absolutely! I'd love to do a Jackson problem in the morning, and then go into the lab in the afternoon and see the data curve match my calculation. Stuff like that is what got me into physics (so maybe I should hate it, but I suppose I'm good at contradicting myself).

Particle astrophysics would be what I would do if I stayed in academia. Man---you're not excited about the WMAP haze, COGENT/DAMA/CDMS, Pamela, Fermi, ATIC (...) ?

Personally I think WMAP is awesome. But I deal with ground-based Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (I'm in the VERITAS collaboration), so most of what I do is detector calibration. There's some cosmology to be done, but I only get to think about actual physics maybe once a month. As for Fermi, others in my group work on it. Maybe I'll try to get involved, it does sound pretty cool.

Don't get me wrong, particle astro can be fun. But it requires a lot of patience. The CMP guys can just go into the lab and cook up a sample in a few days, whereas I've got to wait for months of observations (and go down to take some of those observations myself) before I can get any meaningful science. Just the nature of the beast, I guess...

 

[twofish-quant]

I don’t think most theoretical physics PhDs are worthless, but I think it can come pretty close (or worse!) if one isn’t careful.

Personally, it's very hard for me to imagine a field of physics that doesn't have major industry application if you do a few things while you are getting the Ph.D. The fact that people aren't taught some skills that increases the marketability of their Ph.D. enormously is a problem with academic advising.

However I know a few students that managed to become Dr. Soandso with no marketable skills in any line of work except teaching, and it doesn’t take very long teaching physics to realize it isn’t the same as doing physics.

Curiously I don't. It may be that I lucked out and went into a program that doesn't look down on people getting marketable skills.

There are some areas of study in physics that don’t have any industry application and that have little to no chance of academic employment.

The problem is that without industry exposure, people can make totally incorrect estimations as to what those areas are. Doing radiation hydrodynamic calculations of supernova might be something that seems like it has no application, but it does, since the diffusion equations happen to be the same ones that you use in financial derivative models.

Anyone reading this thread that is still making decisions about graduate school would do well to read between the lines and start making smart decisions now, before they end up making hard ones later.

Sure, but the employment situation outside of academia is hardly gloom and doom.

 

[Andy Resnick]

The condensed matter experimentalists who spent their six years wishing they were good enough to do theory can console themselves with the fact that it may be easier to get a lab monkey job in industry with their experience.

You give physicists a bad name. IMO.

 

[twofish-quant]

Heh, I guess I'm not so lucky. While I'm doing experimental physics rather than theory, I feel that astrophysics is "worthless" enough (in the employment sense) that I really see what you're saying about the loss of present and future earnings.

Except it's not true. When I was being interviewed for my current employer, the interview questions ended up being about algorithms for general relativity calculations, because one of the hiring managers happened do their Ph.D. in numerical relativity. My boss's boss's boss's boss has a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

I hope the high schoolers and college freshmen who frequent this forum will think very seriously about going down this route, because you're basically gambling with your economic future just for the sake of satisfying intelletual curiosity.

Again, what you are saying is just not true. There are a few things that you need to do to make your Ph.D. marketable, but if you can learn differential geometry then figuring out how to write a decent resume isn't that tough. As far as economic future, I make fairly large amounts of money, and my boss's boss's boss's boss likely makes scary amounts.

One thing that's nice about a physics Ph.D. is that you have a lot of choices. If you get a physics Ph.D. and you then want to sell used cars, you can, whereas if you get a law degree, your choice of career is fixed because you have to pay off your loans. Whether you want to make $20K or $200K is pretty much up to you, and having the choice of wanting to make money or not make money is pretty nice.

But one thing I've figured out so far is that if you are decided on the physics PhD route, you shouldn't even think about looking outside of condensed matter.

I'm sorry to be harsh, but this is utter non-sense. Pretty much anything that requires that you deal with heavy numerical code will get you skills that are marketable. This includes N-body simulations, CFD, lattice gauge theory.

 

[BenTheMan]

You give physicists a bad name. IMO.

meh.

 

[Count Iblis]

Yes, I agree that you should be able to work almost everywhere with a theoretical physics Ph.D. There was even a theoretical physics Ph.D who did quite well in the show http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-461607/Why-earth-want-work-Sir-Alan-Sugar.html"

Sir Alan's mentality hasn't changed in more than 20 years and he looks like a dinosaur. Even worse, he has a chip on his shoulder. Having left school at 16, he seems determined to humiliate publicly all those with a university education.

