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It has appeared that the physics community has done much better getting good non-academic jobs and careers for their Ph.D. holders than most other STEM fields.

by graycat 13y ago

analog31 13y ago
Granted, I got my physics degree 20 years ago. At that time, there was actually a lot of frustration in the physics community about the lack of preparation for industry jobs. So I'd hesitate to speculate on why (or even if) the situation has improved. But I will anyway. ;-) I think that physics students aren't always "monogamously" in love with physics, so much as we're intellectual omnivores / opportunists. I was in love with math, electronics, and programming. But I ended up at a college with no engineering school, and the people who seemed to have the most fun playing with toys were my physics profs. But as a result, my ability to roll circuits and sling code with the best of 'em was still marketable in 1993. Today, I see a trend towards hiring people with more formal skills in their job areas, such as CS and EE degrees for programming and electronics design. And I see more emphasis on tools (IDE, CAD, etc.) than on knowledge of fundamentals. As an aside, it's worth noting that the public image of physics is the Theoretician, but most physics students are Experimentalists.
lsc 13y ago
Now, I'm seeing things from the production programming/systems administration side. But my impression was that physics people use large clusters of Linux boxes in college, and thus have practical experience when dealing with that sort of thing in industry. From my perspective, I'd much rather have a physics major who has large-scale systems administration experience and linux experience than a CS major who used java and windows. (But again, I'm not working on "hard CS" - I'm keeping clusters running, with bondo and bailing wire, if need be.) That, and they tend to be bright sorts who are able to break down problems into something that can be reduced to code. My impression is that the standards as far as intelligence goes are higher in the physics department than in the CS department, but that might just be that where I work, I don't get to see the best output of the CS department.

It has appeared that the physics community has done much better getting good non-academic jobs and careers for their Ph.D. holders than most other STEM fields.

by graycat 13y ago

It has appeared that the physics community has done much better getting good non-academic jobs and careers for their Ph.D. holders than most other STEM fields.

analog31 13y ago

Granted, I got my physics degree 20 years ago. At that time, there was actually a lot of frustration in the physics community about the lack of preparation for industry jobs. So I'd hesitate to speculate on why (or even if) the situation has improved. But I will anyway. ;-) I think that physics students aren't always "monogamously" in love with physics, so much as we're intellectual omnivores / opportunists. I was in love with math, electronics, and programming. But I ended up at a college with no engineering school, and the people who seemed to have the most fun playing with toys were my physics profs. But as a result, my ability to roll circuits and sling code with the best of 'em was still marketable in 1993. Today, I see a trend towards hiring people with more formal skills in their job areas, such as CS and EE degrees for programming and electronics design. And I see more emphasis on tools (IDE, CAD, etc.) than on knowledge of fundamentals. As an aside, it's worth noting that the public image of physics is the Theoretician, but most physics students are Experimentalists.

lsc 13y ago

Now, I'm seeing things from the production programming/systems administration side. But my impression was that physics people use large clusters of Linux boxes in college, and thus have practical experience when dealing with that sort of thing in industry. From my perspective, I'd much rather have a physics major who has large-scale systems administration experience and linux experience than a CS major who used java and windows. (But again, I'm not working on "hard CS" - I'm keeping clusters running, with bondo and bailing wire, if need be.) That, and they tend to be bright sorts who are able to break down problems into something that can be reduced to code. My impression is that the standards as far as intelligence goes are higher in the physics department than in the CS department, but that might just be that where I work, I don't get to see the best output of the CS department.