Full Academic and Practical Toolkit

   “It’s déjà vu all over again”. This expression aptly describes ups and down cycles of physics job market during the past century. The ups resulted from such stimuli as war needs, the invention of the sputnik, the transistor or the computer, as well as from the spark of strong economy. The downs have almost inevitably followed, as the supply of trained specialists has exceeded the demand or the economy faulted. During the down periods such as the job crunches of the early 1970s and 1990s, those hardest hit were the newly minted physicists and students caught n the pipeline. Although, historically few physicists go unemployed or underemployed for long, they nevertheless experienced great angst. Many enter “holding pattern”, taking one postgraduate position after another; some drop out. As the word of the tight job market spread, physics major enrollments drop, recovering only slowly once the conditions improve.

    Industry wants very bright problem solvers, having broad technical underpinning. Science graduates fill that part of the bill. Moreover, they are frequently hired because employers know that science majors effectively weed out all but most talented. For example, half of the new physics PhDs in the US have taken potentially permanent jobs in the industrial sector, doing applied physics, engineering, software development, and the like.

  Aspects of management consulting certainly appeal to a number of physics doctorates. Management consulting involves many of the same skills as physics, such as problem solving and quantitative analysis, but offers rewards on a shorter time scale and allows participation in a greater variety of projects. Plus, the six-figure salaries are nice as well.

Right now the demand for scientists in the US is healthy, and more academic openings are available to scientists than have existed for many years. But how long will the boom last? Are science departments planning for the rainy day? Many physics departments are listening to their students and to a wide range of employers, taking an introspective look at their program, and introducing measures to increase the robustness and attractiveness of their major.

  Traditionally trained academics are hired when specialized talent is scarce but they are at competitive disadvantage when demand wanes. Being smart is not enough; industry expects new hires to contribute from day to day. Industrial employers perceive academics to be at the periphery of the high-tech talent pool. They believe that scientists often lack social skills needed to work on a team or they are too narrowly focused on a topic or too easily diverted from practical goals by interesting science. As a prominent industrial physicist said that academic physicists are “utterly clueless about what it takes to survive in industrial world. They have no idea about customers, on-time on-target delivery of the results without excuses, or participation in teams. These stereotypical views have a grain of truth that needs to be recognized.

  Many science faculty members don’t have the background to prepare students for a career outside the world of academia. Moreover, there persists in academia the remnants of an elitist perception of what a proper science is and what one’s best graduates should do. These days, elitism is decreasing and rarely expressed, but students are masters at reading subtle, subconscious signals from their advisors. With declining enrollment science departments are challenged either to excel at providing a traditional academic program or to adapt their programs to prepare their graduates better for a broader employment markets. Some science departments seem to fail to achieve this goal.

   The losers cite a number of reasons for the drop in students’ numbers, including increased competition from other programs, notably computer science and engineering, poor employment prospects, declining preparation of incoming students. The gainers had all taken some action to change their enrollments. Their efforts included a double major with a department like electrical engineering, transfer to engineering school after two years and increased research opportunities. Though the gainers do not have a single bullet, all remedies include visible and improved preparations other than research professorship.

 

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