The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there’s Nicholas Condon in comments:
When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in “science,” it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake their situation for the state of the entirety of the scientific enterprise. There are lots and lots of Ph.D.s employed in both government and industry, and many of them are indeed working on the sorts of challenging, stimulating problems that attract people to science to begin with; just ask Derek Lowe.
I see the situation in the sciences (where there are “too many” science Ph.D.s produced every year in the U.S. for the number of academic and industrial jobs that employ Ph.D. scientists) as one more argument for loosening the tight linkage between what one studies and what one does (or even who one is). Of course, it’s good to have doctors who have gone to medical school, lawyers who have gone to law school, and particle physicists who have earned advanced degrees in particle physics. But, I don’t believe that advanced degrees, by their nature, suck all the other useful skills out of a person. Nor should they close off a person’s career options.
I’d agree with both of these, but I’d also go one step further: I think we should try to expand job opportunities in science for people below the Ph.D. level. (More below the fold.)
This is particularly important for physics, which has the unfortunate quirk of offering very few technician jobs. For whatever reason, physicists are expected to do a lot of things for themselves that scientists in other disciplines hire people to do for them– we prepare our own test samples, make our own stupid little electronic circuits, and debug our own code. Or at least, we make our students do those things, along with routine equipment maintenance and operation.
As another commenter points out, you can get a good job at a reasonable salary as a lab tech in biology or chemistry straight out of college. Those jobs aren’t as common in physics, where it’s sort of “Ph.D. or bust,” if you want to work in research.
But it’s not just lab tech jobs that we need– it would be good to have more options for undergraduate physcis majors than grad school or leaving science. As countless people have noted, getting a Ph.D. is a huge committment– you’re talking at least four or five years (if you’re really lucky, and really smart) in grad school, at little more than subsistence wages. A lot of students– even very good students– aren’t prepared to make that kind of committment right out of college, but it’s hard to find other things for them to do. And there are some students who really shouldn’t go to grad school at all, who end up trying just because there’s no other clear career path.
Some of the blame for this falls on undergraduate faculty– God knows, I don’t know as much about career options for people with Bachelors degrees in physics as I really ought to in order to advise students. And some of it falls on groups like the APS and AIP, that don’t do enough to encourage the development of non-academic career tracks, or publicize the ones that do exist.
On a number of occasions when I’ve mentioned trying to increase the number of undergraduate majors in physics, I’ve had commenters chide me for irresponsibly increasing the Ph.D. glut, as if there’s nothing else for those students to do but go to grad school and help make it nearly impossible to land an academic job. To the extent that this is an accurate description, the problem isn’t so much with wanting undergraduate majors as it is with the system that doesn’t provide options for them.
I’ll admit, though, that I’m not really sure how to fix this problem. Suggestions are welcome in the comments, and if you know anybody who’s hiring undergraduate physics majors into jobs that require some knowledge of physics (and not “you’re good at math, so become a Wall Street analyst”), I’d definitely like to hear more about it.
I have no advice even resembling a quick fix to this solution. But in general, I always had the sense that its easier for BSxE and MSxE’s to get jobs because there’s more industry positions for engineers as opposed to physicists.
If that impression is true, then my strategy would be to start a discipline-wide effort to start partnering with industry– the big science and tech companies need to know what physicists can do for them and in a sense, physics faculties need to know what their students can do for big science and tech companies.
Co-ops and internships might be a place to start. They’re low risk for the companies, because interns and co-ops don’t cost that much, and they don’t need to be hired back. They’re low risk for the students, because they’re not irrevocably signing off the academic track if it turns out they like that better.
I know that there are non-PhD positions out there for physicists, but they’re not (presently) what physicsists really train for. In my field, we see physics people as systems engineers, as engineering program managers and occasionally as actual scientists. It’d be nice if there were more scientist-type positions that didn’t require the terminal degree.
I work (at a military research lab) with a lot of folks with bachelor’s degrees in physics, and they’re not just lab techs; some of them are P.I.s in their own right. Several of these folks worked in other places before coming here, including defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) and various telecom companies. As far as I can tell, they often worked shoulder-to-shoulder with bachelor’s-level engineers on developing and testing systems, building prototypes, and the like. I suspect that practical bench experience as an undergrad, like working in a professor’s lab, would greatly increase your employability. I don’t know how many jobs like these are out there, but there are at least a few opportunities available.
