I’ve talked before about the tension between the desire to encourage students to major in physics and the tight job market in academia. Every time I talk about ways to draw more students into physics, it seems that somebody pops up to call me irresponsible for trying to lure them into a dead-end career track, saying that we don’t really need more physics majors.
Eugene Wallingford quotes the best concise response to this argument that I’ve heard:
Another colleague spoke eloquently of why we need to work hard to convince young people to enter the sciences at the university level. He said something to the effect that “Society does not need a lot of scientists, but the ones it does need, it needs very much — and it needs them to be very good!”
That’s it exactly.
I think it’s more than that.
We need physics majors who go on to be lawyers and businessmen and politicians and journalists and so forth. Not everybody who majors in English goes on to be an English professor. Yes, there is a lot of specialized knowledge (linear algebra, etc.) that you have to get under your belt to go through a physics major– but there’s no requirement that every physics major go on to graduate school.
Physics can be more than the esoteric field fully studiend and understood by only those who become professionals in it. There are parts of physics that the public is really interested in– consider the fact that Stephen Hawking is almost a household name. I think that there is a thirst to understand out there, and it can only help to have more people major in physics who go on into the with a deeper understanding in it. I’d love to see people major in and love physics even if they don’t go on to graduate school and become one of the very good scientists.
-Rob
“Society does not need a lot of scientists, but the ones it does need, it needs very much — and it needs them to be very good!”
Ah, at long last a modern version of “Kill them all, let God sort them out!”.
Maybe “society” (wazzdat, exactly?) needs some very, very good physicists (really? what for?). That still does not justify luring the vast majority (virtually all of them) who can not be those few needed physicists into a dead end (talk of a “dead-end career track” is wildly optimistic, presupposing as it does the existence of a career track).
A science PhD after four years college plus six years grad school emerged no better than break-even overall and with poor employment prospects. A starting 21-year old GED-bearing warrantless search and seizure Homeland Severity stormtrooper at LAX was paid $1.2 million during those 10 years. Who is the smart one?
Mihi cura futuri… at gunpoint.
Who is the smart one?
The one who spent ten years working on and studying things that he or she loved, expanding his or her mind and engaging in intellectual pursuits, rather than the one who spent ten years subsisting.
Even if it’s more financially responsible to tread water as opposed to swim towards deep water, there is more to being human than making money.
I’d love to see the stigma against not going on in scientific research removed from grad students. (Yes, it exists.) And, as I said before, I’d love to see us fully celebrating physics majors who don’t necessarily go on to graduate school.
-Rob