“First, no one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general “shortages” of scientists and engineers. The RAND Corporation has conducted several studies of this subject; its conclusions go further than my summary above, saying that not only could they not find any evidence of shortages, but that instead the evidence is more suggestive of surpluses.”

Vice President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Michael S. Teitelbaum
before the
Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation
Committee on Science and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC
November 6, 2007

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.

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.

Let us not forget why people are attracted to the field of Physics in the first place. There are some of us (albiet very few) who are naturally instilled with a much deeper curiosity than others. We seek certain universal truths, we spend our entire lives seeking, it is in our nature. Physics is the “root” of all other sciences. The study of Physics can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers. They were seeking a deeper understanding of our world.

This my friends, is what Physics is all about. We who pursue this “purest of all sciences” should not pursue it for profit, but rather to thicken the tome of human knowledge, to help dispel ignorance and to help elevate humanity.

Outsourcing is not possible in the case of e.g lawyers, which is one reason why you’ll see stakeholder organisations in the natural sciences (like the APS) plead for more students to fill their ranks, but not hear it from organisations representing lawyers.

A corollary of outsourcing is that the “invisible hand” others mentioned will not necessarily raise our salaries nor fill magazines with job ads.