4 ms·

(At risk of hijacking this thread) I'm a first-year physics grad student (so ~5 years to go, for a PhD), and I'm pretty sure what I want to do is software engin

by joe42 15y ago

(At risk of hijacking this thread) I'm a first-year physics grad student (so ~5 years to go, for a PhD), and I'm pretty sure what I want to do is software engineering, SV-type stuff, and I've been seriously considering quitting the physics thing for most of the past year. Compared to business school in the post: * I've got about 5 more years of school, * school isn't costing me anything (I get a ~$20k/yr stipend; no tuition), * I'm not enjoying myself at all (lots of hard core classes, required to pass preliminary tests in a limited number of sittings, boring city, boring people, boring school, no friends), * the payoff is slim-to-none. I can't find evidence that a physics PhD is worth much in, say, software engineering. An MIT PhD student just told me he's heard ~$120k typical-ish starting salary in software engineering with a physics PhD (and he was trying to talk me into staying). That doesn't sound worth it at all! "Starting" salary!--if you don't count the 5-7 years of school (basically work). I could go on, but I'm interested if anyone's got an opinion or some advice. It's a bit similar to the MBA decision.

SatvikBeri 15y ago
Imagine that you're not part of a company or a PhD program, and you're choosing between spending 5 years to get a Physics PhD and go into software, or going into software directly. Which sounds more appealing to you?
- joe42 15y ago
  That's pretty much the decision I had to make a year ago, and I ended up in the PhD program. But if I knew then what I know now (that I'd not be having a good time), I'd be leaning closer to the software job. The remaining unknown (to me) is what the degree is worth, in the end. Really, I suppose, I'm just not looking forward to telling everyone (friends and family) that I'm quitting. It's admitting a defeat/failure/mistake, and that's hard, so I'm trying to find a good reason to stay.
  - daegloe 15y ago
    Nah, you're not defeated. Just the opposite. You're empowering yourself by taking command of your life decisions. We all make mistakes along the way, but learning from those mistakes and course correcting are the biggest wins we can ask for. You should be proud and wear your decision like a badge of honor. As the Aussies say, good on ya!
  - msg 15y ago
    If you're talking about worth in terms of cash, I would run don't walk away from the PhD. If you're talking about worth in terms of cherished personal values, I would try to figure out if I want to be a scientist or an engineer. If it is a vocation. Through my master's program, this was on my mind while doing my thesis. I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker. Neither choice is the less noble.
    - joe42 15y ago
      > worth in terms of cherished personal values Yeah, that's probably part of it. I guess The Internet can't help me with that one. > I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker. I like this. Sums it all up quite nicely. Thanks!
daegloe 15y ago
You should do what you love and thereby love what you do. If you don't, take a step back as you may need to recalibrate a bit (or a lot). It's a healthy and productive exercise, if only to reaffirm your current direction. EDIT: I don't mean to get all meta, but it's not about the ideal of others but rather what makes you happy as an individual. Anyway, that's the way I rationalize it all.
- joe42 15y ago
  Yep, it was something of a revelation to me this week, that "hang on, I could actually quit if I wanted to!" feeling. Powerful, but I'm afraid it's dangerous.
ylem 15y ago
I'm a practicing physicist, so I'll give a bit of advice. The only reason to go into physics is because you love doing it--but--you have to go into with your eyes open. The job market is extremely competitive these days for faculty and national lab positions. Depending on your subfield, there may or may not be industry jobs. If you're not having fun and you finish, then what are your options: 1) Medical Physics 2) Wall Street (though I hear that it's getting harder to go directly from physics phD to wall street and more people are getting a masters in financial engineering first) 3) Software 4) Management Consulting 5) Science Policy 6) Etc. While the salary for all of these can be good, you have to look at the opportunity cost--you're looking at ~6 years for grad. school. Someone else might be able to tell you if it's worth sticking around to pick up either your masters in physics (or to take some graduate courses in CS)--but if you don't love it, my advice is to get out and do something that you're passionate about--What do you mean by SV type stuff? Now, with all that having been said--one thing you might want to consider is that the first year of a typical physics grad. student is fairly hard with coursework and such and you might want to try to pass quals. and try research for a year before making your final decision--are you interested in theory or experiment? Did you do research in undergrad.? Life in a lab can be rather different from coursework--also, even course work tends to be more interested in advanced courses such as GR, Quantum Field Theory, etc. than in the typical Jackson courses.... Good luck!
- joe42 15y ago
  > SV type stuff? I was being purposefully vague--I just meant the Silicon Valley scene. I have a college friend who just got a cool job there, and some family friends, too. It sounds like a fun place from the culture side, but also from the technology side--specifically, I'm amazed by what a small team can do in a 48-hour hackathon with today's technology. The one that comes to mind is that "Infinite Scrabble MMO" from about 18 months ago. 150 man-hours can produce that? Wow. I did research in undergrad (mostly over the summers, but a bit during the year). I had a lot of fun, and it was motivating work. But it was programming work! I wrote a bunch of data analysis code and did a little bit of GEANT simulation stuff, and it all felt more like programming than physics. And the "physics research" (experimentalists) that I have seen looks more like engineering (designing/building some apparatus, then fixing all of the problems...). It just seems so slow-moving compared to the software industry. There's a lot less room for individualism, and it feels like you've got a lot of really smart people doing a lot of menial, commodity tasks (I'm thinking of every PhD candidate and postdoc I've ever known). I'll have to give theory a closer look. It's hard to see myself in it any time soon, because there's more material I'd need to learn first. (I think I'm rambling to myself now.) All this, I think, is to say that I'm pretty sure the physics charm has worn off. Unless there's something really exciting around the corner, I think I'm over it. I seem to have written this comment as if there's some point I'm trying to prove. Habit. Sorry about that! Thanks for the advice and encouragement, and I'll keep my eyes open!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
neutronicus 15y ago
Year 1 is supposedly pretty different from subsequent years - you should at least stick it out until you fall in with some research group or other and see how you like it. As a bonus, you can get your Master's!
- joe42 15y ago
  It's mostly the course work and preliminary tests (studying for them) that I'm not liking and dreading, which are supposed to take another ~2 years. At that point, the sunk cost fallacy would probably keep me in for the whole thing.
mwd_ 15y ago
I only did a master's degree, but the consensus among grad student friends is that graduate degrees are not worth it for money (maybe it's different if you go somewhere like MIT or Stanford -- I am talking about second tier schools). Grad school can make sense if you want to do research or some specific kinds of technical work (e.g. physics simulation for movies). It also makes sense if you enjoy it. I had a great time socially in grad school and loved working as a TA. When you consider the "cost" of your Ph.D., you should consider the opportunity cost of the salary you could be earning, which could easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a six year period. It's also wrong to compare a starting salary with Ph.D. to a starting salary with undergrad because by the time you get your Ph.D. and work the undergrad will have 5-7 years of experience and, on average, a higher salary.
- joe42 15y ago
  Agreed. I guess I'm just trying to weigh the "worth" of the degree (not just money) against the "cost" of it (not just money). Lots of intangibles in the equation. It sounds like the consensus is not "Absolutely do X, or you'll regret it later," but "(Either one will be fine;) do what you love." So it's comforting that I probably can't screw this up too badly with either choice, but I'm going to have to do some introspection.

