Non-academic career options for the theroetical physicist

[hadsed]

Maybe Vanadium is right about this big schools thing, but it's not entirely a waste of time I think to look at the effects this might have. When people see a bunch of faculty from MIT and the like, what do people immediately think? Well, it may be similar to what ParticleGirl is saying right now (and she is definitely not the only one I've heard express this sentiment). It might not be happening now, but perhaps people will start to think that it is happening... in turn, causing it to actually happen.

 

[Marx O' Perry]

What company would opt someone having all these degrees? needed a long hours to review one's curriculum vitae. You are such an observant and this helps you to chose what you like and dislikes and some work that might easily bores you, well I am an experienced web developer, it really needs long hours to work because the goal is not only to develop a website but meeting the client's wants about the output. How does an employer know that they do a best hiring decision?

 

[gizzard]

There is a senior mathematics professor at my community college who claims to make 100K. Even the avaerage salaries i have researched online were higher than the salaries I am seeing posted on this thread.

 

[twofish-quant]

Faculty positions are there, too- I was able to get one two years ago. I've been through the job-seeking process plenty- the success rate between quality industrial jobs and quality academic jobs is about the same: dozens of resumes out, a trickle of interviews, and one or two actual offers.

But there are a lot more empty chairs in industry than in academia. You look at the total number of faculty positions and the total of Ph.D.'s and the imbalance is a lot higher in academia than in industry.

It's a fine line between constructive discussion and pointless whining.

If whining keeps you sane, then it's not pointless.

 

[twofish-quant]

I should point out that if anyone needs R and basic statistics experience, doing a two to three mini-project would be a great way of getting yourself to the point that you can put it on your resume.

They have, respectively, a fifth and a third of the students. So while there is an effect - nobody argued that Oklahoma State was the peer of Harvard - it's nowhere near strong enough to support the common advice "if you can't get into a Top 5 school, stay home."

The problem here is that you are looking at P(B|A) which is quite different from P(A|B). The other interesting data point is that I got my Ph.D. from one of the big Ph.D. producers (U Texas Austin), and I don't know of a single peer that has gotten a tenure track position. It may be that I'm not keeping track of people, but that in itself is interesting.

Also the advice that I give is not "stay home" but "realize that your odds of getting a research faculty position aren't that great."

 

[Andy Resnick]

But there are a lot more empty chairs in industry than in academia. You look at the total number of faculty positions and the total of Ph.D.'s and the imbalance is a lot higher in academia than in industry.

That comparison only makes sense if you compare it to the number of industrial openings that require a PhD (since faculty positions require a PhD). I haven't seen any hard data on that, but my suspicion is that the number of commerical jobs is also much smaller than the number of PhDs.

 

[jtbell]

If you look at recent hires, you will find lots of graduates of Top 20 schools, and the occasional outlier - e.g. the University of Chicago has an assistant professor who graduated from the University of South Carolina.

I wonder if that guy was a student of Yakir Aharonov, (of the Aharonov-Bohm effect) who was at South Carolina for many years before retiring.

 

[Vanadium 50]

No, he was Frank Avignone's student.

 

[twofish-quant]

That comparison only makes sense if you compare it to the number of industrial openings that require a PhD (since faculty positions require a PhD).

It depends on what the point of the comparison is.

Personally, my goal is to avoid starvation, and at that point it really doesn't matter whether the job requires a Ph.D. or not.

I haven't seen any hard data on that, but my suspicion is that the number of commerical jobs is also much smaller than the number of PhDs.

I strongly suspect otherwise. The reason that I strongly suspect otherwise is that I don't know of a single physics Ph.D. that has looked for a Ph.D.-level position in Wall Street that has been unable to find one. It usually takes three to six months of looking, but at the end of looking people get jobs.

Also we really are talking about some tiny numbers here. There are 1000 new Ph.D.'s each year. The total employment of the securities industry in NYC is 200,000. Citigroup has a headcount of 260,000, and Goldman-Sachs has a headcount of 35,000.

Every major investment bank has a "physics department" that has dozens of physics Ph.D.'s, and you have several thousand hedge funds, each of which has a few Ph.D.'s.

One very curious thing about US financial hiring of physics Ph.D.'s is that the people from the really big name schools in the US just don't seem to apply for Wall Street physics positions. The applications that come in are from the big public schools (UTexas, UIUC, U Wisconsin, Rutgers). I don't think I've *ever* seen an application from someone with a Harvard or Princeton Ph.D. This isn't true for other countries, since people from the big-name Chinese, German, and UK schools do go out for finance positions.

The other thing to note is that Ph.D. jobs have been centered on finance because jobs in general have been centered on finance. Something that people find surprising is that Citigroup hires more people than General Motors (260,000 versus 206,000) and Morgan-Stanley is bigger than Chrysler (62,000 versus 51,000).

Now whether it's a good thing that the US economy has become finance-focused is another question. Personally it bothers me a lot, but I'm not going to help the situation by starving myself.

Something that is a major problem is that there is a disconnect between employers and Ph.D.'s. Part of it is that we are talking about numbers that are small enough so that anonymity becomes impossible.

Another issue is that banks do not like to talk about who they've hired and why. Schools are rather open about their hiring. You know that Professor X works at Y school on project Z. Industrial companies particular banks are closed-lipped about this information, and publicly releasing the corporate phonebook is grounds for immediate termination. One thing that I've been told to do when someone calls me is to say "Hello". Not "Hello, foo speaking" or "Hello, firm name" but just Hello.

As far as publicity goes, it also doesn't help that finance in non-unionized. When you look at GM, you know that there are people other than the top management, because workers have an independent voice. When you look at investment banking, the only people that you see are senior management, and it's not obvious that there is anyone else. When people mention Goldman-Sachs, they think that it's a company with a few hundred hyper-rich people and not a big giant corporation that's bigger than Google (35K versus 26K). It also doesn't help that pretty much everyone that works in high finance does so in one of a half dozen cities, so if you live in Jackson, Mississippi, you aren't going to know any investment bankers.

Something that I find interesting is that when I looked at the list of HEP graduates, I spotted quite a few people that I know personally (i.e. I e-mailed them a question that morning).

 

[twofish-quant]

One mystery to me is that I'd be very interested in talking to someone that got their Ph.D. in the 1970's to see how their life turned out. One of the big surprises that I got was that I assumed that my dissertation adviser's generation had a much easier time of it, and I was quite shocked when I looked at the numbers and found out that issue with physics Ph.D.'s not getting academic positions started around the time that I was born.

Something that I don't have any good sense of is what the *those* physics Ph.D.'s ended up doing, and how did their lives turn out? If anyone knows any physics Ph.D.'s, that got their degree between 1970-1985 and didn't end up in academia, I'd love to hear about what happened to them.

Also, this points out the big difference between 2010 and 1975. In 1975, it was easy to disappear into the night. With the internet, it's really hard to go off the grid.

 

[ks_physicist]

I am fascinated by the original post in this thread, and will keep it as a reference to add to my "just in case" career development file. Great summary!