If the world truly needs more physicists, then the invisible hand ought to start feeding us more, lest we bite it.

I complitely disagree with the assessment in the article. My husband graduated with a masters degree in Applied Mathematics with a specialty in dynamical systems. Theoretically, he could design aerodynamical systems in aviation industry. In practice – out of hundreds, if not thousands of jobs he applied for in his field over the last 2 years, he only received 1 interview, which was cancelled due to cut in finding. He was not even given a chance to interview for any other position in his field, because he either did not have additional degree in engineering (apparently a must) or he did not have prior experience. Additionaly, many companies, like mine, put freeze on US citizen hires, only to plead with US government to give more work visas to cheaper foreign labour, or put more sites in cheaper regions of Asia. Companies are smily not interested in US graduates.

As the old saying goes, “Cry me a river.” I heard that same load of horse manure at the APS meeting in Santa Barbara in the 1990s. Tenured faculty and the APS (of which I am not a member and never will be despite a PhD in Physics) rely on a steady supply of cheap labor — graduate students. The “establishment” couldn’t or wouldn’t tell the truth then a person’s likelihood of obtaining tenure then and they aren’t telling the truth now, either.

As Katie said, if you’re not on the tenure track, then you are conditioned to believe you have failed. In my business, we need and hire folks with PhDs in Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics but not to do “science”. I need folks with critical thinking skills (and often good interpersonal skills which is even rarer amongst this group) to help a customer with a problem. The vast majority of them will leave to take a “real” job — a post-doc at a third the salary.

On a final note, why would I teach high school science? Do they have any real clue what it is like? Or they all sitting in their cushy offices at AAPT? Many of my colleagues are married to school teachers (K through 12). They work far longer hours than we do for less than a fifth of what I make. Not to mention the fact that schools are administered like small dictatorships.

I doubt the APS or AAPT will change their tune, they haven’t in more than a decade.

–Jason

From a non-scientist perspective, you have to feed the system with under-represented groups, such as women and minorities. You also have to get non-scientist parents (not just those already inclined) to urge their children into these careers by showing them what physics/science means to society. That is missing. APS should be on the forefront of PR efforts aimed at this and has only just begun. There was a commercial with Phil Mickelson, the golfer, and he and a corporate sponsor have started a match and science teacher school. APS should have hooked into that PR-wise.

Many of us are against nuclear power, so that is a huge issue. Find a safer power source that is not related to bombs. And yes, what Katie said too.

“I feel that one should ultimately look at where every major discovery had started (cough, physics) and reconsider your harshful statemants.”

Shawn, you fail to see the point here. Job placement has a *direct* impact on undergraduates entering a field. If they don’t see a rewarding (both financially and otherwise) job at the end of their studies, they’ll find something else to study. And that is exactly what has been happening in physics for more than a generation.

The APS is laser-focused on getting students to enter the graduate degree track without planning for the end result other than “get on the tenure track or you are a failure.”

Maybe when that changes and schools are more interested in turning out folks who look at how to apply what they’ve learned to many fields outside academia, the enrollment numbers will increase.

@Jason: I’m not sure precisely what you were referring to when you said “I heard that same load of horse manure at the APS meeting in Santa Barbara in the 1990s.” Specifically which message don’t you agree with? (I’m not disputing your claim, just not sure what you refer to.)

@Physiker: I agree you should be skeptical of any group promoting more education in its own field. But one interesting piece of the argument here is the Tapping America’s Potential report linked to above. It comes from the Business Roundtable organization which is not a science organization at all. They explicitly call for a doubling of STEM graduates by 2015.

To address another one of your points, a survey of people with science degrees were asked what skills they needed in their actual jobs (such as the ones you mention) and computer programming was low on the list.

As a high school senior who will likely attend Caltech next year, the disagreement in this comment thread concerns me. My strongest academic interests thus far have been in Physics, Astronomy, and Computer Science, so the majors I’ve been considering most are Physics, Astrophysics, EE, and CS. Jason’s posts seem to suggest that a Physics degree would limit me to a career in academia (which I think I would enjoy, but I would like to keep my options open). Would an Astrophysics degree limit me even more than that?