by joe42 15y ago

SatvikBeri 15y ago

Imagine that you're not part of a company or a PhD program, and you're choosing between spending 5 years to get a Physics PhD and go into software, or going into software directly. Which sounds more appealing to you?

joe42 15y ago
That's pretty much the decision I had to make a year ago, and I ended up in the PhD program. But if I knew then what I know now (that I'd not be having a good time), I'd be leaning closer to the software job. The remaining unknown (to me) is what the degree is worth, in the end. Really, I suppose, I'm just not looking forward to telling everyone (friends and family) that I'm quitting. It's admitting a defeat/failure/mistake, and that's hard, so I'm trying to find a good reason to stay.
- daegloe 15y ago
  Nah, you're not defeated. Just the opposite. You're empowering yourself by taking command of your life decisions. We all make mistakes along the way, but learning from those mistakes and course correcting are the biggest wins we can ask for. You should be proud and wear your decision like a badge of honor. As the Aussies say, good on ya!
- msg 15y ago
  If you're talking about worth in terms of cash, I would run don't walk away from the PhD. If you're talking about worth in terms of cherished personal values, I would try to figure out if I want to be a scientist or an engineer. If it is a vocation. Through my master's program, this was on my mind while doing my thesis. I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker. Neither choice is the less noble.
  - joe42 15y ago
    > worth in terms of cherished personal values Yeah, that's probably part of it. I guess The Internet can't help me with that one. > I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker. I like this. Sums it all up quite nicely. Thanks!

daegloe 15y ago

You should do what you love and thereby love what you do. If you don't, take a step back as you may need to recalibrate a bit (or a lot). It's a healthy and productive exercise, if only to reaffirm your current direction. EDIT: I don't mean to get all meta, but it's not about the ideal of others but rather what makes you happy as an individual. Anyway, that's the way I rationalize it all.

