- #106
Chronos
Science Advisor
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Getting a secure job in science is like becoming a movie star. You need perseverance, luck and the right opportunity. Almost any Phd has the skill sets.
ParticleGrl said:Industry is being used in the "anything not academia" sense. Most physics phds don't find work in (say) engineering fields.
From my phd cohort, I know two lawyers, an actuary, several software engineers,a youth minister a nurse, several people in finance, several people in insurance,an owner of a bar-and-grill near campus, and some big-data/stats people. I originally did data work for an insurance company, and now I work for a big-data consulting company. Most of those people agree that nearly nothing they learned while doing their phd has helped them, the exception being the finance people.
Not at all true- finance wants numerical programmers and it will take them where they can get them. For sales type jobs, having impressive credentials might help, but you won't be looking for a sales job. That doesn't mean they'll hand you the job- you'll have to teach yourself enough finance to interview successfully.
There is currently a shortage of statisticians/machine learning people, so its an easy job to bounce into, if you are willing to train yourself a bit.
This is a strange mentality. "I don't really care what happens to me, as long as the same thing happens to everyone else?"
jesse73 said:Except it isn't my anecdotal evidence against yours . It is more like my anecdotal evidence plus (official websites stating stanford and yales policies that show a limit on postdocs) against your anecdotal evidence. I would be interested in a site showing these postdocs (not research staff or research professors) which have 15 year CVs.
HepMan said:One thing I noticed though is in a yearly cycle there are far more tenure-track jobs in the US than academic jobs in the UK. Perhaps this partly explains the difference?