PhD in Applied Physics, 2018 Working on data science/ML now. Started undergrad in 2008 and had to decide between CS and engineering physics. Went with the la

PhD in Applied Physics, 2018 Working on data science/ML now. Started undergrad in 2008 and had to decide between CS and engineering physics. Went with the latter because the school had a particularly strong program. Applied for PhD programs and national lab positions in 2012. The PhD route seemed more interesting, so I went with that. Ended up spending 6 years on materials simulation. My peer group ended up going to academia, software engineering, and data science. Technology companies seemed exciting so I interviewed for software engineering and data science roles. Ended up with a company that predicts accident risk from driving data. I think that physicists are particularly well suited to the machine learning space. I was trained to work systematically work through problems with no analytic solution through clever approximations. This tenacity can help with tackling problems in the machine learning space.