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In a somewhat related issue, many of these financial firms will recruit top science & engineering talent at competitive universities. In some sense, it would h
by kqr2 12y ago
In a somewhat related issue, many of these financial firms will recruit top science & engineering talent at competitive universities. In some sense, it would have been better if these people had just studied finance to begin with since that would have opened a spot for someone who really wanted to practice science and engineering as a profession.
- tanderson92 12y agoWhile what you say is true, I would draw a different conclusion. It seems more likely that the students would prefer working in a field closer to what they studied, but the lack of positions means they had to look elsewhere. Finance knows they can find people with highly transferable skills in sci/engineering at competitive schools, so the brain drain is really the fault of the job market in the sciences and engineering. Of course you can still look at it as finance not investing in long-term R&D such as in science and engineering directly causing this brain-exodus (as opposed to brain drain), so it's still finance's fault!
- dagw 12y agoThat's like a friend of mine with a math degree. He didn't want to work in finance, but despite his best efforts he could not find anyone offering him a job where he would get to use his degree. So he ended up in finance after all and gets paid lots of money and works on interesting math problems.
- akgerber 12y agoI have generally seen people finishing PhD.s lately reluctantly start looking for jobs in alternate industries only because there is an extremely slim chance of getting a reasonably well-paid, secure job doing the type of scientific research they trained for. If they don't explore alternate options, they can easily be trapped in postdoc purgatory for a very long time.