Although he constantly claims: "I don't care if you come from a council estate or you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth," there is no disguising his delight when candidates such as Tim, a Sandhurst-educated ex-Army lieutenant, fail.

"You're a total, absolute disaster!" he shouts. "Your luck has run out. You're a total shambles. You're fired."

 

[twofish-quant]

Unless you're at a top tier place (like Princeton, Stanford, etc.), you don't have a lot of contact with people who have left.

The astronomy department at UT Austin is pretty good about keeping track of alumni, and much of that is because of a single professor that has made it her job to keep track of this. The other thing to point out is that top-tier places are "top-tier" precisely *because* alumni are highly encouraged to help each other out.

Also keeping track of graduates reduces the fear factor since you end up with hard numbers about what people end up doing, and everyone that has gotten an astronomy Ph.D. from UT Austin has ended up with some decent job.

It's something that any department or school can do, which why it's surprising to me that more departments don't try to keep alumni connected or to gather these sorts of statistics. Something that helped me a lot was just knowing that so-and-so managed to get a job at a hedge fund. Now, I never was able to track down so-and-so, but just knowing that he got that job created a "well if he could do it, so can I" mentality.

One thing that puzzles me is that there seems to be a huge inconsistency in the criteria people are using for employment. The physics Ph.D. may not get you your dream job, but it will get you something decent, but because the physics Ph.D. won't get you the dream job, it's seen as useless and so the career advice is to do something else that won't get you the dream job anyhow.

Also, I don't see any conflict between being intellectually curious and making large sums of money or getting stable employment. One question that I find intellectually stimulating is to ask "so how does this money and power thing work anyway?" One reason I ended up in finance is that I found a lot questions seemed to involve this money thing, so I figured that my education would be very incomplete if I didn't learn about money. So in some sense, I'm a post-post-post-post-doc.

 

[Rika]

The physics Ph.D. may not get you your dream job, but it will get you something decent, but because the physics Ph.D. won't get you the dream job, it's seen as useless and so the career advice is to do something else that won't get you the dream job anyhow.

For some people starting with decent salary after 4 years od education is much better than being a cheap labor for the next 6 years.

People do phd in physics because they want to do physics not because they want to be quants or programmers (in my country you can do MSc in econophysics or computional physics). Some people prefer lab work over programming so BSc in applied science may be better choice. If you like quant job then good for you but don't expect people to say: "it doesn't matter if I can't get job in physics after 15 years of hard work, I still can be a prorgammer/quant, I am so happy" because having your dreams shattered is always painful but it's much more painful after 15 years (phd+post-docs) than after 4.

Science is not the only one interesting field in the world. Finding sth (that you are really passionate about) outside of it, doing it during your science education and making it your part - time job and backup plan is the best thing that one can do. It doesn't have to be extremely marketable or $$ but if you can make a living from it then that's fine.

 

[BenTheMan]

One thing that puzzles me is that there seems to be a huge inconsistency in the criteria people are using for employment. The physics Ph.D. may not get you your dream job, but it will get you something decent, but because the physics Ph.D. won't get you the dream job, it's seen as useless and so the career advice is to do something else that won't get you the dream job anyhow.

I would like to hear these people tell me what degree DOES get you the ``dream job''...

People do phd in physics because they want to do physics not because they want to be quants or programmers (in my country you can do MSc in econophysics or computional physics).

And people major in history because they like history, but I don't see too many historians floating around. But yesterday I found a recruiter who has a B.A. in History. How well did that degree prepare him for finding people to work on Wall Street? I did a summer research internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and one of the scientists there, who was researching moderating a fusion reaction, had a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering.

The point is, the probability that ANYBODY gets a job that is more or less completely unrelated to their undergrad degree is pretty high. Why on Earth would you expect that that would be any different for physicists?

I love physics, but I love physics because I think it's absolutely fascinating how you can describe Nature with relatively simple mathematical tools. The fact that you can write down a model of electrons and photons, and calculate a cross section, and then go and measure that cross section, and find exactly what you calculated is amazing. From there, it is only a short intellectual hop to try and understand financial markets in the same light. The fact that you can understand, qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the world financial markets using relatively simple tools is as fascinating to me as understanding nature using physics.

