A lot of people have told me that I would never use the maths, physics and CS I have learnt at school... and the opposite happened! In my job (at Distran, a sta

A lot of people have told me that I would never use the maths, physics and CS I have learnt at school... and the opposite happened! In my job (at Distran, a start-up based in Zürich - founder), I had to use a lot of maths, electronics, physics that I learnt at school. Most of the people here are using their scientific/technical skills to simplify experiments, create new algorithms etc... of course this is the 10% part of the job as implementing ideas take most of the time. And you have the gluing part as well. My answer to you would be to work in a start-up where a broad spectrum of tasks are to be solved by a single person. Hardware start-ups in particular need to cover an even broader spectrum... One aspect I found very important was to "choose the good combats", something that is worth to fight for, so that even after years you are still motivated and proud of what you have done. E.g we are making a gas detector that have obvious good effects on mortality or environment.