I have noticed that my CS teacher has a lot more to say about the success of his former students who pursued degrees in CS than my Physics teacher has to say about his former students… I’m also concerned about Jason’s most recent post that suggests that Physics profs will treat me as “cheap labor” in undergraduate research positions.

Basically what I’m getting at is that I thoroughly enjoy the field of Physics, but I also enjoy CS and could see myself as an engineer. For a student who loves research but also likes practical applications, does Physics have more to offer than other fields?

I have physics bachelor’s degree and would be thrilled if I could find an industry job in physics. However, after a year of searching, I have had to go into a different field in order to find gainful employment. Sure, physics graduates may have jobs, but mostly in fields outside of their area of study. It looks like you must have a PhD in order to avoid having to compete with engineers and programmers. The market for physics BS’s is horrible.

From the bullet points in the original post:
- “The medical physics industry employs about 3200 physicists, and have about 300 new jobs each year more than the current capacity for people with undergrad physics degrees.”
Did you see continuing ads for 300 medical physics graduates in Physics Today during the last year? After all, they say that they need 300 more that they already hired (current capacity). Did they try higher salaries? Did they try giving scholarships? Undoubtedly, there is a need,
but there’s much hype too. And they could hire more physicists at a Ph.D. level, or experienced in other fields (such as high-energy particle physics, where much medical imaging technology originated), of which there seems to be no shortage.

“School principals rated physics and maths teachers about the hardest to recruit along with special needs teachers, primarily due to a shortage of qualified people.”
Did they try higher salaries? Well, I know, most school districts have a budget crisis, but unfortunately this country decided to pay school teachers less than any other professional. So it is no wonder that physics teacher is not a popular career choice, more so if you have to pay off student loans.–

I find it quite amusing that the only positive posts are from undergraduate students. It will be interesting to hear what they say in another 10 years when they are a bit more exposed to the job market.

@A says: “Even if you are a successful industrial physicist, you’ll be aware that the chief legal officer (and, of course, chief financial officer) of most companies makes more than the chief technology officer or chief engineer{snip}”

Exactly! One of my former coworkers (BS in Comp Sci, now with an MBA) works in management for a large local corporation and her bonus this year was more than 4x my salary. But I wouldn’t want her job, or her ulcer.

I just feel worried. I think one can study physics at degree level and change thereafter at masters level.

I have a bachelors in physics, and it is incredibly difficult to find industry employment. I’ve been interviewed by hiring managers only to be told that they don’t believe physics has anything to do with engineering or that anyone with a physics degree can do even close to the work of engineers. I’ve even been told at a shipyard interview where the CEO has a B.S. in physics that physics has nothing to do with anything done at a shipyard. This particular manager proclaimed that he failed physics in college, so he was proof that physics is not important.

I think my experience is important to relay to others because it outlines some of the barriers to being hired after earning a physics degree, at least at the bachelors level. Many hiring managers seem to have a personal bias against physics. They either think of Albert Einstein or their personal negative experiences with a physics class in high school or college. One interviewer went as far as to say that his high school physics teacher sucked, so I must suck as well since I currently teach high school physics.

Why do I want to leave a high school physics teaching position? In my state, Earth Science, Biology, and Chemistry are state required courses with mandatory state tests at the end of the year. Physics is treated as an extra elective with no state test. Therefore a student will not receive credit necessary to graduate by taking physics. Imagine the impact that has on enrollment. I’m told by my administration on a daily basis that I’m an extra and can lose my job at anytime enrollment drops for any reason. This includes kids who drop the class because I actually ask them to do work. Most students realize they don’t need my class for graduation, and they come right out and tell me that they’re not going to do the work. Some have even told me that they’re dropping the class just to try and make me lose my job. So much for STEM.