Arun---you just have to find what you really enjoy doing. It sounds like you're still a few years out from graduating. If you like doing calculations, and you like programming, try picking up a book on quantitative finance. If you like to solve problems, irrespective of the nature of the problem, check out the field of management consulting. If you want to punch a clock, work 40 hours a week for 40 years, and make a good salary, check out the government agencies I listed above. If you like to program, sit in on some upper level programming classes and check out google. (I have a friend (PhD from Stanford) who had very little programming experience, and got a job at IBM working on pattern recognition. Now he works for Facebook.) In this vein, there are also a lot of policy jobs right now trying to understand the internet as a public space, many of which google funds. If you really like pure research, check out the government labs.

The bottom line is, no matter what anyone here tells you, your PhD is not inherently worthless. What makes your PhD worthless is you---if you don't get out and hustle, just like everyone else in the world has to, you will end up unemployed and posting on physics forums all day long. The bad news is that people are not falling all over themselves to throw money at you. But guess what---unless you're one of the 1-in-a-1000 type physicists (you know who they are), no one ever will. This isn't just true in physics, this is true for anyone. If you want something, you generally have to work for it.

 

[twofish-quant]

For some people starting with decent salary after 4 years od education is much better than being a cheap labor for the next 6 years.

True.

People do phd in physics because they want to do physics not because they want to be quants or programmers (in my country you can do MSc in econophysics or computional physics).

Some people like me do Ph.D.'s in physics because I'm curious about how the universe works. Since "money" and "finance" are part of the universe, I'm pretty curious about those things too. There are also some very interesting connections between physics and computer science. Statistical mechanics and Shannon information, or general relativity and virtual functions in C++.

If you like quant job then good for you but don't expect people to say: "it doesn't matter if I can't get job in physics after 15 years of hard work, I still can be a prorgammer/quant, I am so happy" because having your dreams shattered is always painful but it's much more painful after 15 years (phd+post-docs) than after 4.

At some point you have dream new dreams. It's also important to dream your own dreams rather than someone else's. One of the ironies is that the reason I got interested in money is that I was pretty curious about the questions "so why *can't* I be a tenured faculty profession?" and that got me into thinking about finance and money. And then the question "so what do I need to get what I want?" also got me to money. If I had a huge bank account, I'd just camp out at some university, and just write astrophysics papers for the rest of my life. The cool thing is that it's going to happen eventually. Whether it happens at 45, 55, or 65, at some point, I'm just going to show up at university and then teach and write papers.

Science is not the only one interesting field in the world. Finding sth (that you are really passionate about) outside of it, doing it during your science education and making it your part - time job and backup plan is the best thing that one can do. It doesn't have to be extremely marketable or $$ but if you can make a living from it then that's fine.

Which gets back to the money thing.

 

[Rika]

I would like to hear these people tell me what degree DOES get you the ``dream job''...

Professional degrees. While reality is different from dreams becoming MD afrer Med school is very probable.

And people major in history because they like history, but I don't see too many historians floating around. But yesterday I found a recruiter who has a B.A. in History. How well did that degree prepare him for finding people to work on Wall Street? I did a summer research internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and one of the scientists there, who was researching moderating a fusion reaction, had a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering.

Bachelor is a keyword here.

1. Many people like history/physics but do not think about becoming resercher/scientist. They stopped at Bachelor lvl and are fine.
2. Most people go with "I used to like history/physics during HS so I will study it at college" or with "I don't want/ I am too stupid to become engineer, lawyer, MD". Most college freshmen are teens who have no idea what to do with their lifes.

I am completely fine with fact that people with BSc/MSc (non-professional) degree are working in unrelated fields and that's true - there are some engineers who aren't working in their profession or in their field.

The point is, the probability that ANYBODY gets a job that is more or less completely unrelated to their undergrad degree is pretty high. Why on Earth would you expect that that would be any different for physicists?

I don't expect it at bachelor level. But PhD (at least in my country) is clearly a job training because "scientist" is a profession (at least here). I don't expect that every PhD will work in his/her field or profession but the truth is that jobs for MDs/lawyers/engineers aren't as rare as PhD ones. You expect that you will become MD after med school. What's wrong with expecting that you will become scientist after grad school?

I love physics, but I love physics because I think it's absolutely fascinating how you can describe Nature with relatively simple mathematical tools. The fact that you can write down a model of electrons and photons, and calculate a cross section, and then go and measure that cross section, and find exactly what you calculated is amazing. From there, it is only a short intellectual hop to try and understand financial markets in the same light. The fact that you can understand, qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the world financial markets using relatively simple tools is as fascinating to me as understanding nature using physics.

I am not saying that being quant is bad. It's just not good for everyone. There are people who love physics because they find this world decribed by physics fascinating. They don't find tools that physics use - lab work, programming or math fascinating. They find finance boring (personaly I find it quite interesting). Quant shouldn't be the most probable job that person with PhD in HEP can get.