For whatever reason, physicists are expected to do a lot of things for themselves that scientists in other disciplines hire people to do for them– we prepare our own test samples, make our own stupid little electronic circuits, and debug our own code.
I can testify that, despite a greater preponderance of bachelor’s-level folks in the field, a lot Ph.D. chemists have to do their own scutwork as well. For example, a lot of synthetic chemists are pretty serviceable technical glassblowers, and no analytical or physical chemist that I knew made it through grad school without doing at least a bit of machining and electronics work.
Amen to that!
I have been very fortunate in that I was able to get an exciting job in research (with CalTech on LIGO no less) straight out of my BS degree in physics. It is essentially a technician level job which has been a bit frustrating- I’d like to contribute more. Therefore I have been considering going back to school- but that commitment is daunting. Even more so now that I’ve made some grown up commitments since getting out of school (wife, house, pets, etc). So, I’m quite on the fence about going back.
I would very much like to see more opportunities open up for BS level physicists in the future.
Thanks very much for the interesting and relevant topic.
J.
Part of it is teaching undergraduates & graduate students to sell their scientific skills to those outside of science. The analytical skills one learns are applicable to pretty much any job. Former members of the lab I am in run the entire gambit: faculty at all types of colleges and universities, scientists in industry & at research institutes, administrators/management in academia, industry and government, scientific writers, high school teachers, consultants, lawyers, doctors and advisors to NGOs & international organizations. My PI believes his job is to make sure we all learn how to approach a question, to develop our analytical skills such that we can tackle any problem we face regardless if we stay in science or not. If we can, then he believes he was successful. That mindset is something that has to be encouraged in more faculty members or at least in the department I am in. Students who are not set on becoming faculty at research universities are generally not looked upon as favorably as those that do regardless of how well the students are doing.
The problem is that if you only sell faculty positions at research universities you are selling a pyramid scheme. It just isn’t possible for all PhDs in the sciences to obtain
such positions. My PI has had over his career over 40 PhD students graduate. If all of them were faculty members, they would be a department by themselves.
Finding jobs though outside of science doesn’t solve the problem of physics undergrads who need time before committing to (and maturing for) graduate school or who aren’t grad school material but who can contribute to science. Tech positions would be nice but someone has to pay for them.
Physics as a field has blinders on. For some reason, everyone, including physicists, think physics only happens in universities. For the record, Professor is not the only job option. A BS in Physics does not require the student to go to grad school. I might recommend an MS b/c the pay-increase/years-of-salaried-work-lost is extremely favorable, but one does not need a PhD in Physics to have a successful career. A BS will do the trick quite nicely, and the holder can obtain most of the jobs available to holders of engineering BS’s.
The problem is that since Physics departments cannot conceptualize a student doing anything besides going on the grad school, post-doc, professor, they have no infrastructure for things like internships and co-ops. I highly recommend seekers of BS degrees in physics to join engineering societies to learn how to get summer jobs in industry.
True, you cannot do research into fundamental laws without a PhD, but there is more to science than researching fundamental laws. Plenty of non-PhD level people work in industry, go to conferences, and publish. Hell, at my last job my lead was an MS and he did all the conference-going and paper-publishing. Me and my PhD weren’t even invited.
It certainly is possible for undergraduate physics majors to go on to things besides grad school, but I agree with other commenters that a big part of the reason is doesn’t happen is inertia. Grad school is the expected path, kind of like college for good high school students. Part of this is also self-selection, where people don’t major in physics unless they want to do research. It could be argued that this is also a failing of the system, since I consider my education extremely important more because I learned to think than because I learned to do quantum mechanics.
I personally wasn’t ready to commit to grad school right out of college, so I looked into teaching and ended up finding myself a job teaching physics at the American School of Kuwait. While most physics majors might not be so lucky or adventurous, there is certainly a shortage of high school physics teachers, and I know that other majors have gone on to do various things. A friend of mine will be teaching in Hong Kong, and another looked into various jobs with labs and with government agencies.