What I have seen of STEM in my school system? They are only pushing engineering. To make matters worse, my school seems to only be pushing environmental engineering. Even for those students who want to become engineers, they tell the kids that physics is not necessary. This advice is untrue, but it is given anyway. The biology teachers advise the kids that physics is only math word problems. Imagine the effect that has on most kids, especially in a school system where standardized math test scores lag behind other schools in the area.

My administrator sends me mixed messages. First, I’m told that my job is hard to fill because there aren’t enough qualified physics teachers out there. Then, I’m told that I can be fired at any moment due to budget or lack of enrollment. Finally, I’m told that our students aren’t smart enough to study physics because it deals with math. This is despite the fact that I teach 3 types of physics classes. One is mostly conceptual. In another class, I teach the math as we go along, and students finally end up learning why they were supposed to learn things like trigonometry in the first place. It isn’t just my impression that students are finally understanding the math. They actually tell me that they finally understand it, and they go further by asking why their math teachers never applied the math to anything real. To top it all off, our school has nothing in the way of science fair or science olympiad, so I volunteered to start these programs and mentor the students. What did I get stuck with? Organizing the high school prom. Come on, I studied physics in college. Organizing or even attending the high school prom is my version of living in hell.

Some STEM high school. With all of this nonsense in the education field, there is no wonder it is so hard to find someone willing to teach high school physics! What sane person wants to subject themselves to that treatment on a daily basis and not even be paid a living wage?

My experience with the STEM program is that it is just politicians’ efforts at making the American tax payer feel like something is actually being done to improve our education in science, technology, engineering, and math. A lot of the students I’ve come across in my school can’t even tell you what STEM stands for. Some of the teachers in my school don’t even know what all of the letters stand for.

To tie up my story on the job search in industry, I’m going back to school at night to work on my engineering degree so I am employable. I’ve been asked why I didn’t study engineering if I wanted to apply for engineering jobs too often that I realize I need to go back to school and retrain. Unfortunately, I believed what my physics department told all of us that we could actually be employable in industry by studying physics, even if we ended at the bachelors level. I did undergraduate research projects, even a thesis in materials physics that won awards that should have been assigned at the masters level. My take on it now is that the physics department simply needed rear ends in chairs to keep their jobs going. I love physics, but I sincerely regret choosing it as my major in college. Hiring managers tend to believe that I learned nothing transferable to the industrial job world. Unfortunately, those managers with their views, inaccurate as they may be, are the key to being hired in industry.

I too am a recent BA physics grad. I blame it on myself that I don’t have a job, but I can attest to everyone else’s lament. What bothers me is that I have 4 friends that attend USC for Mechanical Engineering, and they say that the classes are the same as what I have taken for my BA, except for fluid dynamics. They would know, because they are in the 3-2 Engineering program. However, I was told by too many companies that I lacked the experience and technical skills needed for engineering, and that physics had nothing to do with engineering. They pointed me towards consulting positions, which then were turned off by my lack of “people skills” (which I beg to differ but it’s hard to prove as a physics grad).

So yes, jobs for BA/BS Physics are grim, and I wish I too went the 3-2 route. I don’t know why engineers are more respected than physicists. I think it should be the other way around. But it all boils down to the root of all evil, i guess. But also, a physicist could easily become an engineer in a small matter of time, and not so much the other way around.

My friend has a Bs in Astrophysics from UCLA and could not do anything with it. I highly admire the people who can do physics. Its a hard subject. He had to rely on his pharmacy tech degree he acquired prior to getting his Physics BS. I don’t know what it is, but, without wanting to offend anyone, physicist tend to be cocky and antisocial, and maybe these hinders their employment opportunities. It may be a biological/genetic thing that leads them to be aloof and even defensive. I’m sorry, that’t the perception that I get but it may be rather jealousy that I can’t be as good as they are in such a mysterious and fascinating topic. All in all, this friend is a good person but I saw him as a waste of intelligence for not being able to find a job in his field. He is now considering or working towards a pharmacist degree.