The bottom line is, no matter what anyone here tells you, your PhD is not inherently worthless. What makes your PhD worthless is you---if you don't get out and hustle, just like everyone else in the world has to, you will end up unemployed and posting on physics forums all day long. The bad news is that people are not falling all over themselves to throw money at you. But guess what---unless you're one of the 1-in-a-1000 type physicists (you know who they are), no one ever will. This isn't just true in physics, this is true for anyone. If you want something, you generally have to work for it.

It's not true for academia isn't it? No matter how good you are your chances are still near zero.
PhD isn't worthless as long as you can get research position. If you can't then it's as worthy as med school without MD job.

 

[Rika]

At some point you have dream new dreams. It's also important to dream your own dreams rather than someone else's. One of the ironies is that the reason I got interested in money is that I was pretty curious about the questions "so why *can't* I be a tenured faculty profession?" and that got me into thinking about finance and money. And then the question "so what do I need to get what I want?" also got me to money. If I had a huge bank account, I'd just camp out at some university, and just write astrophysics papers for the rest of my life. The cool thing is that it's going to happen eventually. Whether it happens at 45, 55, or 65, at some point, I'm just going to show up at university and then teach and write papers.

So it's not a new dream because you don't want to be a quant for the rest of your life or teach and wirite about quantitive finance. you still want to do astrophysics. I wonder - do you want to work at uni for free? Because if there are no positions at uni then yours $$$ won't change this fact (or it won't be legal).

I still don't understand - why people don't want to search for jobs in academia outside US? Even if salary isn't that great you still can get permanent research position.

 

[BenTheMan]

Professional degrees. While reality is different from dreams becoming MD afrer Med school is very probable.

But going to med school seems like a bad idea if you hate the idea of being a doctor. Hence the ill-defined ``dream job''.

I don't expect it at bachelor level. But PhD (at least in my country) is clearly a job training because "scientist" is a profession (at least here). I don't expect that every PhD will work in his/her field or profession but the truth is that jobs for MDs/lawyers/engineers aren't as rare as PhD ones. You expect that you will become MD after med school. What's wrong with expecting that you will become scientist after grad school?

First of all, there are more people getting MDs and law degrees than there are people getting PhD's.

Quant shouldn't be the most probable job that person with PhD in HEP can get.

It isn't. Of all of my friends who have left physics, I only know of two who are working in finance, and only one in a front-office type quant role.

It's not true for academia isn't it? No matter how good you are your chances are still near zero.
PhD isn't worthless as long as you can get research position. If you can't then it's as worthy as med school without MD job.

Your statement is utterly unsupported by my experience and twofish-quant's experience. I know of no people with PhDs in physics who are unemployed, however, if you have some evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

 

[BenTheMan]

I still don't understand - why people don't want to search for jobs in academia outside US? Even if salary isn't that great you still can get permanent research position.

Because most people realize that it's not the lifestyle they want. Don't you think there are MBAs from the US who would rather do something else than work in an investment bank in Bangalore?

 

[twofish-quant]

Professional degrees. While reality is different from dreams becoming MD afrer Med school is very probable.

The trouble with med school is that you end up with pretty massive amounts of debt, which doesn't happen if you go through a physics Ph.D.

I don't expect that every PhD will work in his/her field or profession but the truth is that jobs for MDs/lawyers/engineers aren't as rare as PhD ones. You expect that you will become MD after med school. What's wrong with expecting that you will become scientist after grad school?

Because the economics don't work out. The way that academia is structured, one professor produces five or so Ph.D.'s. If these all become academics who then produce Ph.D.'s, then you end up with a classic Malthusian process, you just run out of funding. You can only sustain this sort of system by exponentially increasing the amount of funding.

It's not a coincidence that you have a one to five chance of becoming tenured faculty, because if you assuming that the number of jobs is stable, then the odds of getting a job is closely tied to the number of Ph.D.'s that a professor produces.

I am not saying that being quant is bad. It's just not good for everyone. There are people who love physics because they find this world decribed by physics fascinating.

And I'm one of them. However, one thing that you learn from physics is to respect reality. I'd really like to be a starship captain, but it turns out that special relativity gets in the way. I'd really like to be tenured faculty, but it turns out that there are economic realities that get in the way of that.

Also one thing cool think about asking "why are things what they are?" is that you find out interesting things about history. I think I have a good sense about why astrophysics is so important to me, and it involves talking about the last several hundred years of history.

