4 ms·

I hear it's actually not that uncommon for physicists to become data scientists. More importantly though, I was successful in physics as an undergraduate, and i

by asafira 13y ago

I hear it's actually not that uncommon for physicists to become data scientists. More importantly though, I was successful in physics as an undergraduate, and it's sort of the academic culture to continue onto to grad school (as well as the culture in my family). In any case, I could always leave grad school if I want to, but I think it's also helping me gain a better computer science background (I've only taken 3-4 computer science classes so far...) I'm not applying to NASA or SpaceX because I'm really interested in consumer tech, and always have been. Honestly, maybe I have the total wrong idea for what I want to do, and I understand that. That's again why I want to do an internship. I actually have a Google interview in a couple of weeks. If you don't mind me asking, did you work at Google as a researcher or software engineer?

Lewisham 13y ago
There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research paper with me [1]). The trick is to realize that there are many product teams for which what you'll be doing are researchy style jobs. These are usually things where you're working on the backend (Compute Platform, Search, Google X) rather than the frontend (Javascript UI stuff). While the job description is software engineer, for those reasearchy jobs, you're doing work that's very similar to what you might be trying at the university lab. Except with a lot more data, and a lot more computing power behind you. Matt Welsh has written a number of times about his job change from Harvard Prof to Google, and he's a software engineer by title AFAIK, but he's clearly doing research work. [1] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html

4 ms·

I hear it's actually not that uncommon for physicists to become data scientists. More importantly though, I was successful in physics as an undergraduate, and i

by asafira 13y ago

Lewisham 13y ago
There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research paper with me [1]). The trick is to realize that there are many product teams for which what you'll be doing are researchy style jobs. These are usually things where you're working on the backend (Compute Platform, Search, Google X) rather than the frontend (Javascript UI stuff). While the job description is software engineer, for those reasearchy jobs, you're doing work that's very similar to what you might be trying at the university lab. Except with a lot more data, and a lot more computing power behind you. Matt Welsh has written a number of times about his job change from Harvard Prof to Google, and he's a software engineer by title AFAIK, but he's clearly doing research work. [1] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html