<p>I'm not inquiring about celebrity physicists or professors with connections who have received tenured positions, but about your average physicist with a phD. What realistic options do they have in the industry? How difficult would it be to find an industry job? Or is the only option to work at a government research lab and a 35K salary?</p>
<p>Here are some [surveys</a> from the American Institute of Physics](<a href=“http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.html]surveys”>http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.html).</p>
<p>Finance, engineering*, and computer software do seem to be escape valves for physics graduates surplus to the number of actual physics jobs.</p>
<p>*Probably mainly those areas where ABET accreditation of the degree program and Professional Engineer licensing is not expected or desired.</p>
<p>Lots of physicists are employed by the Federal government, especially around Washington, DC. Even if there are cutbacks, a good many are set to retire soon.</p>
<p>My physics TA was telling me that there are nice opportunities outside of physics in the finance world.</p>
<p>in more “standard” areas of physics, there are jobs. intel, for example, will hire someone who did their PhD in semiconductor physics. </p>
<p>In some of the more esoteric areas of physics (particle/cosmology), people tend to get hired on the basis of being smart and able to figure stuff out. In some highly qualitative areas of finance, the rules/formulas are rewritten every few months-- not enough time for a textbook to come out and teach a class full of MBAs. So they just hire really really really really smart people to figure it out (aka throwing money at the problem).</p>
<p>On a personal note: I don’t think theres a huge industrial research for super cold physics, yet a graduate from my school (who did ultra cold physics) got a job at Boeing… designing missile guidance systems.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Also, typical business students (at either the undergraduate or MBA level) do not have the math skills needed to handle quantitative finance.</p>
<p>But the summary is that job and career prospects for physics majors are decent, if one is willing to consider math-based non-physics jobs.</p>
<p>In the defense and INTEL sector, there are more and more jobs of “multidisciplinary engineer” being created. These positions hire physicists, mathematicians, chemists and other science major to be a “subject matter expert” on systems engineering projects. For example, a physicist may be that SME to answer functional questions from software engineers like myself on say electromagnetic signals, etc.</p>
<p>“Or is the only option to work at a government research lab and a 35K salary?”</p>
<p>My friend you are selling yourself too low. With a PHD in Physics you could land a 100k+ job in DC.</p>
<p>Do you think a specialization in astrophysics would help land a better lab job or hurt? A Ph. D in astrophysics, I mean. And do you think it makes a big difference if you graduated from MIT or a school of similar caliber?</p>
<p>Determination of things like the rate of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, while interesting to some people, do not have much commercial value, so the number of jobs in astrophysics is very small. However, anyone with a doctorate in Astrophysics is clearly at the pinnacle of the highly intelligent and very high intelligence is a valuable commodity which means that although Ph.D in Astrophysics from MIT is unlikely to lead to a job in Astrophysics, it will likely lead to other lucrative opportunities.</p>
<p>Finance jobs often exclusively hire physics/maths/engineering phds. Having spoken to some of the people who have gone into these fields they say the work they are required to do is at the level of a difficult undergraduate problem (e.g. a tricky GR problem for example). The reason they take the trouble to hire only phds is that this is the only way to guarantee someone who will be consistently competent at this level. It’s also a bonus in these jobs if you have experience in C++/mathematica but generally if you have a very high level degree from a top institute they realise you’ll be able to learn this without difficulty.
I also know a number of people who have gone into patent law (without pursuing any formal law training), others have gone into medical research and a massive variery or other jobs.
In my experience if you have an undergrad in physics from a top university, with the right background work you don’t need a phd to get a high paying job. What a phd does is give you the opportunity to get a job that is both highly paid and academically challenging. Going straight to wall street from college you could end up earning as much as someone would having got a phd but the work will be intellectually tedious.</p>
<p>@alwaysinawe, thanks, ill have to think about what you said.<br>
Do you guys know anyone with a physics degrees that actually went into physics as a career? And were at least mildly successful?</p>