Quant shouldn't be the most probable job that person with PhD in HEP can get.

And the speed of light shouldn't be a limit on how fast you can travel, but it is...

If you don't like reality then change it. Come up with a viable funding system in which all Ph.D.'s can become tenured faculty. I have a few ideas here that I'm working on.

It's not true for academia isn't it? No matter how good you are your chances are still near zero.
PhD isn't worthless as long as you can get research position. If you can't then it's as worthy as med school without MD job.

What's worthy or worthless depends on the person. For me, it's not the destination but rather the journey. I got the Ph.D. because I wanted to be a professional student, and the cool thing is that a decade after I got my Ph.D., I'm still in school and am still a professional student.

 

[twofish-quant]

So it's not a new dream because you don't want to be a quant for the rest of your life or teach and wirite about quantitive finance.

I get bored easily. I figure in about a decade, I'll get bored with finance, and I'll need some other challenge.

I wonder - do you want to work at uni for free? Because if there are no positions at uni then yours $$$ won't change this fact (or it won't be legal).

In order to do research, all you need are facilities and collaborators. Just show up at some university, attend seminars and conferences, coauthor papers, and tutor students.

Also, it's trivially easy to get an adjunct position.

I still don't understand - why people don't want to search for jobs in academia outside US?

Because there aren't that many jobs outside the US and Europe. The job market in Europe is as saturated as the US. If you go into the developing world, you run into the problem that science is expensive, and most places don't have the funding to pay for research scientists. There are some situations in which a government will decide to pour money into science, but they are looking for big-name US/European scientists with track records and prestige.

China is putting lots of money in science, but they are looking for people in the US/Europe that are already big name stars to go back and then manage research institutes to develop local talent. It's not clear where newly minted Ph.D.'s that can't find a job in the US fit in this scheme.

Even if salary isn't that great you still can get permanent research position.

You really can't. If the salary isn't that great, then the facilities are likely to be substandard.

 

[some_dude]

How good of a programmer can one become just from the required numerical calculations for a physics PhD? Presumably a lot of such people would have been good programmers before hand, but ignoring that, I'm wondering how much I'll miss out in terms of skill development if I do a very theoretical PhD that has little required programming?

I would think that for a physics PhD, the programming would consist primarily of writing very optimized and small computational (say, <20,000 lines of C) programs with simple I/O. And then working with very large scientific libraries. Is that accurate?

 

[Andy Resnick]

In order to do research, all you need are facilities and collaborators. Just show up at some university, attend seminars and conferences, coauthor papers, and tutor students.

That's not exactly correct- why not claim that in order to do (theoretical/mathematical) physics research all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil?

Having a viable research program means that some agency (government, foundation, industry(*)) is willing to pay your salary and pay for (in experimental work) the supplies and *not get anything in return*. That won't happen unless you have an original idea that makes sense to people who have been thinking about the exact same question for a lot longer than you.

To do research, you must demonstrate, to others, a command of your discipline and the ability to do something they cannot. "Just showing up" is insufficient, and nobody is going to include you as an author unless you have something to add to the discussion. Tutoring students has nothing to do with research.

(*) getting money for industrial research (Not SBIR) is different because of IP issues, but in general, it is structured like a consulting gig.

 

[twofish-quant]

That's not exactly correct- why not claim that in order to do (theoretical/mathematical) physics research all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil?

What you really need is computers and social networks and time.

Having a viable research program means that some agency (government, foundation, industry(*)) is willing to pay your salary and pay for (in experimental work) the supplies and *not get anything in return*.

Funders always get something in return, and part of the trick of fundraising is to figure out what they are getting. It could be prestige, national security, or something else, but if you are spending someone else's money there is always a string attached.

Since I'll have large amount of money in the bank, I won't need anyone to pay my salary. I'll even pay the university a fee for facility use if necessary. If I make it really big, then I can line up funders that will pay the university in exchange for a library card and a broom closet that I can store my stuff. Part of the point of being in finance is that you meet people with insane amounts of money, and if you know how to sell an idea, that can come in useful, and one thing that's useful in my education, is that I'm better at selling an idea than I was five years ago, and ten years from now, I'll be even better at it.

"Just showing up" is insufficient, and nobody is going to include you as an author unless you have something to add to the discussion.

Which is why I'm keeping my personal research network active. Give me a decade, and I will find something useful to contribute. It could be computer skills, grunt labor, a fresh perspective, or funding. I've got about a decade so I'll find something.