The problem solving skills learned in a physics or mathematics curriculum are applicable to lots of jobs and careers, certainly not just to research. Howvever, in my experience, there have been plenty of options for intelligent young people at university labs. Anyone with a good head on their shoulders and some motivation could easily find themselves a position as a research assistant, and some of these jobs can have a fair degree of independence. I worked at the same lab for three years and had a wonderful time. My experience is probably not typical, coming from an elite university and working in small labs, but the culture I have seen is not at all Ph.D. or bust.
…if you know anybody who’s hiring undergraduate physics majors into jobs that require some knowledge of physics…
I’ll add my 2 cents in about my own experience. After my PhD and a research scientist position, I took a job at a large government contractor (think Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing…) where I am not only doing physics work but expanding into areas of systems engineering that don’t directly deal with my optics/lasers expertise. For every physicist here there is an ME, a materials scientist, an Aero engineer, etc. all working together on the same programs. There is a great need for trained scientists at these companies where their analytical skills and their fast learning curves make them an attractive fit. That includes BS to PhD degrees.
Unfortunately, I was mostly on my own in making the jump from academics to industry. I chose to do a postdoc on a project with my former PI (that’s usually death in academics but then again, I knew at this point I wasn’t staying in academics) that had a lot of exposure to industry and government. This is where I made the contacts to learn about job opportunities for someone with my background. Being in the purely academic environment as a grad and undergrad student, no one ever really talked about working in industry. And when they did, no one could adequately define what “work in industry” entailed. Unless a professor collaborates or consults with a specific industry sector, how could a professor talk to a student about a career outside of academics?
Based on my lessons learned, my advice for undergrad physics students would be to follow the advice given above and join an engineering society to form contacts. Also, adjust your academic curriculum to make you more attractive to an industry sector. Take a broad exposure of physics courses and take a number of non-physics but science related courses as well. Also, think about getting an MS degree, because that will always make you more hirable. For grad students, and I think this mostly applies to CM/AMO experimentalists, try to attend SPIE and CLEO type conferences where you will get more exposure to industry based research work and develop contacts as well. I think that something similar may be said for Nuclear/Particle physics. Theorists: You’re mostly out of luck here, unless you like hedge funds. I’m not saying theorist can’t get a job in an industry sector. I’m saying that usually lab/bench experience is often desired because it demonstrates that you can tackle real world problems.
It certainly is possible for undergraduate physics majors to go on to things besides grad school, but I agree with other commenters that a big part of the reason is doesn’t happen is inertia. Grad school is the expected path, kind of like college for good high school students.
This is absolutely true. Plenty of our students “plan” to go to grad school just because they aren’t aware of any other options.
At the same time, we have other students who aren’t thinking about grad school at all, because it doesn’t fit their self-image. Maddeningly, this includes some of our best students, people who really ought to be the ones thinking about grad school.
A good part of the problem is that, as Jeff notes, faculty generally have only the haziest idea of what “work in industry” means for people with physics degrees. I think I’m going to promote this bit to a front-page post, though…
I have a BS in Physics and a MS in EE which I got 10 years later. I’ve worked in industry for most of my career but did do 4 years as a lecturer. I last year went back to to my alma mater for a Physics colloqium that they had for opening a new building. It was fun, I listened to cool talks, but I was the only person there without a Ph.D. and really felt the outsider – I felt like a Democrat listening to Republican talk radio, well maybe not that bad – I wasn’t snubbed or anything but I felt almost no connection from the academics to industry or anything outside academic research. At the Uni where I got my MS in the Eng Dept. there was a lot, lot, more crossover, with people working in Industry even coming in and talking about their work and getting input where people’s research applied.
Even where it is applied I really feel Physics people are ivory tower. I don’t know a solution, but i feel like it is somewhat of a problem.
I agonized over whether to go to grad school in physics. My favorite professor / mentor gave me this advice: “Stop tormenting yourself. Just make a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision and follow through for at least a year — burrow underground. When the year is over, poke your head up, look around, and figure out whether you want to keep tunneling in the same direction.”
I did exactly that — went to grad school, burrowed underground. Then after a year I reassessed… and realized that while I liked “classroom” physics, I didn’t have have the mathematical chops for theory, and I hated, hated real lab work. So I quit and went to work in high tech. It was the best career choice I ever made.
