Spotlight

More Physics Ph.D.'s Exit the Academy for Jobs in Industry

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Moving Up Mind the Gap How your cover letter can keep your presidential candidacy alive, or kill it. P&T Confidential Facebooking Your Way Out of Tenure How can you minimize the possibility that your blog or Facebook page might hurt your career? On Course Nudging Higher Education A professor looks for small changes he can make to move students toward making smarter choices. Career News No Jacket Required A scholar's study of her own students suggests that while a professor's clothing might affect initial impressions, it doesn't make a difference in the long run. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Gabriela Montell

Five years ago, Ushma Kriplani was about to receive her Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, but when she explored the job market, she couldn't get a single interview. This year, she's had three job offers in industry and one for a postdoctoral position at a university.

What's changed? The economy and the explosive growth of high-tech industry. The demand for workers with technical and computational skills has transformed even a competitive field like physics.

At this April's meeting of the American Physical Society in Long Beach, Calif., there were more than twice as many job openings in industry as job seekers. Raytheon Company, for example, was seeking physicists for jobs in software development, computing, and signal processing. Lynntech Inc., a systems, software-development and electronic-design company, was also recruiting physicists at the conference.

"I'm astounded by how many opportunities there are out there," says Ms. Kriplani, who hasn't yet decided which offer to accept. "It was as easy as pie to get interviewed on campus by all sorts of companies, and many of them called me back. Five years ago a physics Ph.D. was one of the worst degrees to have if you wanted a job in industry. This year companies are quite happy that my résumé says 'Ph.D. in physics.'"

Many physics Ph.D.'s are having similar good fortune in the private sector. "Right now there seems to be a feeding frenzy for people with any kind of scientific training, and physicists certainly qualify, so they're doing well," says Roman Czujko, who, as manager of the statistics division of the American Institute of Physics, follows the job market closely.

Melissa Midzor, a Ph.D. candidate in condensed-matter physics at Caltech, already has a job lined up for next year with McKinsey and Company -- a management-consulting company that actively recruits science Ph.D.'s. (See an article from The Chronicle on management consulting, November 12, 1999.)

So does Frederick Jenet, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at Caltech. Next January, he'll put his data-analysis and signal-processing skills to work mapping oil fields for Schlumberger-Doll Research. In fact, "only two out of the 20 or so people in my graduating class are actually planning to stay in physics," says Mr. Jenet.

What's happening at Caltech is mirrored elsewhere. Preliminary results of the physics institute's 1999 Initial Employment Report showed that 70 percent of the new doctoral-degree recipients who took permanent jobs were working at private companies, up from about 40 percent to 50 percent a decade ago.

Specializations such as optical, biological, computational, and condensed-matter physics are hot, according to those in the field and leading journals such as Physics Today.

For instance, at this year's Optical Fiber Communications conference, there were an unprecedented 11 positions for every job candidate registered at the meeting. Meanwhile, the revolutions in computer design and microchip development continue to fuel the demand for condensed-matter physicists.

In one sense, this is not new: Physicists have always gone into industry. Historically only about a third of physics Ph.D.'s have ended up in academe, says David Campbell, chairman of the physics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.What's different is the number of Ph.D.'s seeking jobs in consulting and finance. While those areas have traditionally been a bastion for M.B.A.'s, the recent dot-com goldrush has opened new doorways for Ph.D.'s -- especially for those with scientific backgrounds.

Jolie Cizewski, associate director of the graduate program in physics and astronomy at Rutgers University at Piscataway, estimates that more than a third of her recent doctoral graduates have taken jobs in consulting or on Wall Street. Other university physics departments report a similar trend.

More academic institutions are hiring physicists, too. This year, for example, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will hire four faculty members and Caltech will hire 5 1/2 faculty members (one will be split among several academic departments). Rutgers-Piscataway hired two physicists this spring and plans to hire two more in the fall. The heads of the physics departments at the University of Arizona and Iowa State University say they are also hiring.

However, with average starting salaries in industry greatly outpacing those in academe, more physics Ph.D.'s are heeding the siren call of the private sector. And while the academic job market has improved slightly, it's still not a growth industry. Postdoctoral positions are pretty easy to come by, but there's still intense competition for professorial positions.

For that reason, an increasing number of Ph.D.'s are leaving their postdocs early to take jobs in the private sector. Mr. Campbell of Urbana-Champaign says that one of his postdocs left to take a job at NationsBank, which is now Bank of America. Other administrators note that some of their graduates are skipping postdocs altogether.

Ms. Kriplani says she isn't surprised by this trend. "I think the people who have been postdocs for a while are thinking, 'Why are we bothering to do this when we could easily get a job in industry and make more money doing it, and we could, to some degree, choose where we want to live?' This is a time in our economy when physicists have a choice, and a lot of them are choosing to move out of academia."