The reason I think this is viable is that I know people that have done this.

 

[twofish-quant]

How good of a programmer can one become just from the required numerical calculations for a physics PhD?

It really depends on the type of field, but if you are talking about CFD or MHD code, you are talking about a huge amount of algorithmic calculation skill.

I would think that for a physics PhD, the programming would consist primarily of writing very optimized and small computational (say, <20,000 lines of C) programs with simple I/O. And then working with very large scientific libraries. Is that accurate?

No. For any sort of astrophysical simulation you are talking about >100,000 lines of Fortran and C++ code. There are very few libraries used since usually the libraries can't handle the calculation. There are some open source platforms for hydrodynamical calculations, but these invariably require massive reprogramming to do what you want.

Astrophysical code tends to be run in batch mode, but there is starting to be a trend toward parallel computing in which you have to worry about the IO between different compute nodes. Also the paradigm that most computer programming uses involves splitting the problem into distinct models. This is really tough to do in astrophysical problems because you have many different types of physics all tightly coupled with each other.

 

[Rika]

But going to med school seems like a bad idea if you hate the idea of being a doctor. Hence the ill-defined ``dream job''.

I am talking about people who want to be a doctor.

Your statement is utterly unsupported by my experience and twofish-quant's experience. I know of no people with PhDs in physics who are unemployed, however, if you have some evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

Are you saying that all of your PhDs friends do research in science?

Because the economics don't work out. The way that academia is structured, one professor produces five or so Ph.D.'s. If these all become academics who then produce Ph.D.'s, then you end up with a classic Malthusian process, you just run out of funding. You can only sustain this sort of system by exponentially increasing the amount of funding.

It's not a coincidence that you have a one to five chance of becoming tenured faculty, because if you assuming that the number of jobs is stable, then the odds of getting a job is closely tied to the number of Ph.D.'s that a professor produces.

I don't think that law or med schools would produce more people than market can handle. I guess medical association wouldn't allow that.

I still don't understand what's wrong with associate degree technician-level positions. Technicians are everywhere. What's wrong with technicians in academia? Why can't they do all that grunt work that grad students do? There are technicians in med or engineering and they are completely fine.

Because there aren't that many jobs outside the US and Europe. The job market in Europe is as saturated as the US. If you go into the developing world, you run into the problem that science is expensive, and most places don't have the funding to pay for research scientists. There are some situations in which a government will decide to pour money into science, but they are looking for big-name US/European scientists with track records and prestige.

China is putting lots of money in science, but they are looking for people in the US/Europe that are already big name stars to go back and then manage research institutes to develop local talent. It's not clear where newly minted Ph.D.'s that can't find a job in the US fit in this scheme.

Every physics PhD that I know was able to find some research position somewhere but I don't know if it was permanent.

You really can't. If the salary isn't that great, then the facilities are likely to be substandard.

I guess all facilities in my country are like that I still can't understand why universities can't work with Wall Street. They (WS) need PhDs and they are willing to pay for them.

Having a viable research program means that some agency (government, foundation, industry(*)) is willing to pay your salary and pay for (in experimental work) the supplies and *not get anything in return*. That won't happen unless you have an original idea that makes sense to people who have been thinking about the exact same question for a lot longer than you.

Why sth like that is impossible in case of WS? Why can't they pay universities or rather Theoretical Physics PhDs for new computional methods that they invent during astrophysics research? You could also do pure quantitive finance research and do astrophysics in the same time. For universities it means $$$ and WS can't live without quants so it really means $$$. Why universities let go of people who can bring $$$?

Even if you can't get permanent position is that really bad? So many people live as freelance. If becoming adjunct is easy then what's wrong with being adjunct and getting decent salary from research grant? I don't know about US but from my experience you don't have to be superstar (you can be even a grad student) to get some money. Yeah - you need to worry about $$ after 4 years and go after next grant but is that really different from industry where people change their job every few years?

 

[BenTheMan]

Are you saying that all of your PhDs friends do research in science?

Some do, some don't. I have a friend who got a job for the FBI. Another friend works for Facebook doing data mining. Another friend of mine works as a science policy analyst in Washington, D.C. Other people I know have gone on to work in government labs, some went to Wall Street (loosely defined). In all cases, I don't think that they'd have been able to find these jobs without their backgrounds, and I none of them (that I know) would trade their PhDs for anything.

I don't think that law or med schools would produce more people than market can handle. I guess medical association wouldn't allow that.