There are two types of physics grad students: the ones who really love grad school deep down, and the ones who are able to force themselves through because they’ve trained themselves to get through unpleasant times simply by working harder. The trick is to convince the students in the second category that their time is better spent outside of the Ph.D track. If more professors gave their students the advice that I was given, we’d have a lot fewer people going through grad school on sheer momentum, and a lot more happy Ph.Ds and BSes alike.
On a number of occasions when I’ve mentioned trying to increase the number of undergraduate majors in physics, I’ve had commenters chide me for irresponsibly increasing the Ph.D. glut, as if there’s nothing else for those students to do but go to grad school and help make it nearly impossible to land an academic job. To the extent that this is an accurate description, the problem isn’t so much with wanting undergraduate majors as it is with the system that doesn’t provide options for them.
Somewhere in the blogosphere, is one faculty member chiding another for encouraging more students to major in English? A good education is worthwhile on its own merits and no one should expect that a physics undergraduate degree is vocational training that automatically leads to a decent job. Some students seem to expect that any hard science degree will be marketable without considering what kind of jobs are available. Such a student will take to a faculty member who never considered any options beyond an academic career and hear, “I dunno . . . you could go to graduate school!”
The Industrial Physicist was a fine AIP publication with lots of information about physics employment in non-traditional areas. A lot of the jobs could have been filled by people with bachelor’s degree. The magazine is no longer publishing but the archives are available on-line.
I think that finding jobs as a physics bachelor’s recipient is quite doable although the candidate would have to be willing to live anywhere in the U.S. and be broad-minded about his/her work duties. Look for example at this optical engineer job posting. A student with a bit of experience in a laser lab and a couple of summer jobs could get this position. I can find dozens of such openings in half an hour. Someone could make an RSS feed of them and seniors could subscribe to it.
There are two types of physics grad students: the ones who really love grad school deep down, and the ones who are able to force themselves through because they’ve trained themselves to get through unpleasant times simply by working harder. The trick is to convince the students in the second category that their time is better spent outside of the Ph.D track.
I think I’m one of those second people, but in a microbiology PhD program rather than physics. In the biosciences there’s much less correlation between the concepts “work hard for months and months” and “actually accomplish anything other than proving that dozens of things don’t work for some unknown reason”. Therefore, some people take 3.5 years to get a PhD, and some people take 8 years, and nobody can predict which you will be when you are starting out. I’m feeling pretty annoyed by the whole thing, and am searching for some other option where hard work is actually rewarded, and where I can estimate (within a few months) when the damn thing will actually be over and I’ll be allowed to leave.
The big problem is that the academic system forces people to make critical, irrevocable decisions early. Once you’ve decided not to go to physics graduate school, its very hard as a practical matter to get back in. What really needs to happen is that there need to be options for people to go out into industry make some money, and then go back to graduate school. My own experience in industry will make me a much better academic, and vice versa.
Also, the goal really isn’t to “be a professor”. I figured out that the goal really is to “do research.” I do suspect that in five to ten years, I’ll perform all of the functions of a professor, and the title really isn’t that important.
One final thing, there is a power relationship thing. The big reason that motivated me to get my Ph.D. is that without it no one would take me seriously if I tried to change the system. The problem with *not* getting a Ph.D. is that you then lose any power and authority to come back and fix things, and I’ve found that just having this sort of power and authority is useful for its own sake. At that point, you are on the outside staring at these utterly bogus reports that get written on higher education (see my blog) and you have no power to do anything about it.
Where I went to undergrad, there are separate Physics and Engineering Physics departments. Talking to a few engineering physics majors, it’s obvious why they were more employable and got alot more job interviews. In advanced E&M, for example, physics majors learn that antennae exist and then move on to more exotic phenomena whereas the engineering physics E&M course actually spent weeks exploring antennae design. I remember solving countless example problems about particle accellerators and bose-einstein condensates while my EP friends were learning about magnetic circuits and nonlinear optics, not to mention fluid and continuum mechanics, which is almost never in a straight physics curriculum. It’s no wonder they are more employable!
Ideally the standard physics major would be a little more balanced between the two extremes. Without compromising the level of instruction I really think physics curricula could be retooled to highlight more real-world applications and not just the esoteric, academics applications. Perpetuating the idea that applied physics is somehow “less pure” than straight theory is a huge disservice to those of us that won’t end up with that tenured slot at the end of the day!