Why spend 10 years to get a physics PhD and then go to work for Wall Street?

[AlexES16]

i hated it when people who studied science and engineering went on to do business and finance. i believe that many of them left because there weren't sufficient opportunities or pay to continue working in science and engineering.

in that case, won't there be a brain drain in the area of science and engineering itself?

but it can't be helped i guess. money is a very important motivation for people to work.

i really dread the day when all our inventions and discoveries are made by china and india, while the rest of us are busy generating cash out of nowhere and getting ourselves into bigger debt.

i feel that a big change is needed to make science and engineering seem more profitable and a worthwhile investment in the long run.

i live in a small country, singapore, and even as an undergraduate, i have seen how much science and engineering have declined in my country. singapore is used to be considered one of the four asian tigers which include hong kong(now part of china alr), taiwan and south korea.

in my country here, there has been an exponential increase in people going into finance rather than engineering and science. and our government is trying to make our country into a financial hub like the wall street. just imagine, the whole country, surviving largely on finance.

our semi conductors mncs have all relocated to china and india, for lower cost. the manufacturing industry has since moved away long ago, since singapore doesn't have sufficient land for big manufacturing plants. and we only have a small government backed R&D agency that tried to come up with something. all there is left is petroleum, which has an offshore island dedicated to this particular industry. almost a large portion of our engineering sector is already outsourced to china and india.

but is it good that for a country to be so dependent on the finance sector?

i don't think so. because i have only seen so many of our own people losing jobs in economic crisis and our economy is in fact picking itself back far too slowly. that's because we are too largely dependent on the world's economy and we don't produce our own goods and exports anymore.

do you want to see something like that happen in your own country one day? while taiwan and south korea are still exporting large amount of consumer goods and growing strong in their engineering and semi conductor industry, all that is left in singapore is nothing. despite being a strong economy in asia, we never had any famous consumer brand worldwide or any important scientific discoveries done here.

taiwan has famous electronic brands like acer, south korea has samsung. and we all know too well about japan, they are one of the leaders in technology. and yea, in the US, apple, microsoft, just to name a few.

and these are the companies that will make the country grow stronger. not banks like lehman brothers and insurance company like AIA or watever there are.

you might be amazed though, our government encourages us to study science since young, and similarly like the rest of the asia countries, we have been drilled with maths and science since childbirth.

LOL. but look at what we have become.

this is what that could happen when nobody is interested or deprived in opportunities in science and engineering.

that's why i firmly believed that my country could have done better if we had been given more opportunites to become more outstanding engineers and scientists who could make products to be exported rather than having tonnes of bankers and managers trying to shift assests into their own pockets.

And i puted Singapure as an example of great capitalism =(.

This thread let me the feeling that I am going to die of starvation if i become a physicist, especially here in my country El Salvador.