Really? That's not the case in the U.S. for lawyers, at least. Look at how many ``personal injury'' lawyers there are. Anyone can go to law school, typically, if you have the money. The problem is that all law schools are not created equally.

 

[Andy Resnick]

What you really need is computers and social networks and time.

Funders always get something in return, and part of the trick of fundraising is to figure out what they are getting. It could be prestige, national security, or something else, but if you are spending someone else's money there is always a string attached.

Now I'll agree- the #1 requirement to perform useful research is *time*. Now, consider what that means, given 10+ years of training (grad school, postdoc or two...) in which your time is considered valueless. It's an incredible mental barrier to overcome, and is one of the reasons some people can't progress forward- they don't understand that their time is actually precious.

Now- NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE, HHMI, and all the other agencies and organizations that fund *basic* science, do not ever get a material return on their investment. You are correct, they get 'prestige'- an acknowledgment at the end of a paper, things to write about when they need to justify their budgets, etc, but that's it. Academic attempts to commercialize the research ('tech transfer') are laughable and a sham.

SBIR grants, and grants aimed at industry-academia joint projects, are different (hence the (*))- those are definitely geared towards generating a marketable product and bringing it to market.

The 'string' that gets attached to my grants is "annual reports"- that's really it.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Why sth like that is impossible in case of WS? Why can't they pay universities or rather Theoretical Physics PhDs for new computional methods that they invent during astrophysics research? You could also do pure quantitive finance research and do astrophysics in the same time. For universities it means $$$ and WS can't live without quants so it really means $$$. Why universities let go of people who can bring $$$?

Even if you can't get permanent position is that really bad? So many people live as freelance. If becoming adjunct is easy then what's wrong with being adjunct and getting decent salary from research grant? I don't know about US but from my experience you don't have to be superstar (you can be even a grad student) to get some money. Yeah - you need to worry about $$ after 4 years and go after next grant but is that really different from industry where people change their job every few years?

I'm not sure what you are getting at. Why would a profitable firm, in a highly competitive industry, want to deal with universities? Universities are about the slowest-moving beasts on the planet, government included.

Now, I'm sure there are faculty members out there who *consult* for wall street firms, on the side, for their own benefit. Consulting is one of the secret perks of academia- it's easy to do, and can be very lucrative.

As far as an adjunct faculty getting a 'real' research grant- not going to happen. There's lots of reasons why, some good, some not. Your other comments reflect a very poor understanding of the realities of research universities, especially since the 'success rate' of proposals is around 10% for NIH, and not much better for NSF (20% in 2005). Think about that.

 

[twofish-quant]

It's an incredible mental barrier to overcome, and is one of the reasons some people can't progress forward- they don't understand that their time is actually precious.

Which is curiously my problem. I don't have money problems. I have time problems. If my employer were willing to let me off for six months and pay me half salary for the year, I'd have more than enough money and time to do astrophysics research. The problem is that this just doesn't work out right now, although I think I may be able to change things so that it will.

One thing that the internet does do is to reduce start-up time. The problem with academic papers is to write a decent paper, you have to spend at least three months, and a lot of that involves just getting the formatting and structure write. The big thing that wikipedia does is that you can spend ten minutes and do something useful.

You are correct, they get 'prestige'- an acknowledgment at the end of a paper, things to write about when they need to justify their budgets, etc, but that's it. Academic attempts to commercialize the research ('tech transfer') are laughable and a sham.

Academia is very much a prestige economy. It's a lot like Hollywood.

That's because that anything that is easily commercializable is already done by the for-profits. The thing that I'm most interested in is "reverse tech transfer." Getting technology from for-profits back to academia.

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't think that law or med schools would produce more people than market can handle. I guess medical association wouldn't allow that.

Not quite true. Also one of the ways that medical and law schools work is that they set up a very strong tier system.

I still don't understand what's wrong with associate degree technician-level positions. Technicians are everywhere. What's wrong with technicians in academia? Why can't they do all that grunt work that grad students do? There are technicians in med or engineering and they are completely fine.

Because it would wreck havoc with the social structure of academia. The important thing about grad students is that they are gone after five years, and junior faculty are "up or out" positions. If you had people doing grunt work staying around forever, they would demand more money and power.

I still can't understand why universities can't work with Wall Street. They (WS) need PhDs and they are willing to pay for them.

They do. However universities tend to be very loosely structured, so you usually don't work with the university, you work with Professor so-and-so. Universities are unusual in that they encourage moonlighting, whereas most corporations frown on it.