joe42 15y ago
Yep, it was something of a revelation to me this week, that "hang on, I could actually quit if I wanted to!" feeling. Powerful, but I'm afraid it's dangerous.

ylem 15y ago

I'm a practicing physicist, so I'll give a bit of advice. The only reason to go into physics is because you love doing it--but--you have to go into with your eyes open. The job market is extremely competitive these days for faculty and national lab positions. Depending on your subfield, there may or may not be industry jobs. If you're not having fun and you finish, then what are your options: 1) Medical Physics 2) Wall Street (though I hear that it's getting harder to go directly from physics phD to wall street and more people are getting a masters in financial engineering first) 3) Software 4) Management Consulting 5) Science Policy 6) Etc. While the salary for all of these can be good, you have to look at the opportunity cost--you're looking at ~6 years for grad. school. Someone else might be able to tell you if it's worth sticking around to pick up either your masters in physics (or to take some graduate courses in CS)--but if you don't love it, my advice is to get out and do something that you're passionate about--What do you mean by SV type stuff? Now, with all that having been said--one thing you might want to consider is that the first year of a typical physics grad. student is fairly hard with coursework and such and you might want to try to pass quals. and try research for a year before making your final decision--are you interested in theory or experiment? Did you do research in undergrad.? Life in a lab can be rather different from coursework--also, even course work tends to be more interested in advanced courses such as GR, Quantum Field Theory, etc. than in the typical Jackson courses.... Good luck!

joe42 15y ago
> SV type stuff? I was being purposefully vague--I just meant the Silicon Valley scene. I have a college friend who just got a cool job there, and some family friends, too. It sounds like a fun place from the culture side, but also from the technology side--specifically, I'm amazed by what a small team can do in a 48-hour hackathon with today's technology. The one that comes to mind is that "Infinite Scrabble MMO" from about 18 months ago. 150 man-hours can produce that? Wow. I did research in undergrad (mostly over the summers, but a bit during the year). I had a lot of fun, and it was motivating work. But it was programming work! I wrote a bunch of data analysis code and did a little bit of GEANT simulation stuff, and it all felt more like programming than physics. And the "physics research" (experimentalists) that I have seen looks more like engineering (designing/building some apparatus, then fixing all of the problems...). It just seems so slow-moving compared to the software industry. There's a lot less room for individualism, and it feels like you've got a lot of really smart people doing a lot of menial, commodity tasks (I'm thinking of every PhD candidate and postdoc I've ever known). I'll have to give theory a closer look. It's hard to see myself in it any time soon, because there's more material I'd need to learn first. (I think I'm rambling to myself now.) All this, I think, is to say that I'm pretty sure the physics charm has worn off. Unless there's something really exciting around the corner, I think I'm over it. I seem to have written this comment as if there's some point I'm trying to prove. Habit. Sorry about that! Thanks for the advice and encouragement, and I'll keep my eyes open!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

neutronicus 15y ago

Year 1 is supposedly pretty different from subsequent years - you should at least stick it out until you fall in with some research group or other and see how you like it. As a bonus, you can get your Master's!

joe42 15y ago
It's mostly the course work and preliminary tests (studying for them) that I'm not liking and dreading, which are supposed to take another ~2 years. At that point, the sunk cost fallacy would probably keep me in for the whole thing.

mwd_ 15y ago

I only did a master's degree, but the consensus among grad student friends is that graduate degrees are not worth it for money (maybe it's different if you go somewhere like MIT or Stanford -- I am talking about second tier schools). Grad school can make sense if you want to do research or some specific kinds of technical work (e.g. physics simulation for movies). It also makes sense if you enjoy it. I had a great time socially in grad school and loved working as a TA. When you consider the "cost" of your Ph.D., you should consider the opportunity cost of the salary you could be earning, which could easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a six year period. It's also wrong to compare a starting salary with Ph.D. to a starting salary with undergrad because by the time you get your Ph.D. and work the undergrad will have 5-7 years of experience and, on average, a higher salary.

joe42 15y ago
Agreed. I guess I'm just trying to weigh the "worth" of the degree (not just money) against the "cost" of it (not just money). Lots of intangibles in the equation. It sounds like the consensus is not "Absolutely do X, or you'll regret it later," but "(Either one will be fine;) do what you love." So it's comforting that I probably can't screw this up too badly with either choice, but I'm going to have to do some introspection.