Why sth like that is impossible in case of WS? Why can't they pay universities or rather Theoretical Physics PhDs for new computional methods that they invent during astrophysics research?

Because it's easier to just hire the Ph.D. Any time you put money into the university, you are looking at about 50% overhead, and the university is designed so that the administration doesn't have any control over faculty. It's easier to just pay the Ph.D. or faculty person directly and bypass the middleman.

You could also do pure quantitive finance research and do astrophysics in the same time.

Time is a factor.

For universities it means $$$ and WS can't live without quants so it really means $$$. Why universities let go of people who can bring $$$?

Because one the university stamps Ph.D., there is no reason for the Ph.D. to say around. If you want the Ph.D. to develop new stuff, then just hire them.

If becoming adjunct is easy then what's wrong with being adjunct and getting decent salary from research grant?

Because adjuncts in the US can't get research grants. The universities just will not let an adjunct be a principal investigator, and as an adjunct you are unlikely to have the reputation and publication history to be competitive for grants.

I don't know about US but from my experience you don't have to be superstar (you can be even a grad student) to get some money.

US is very different. Writing a grant proposal is a major effort that can easily take a year. Usually it's an multiple person institutional effort, with the "superstar" leading the proposal.

Yeah - you need to worry about $$ after 4 years and go after next grant but is that really different from industry where people change their job every few years?

Yes it is. One problem with the grant system is that it's up or out. If you lose out on a grant, it puts you into a downward spiral that puts you out of other grants.

 

[Andy Resnick]

The problem with academic papers is to write a decent paper, you have to spend at least three months, and a lot of that involves just getting the formatting and structure write.

My experience (which may not be normal) is that I need 6 months - 1 year to take the data, 6 months-1 year writing the paper (which may require going back into the lab to take more data), and then 6 months-1 year in the peer-review process.

For experimental physics, a reasonable rule of thumb is 1 paper/year.

 

[Rika]

I'm not sure what you are getting at. Why would a profitable firm, in a highly competitive industry, want to deal with universities? Universities are about the slowest-moving beasts on the planet, government included.

If Bayer wants to deal with process engineers in academia then why WS wouldn't want to deal with theoretical physicists? As far as I know Bayer pays technical universities for doing research.

As far as an adjunct faculty getting a 'real' research grant- not going to happen. There's lots of reasons why, some good, some not. Your other comments reflect a very poor understanding of the realities of research universities, especially since the 'success rate' of proposals is around 10% for NIH, and not much better for NSF (20% in 2005). Think about that.

I know very little about academia and that's why I'm asking. I know extremely little about Academia in US because I have never been there that's why I'm asking. I live in completely different country - with free education, free healthcare, no big, competetive science, no great $$$ for science, no mobile, initiative society. Despite that fact or maybe because of it if you are initiative and active you can get scolarships and grants. I know many grad students and postdocs who manage to get research grant from government or EU and from what I heard it's not that hard. I can imagine that getting big money from big name institution is hard. But in US do you only have big name institutions and research grants for superstars? No scholarships and grants for young scientists? No commercial grants from government or firms? No small institutions small grants for small science?

Because it would wreck havoc with the social structure of academia. The important thing about grad students is that they are gone after five years, and junior faculty are "up or out" positions. If you had people doing grunt work staying around forever, they would demand more money and power.

Can you apply this to the med or eng technicians? Do Med technicians or nurses demand more money and power? And if that's case then who are the people who stay in academia? Someone needs to stay because PhDs from 70' won't live forever.

 

[Andy Resnick]

If Bayer wants to deal with process engineers in academia then why WS wouldn't want to deal with theoretical physicists? As far as I know Bayer pays technical universities for doing research.

But in US do you only have big name institutions and research grants for superstars? No scholarships and grants for young scientists? No commercial grants from government or firms? No small institutions small grants for small science?

Bayer does indeed partner with academia, and so do most of the multinational corporations. Proctor&Gamble, L'Oreal and Shlumberger are others that I personally know of. But, you are not asking the important question, which is "Why?" What are they funding? How do they benefit? When you can answer that, you will understand why investment firms don't partner with academia.

And research funding is not "big superstars" or nothing- there is the total spectrum, from local governments and local industry up to large corporation (ACS's petroleum research fund), national governments, etc. Grants range in size from $1,500 (and less) through $multimillion. But that's not the relevant point.

 

[Count Iblis]

Papers on theoretical subject can be written up much faster. I've once done it in less than two weeks. I had an interesting idea, thought for it for two days, I then decided to write an article about it and ten days later I was done.