Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

physicstoday.scitation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 169 posts

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#101

Post by thatoneuser »

oneepic wrote: post #41

I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US. Just be careful, I guess, and get plenty of advice from real people who took that path (successfully or not). Oh, and a bachelor's in engineering physics seems to lead to nothing as well. Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as the…

I have a masters in physics and know people who do to with different results. One thing you gotta realize is physicists tend to be very smart people and often enough "lazy". Or I should say - don't like putting on a suit for a 9-5.

They're different people. And a lot of then value living their lives over slaving away and are OK with that.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#102

Post by hooloovoo_zoo »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #99
oneepic wrote: post #41

I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US. Just be careful, I guess, and get plenty of advice from real people who took that path (successfully or not). Oh, and a bachelor's in engineering physics seems to lead to nothing as well. Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as the…

That hasn’t been my experience. I have M.S. in physics at a shitty school and went into industry. (I didn’t fail anything, and actually had a 4.0 gpa, just didn’t want to spend more time in school). Eventually switched from material science to data science. Currently an ML research scientist at AWS. It’s been a fun journey. No one gave a shit about what I did or didn’t do in college. It might matter to HR people, whi…

Any tips for getting into Amazon's research arm? I'm in the market, as it were.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#103

Post by joshvm »

muvek wrote: post #27

I have an MS in physics and I disagree with this. If you want opened doors, go for software engineering. You have so many things you can do with software, seriously. I have finished my master's in November, and I have been looking for a job. I have not been very lucky so far. I am looking for data-science related stuff. If you have any suggestions, please, I am all ears. (I am in Europe) There was a time when, if you…

> If you have any suggestions, please, I am all ears. (I am in Europe)

What was your MS program like (research/taught/etc)? Happy to give some advice, but a bit more background would be useful.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#104

Post by selimthegrim »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #99
oneepic wrote: post #41

I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US. Just be careful, I guess, and get plenty of advice from real people who took that path (successfully or not). Oh, and a bachelor's in engineering physics seems to lead to nothing as well. Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as the…

That hasn’t been my experience. I have M.S. in physics at a shitty school and went into industry. (I didn’t fail anything, and actually had a 4.0 gpa, just didn’t want to spend more time in school). Eventually switched from material science to data science. Currently an ML research scientist at AWS. It’s been a fun journey. No one gave a shit about what I did or didn’t do in college. It might matter to HR people, whi…

Would be interested to hear what you do and don’t like about your job and what skills you learned from your degree

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#105

Post by ErotemeObelus »

oneepic wrote: post #41

I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US. Just be careful, I guess, and get plenty of advice from real people who took that path (successfully or not). Oh, and a bachelor's in engineering physics seems to lead to nothing as well. Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as the…

> I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US.

Students who do a Master's before going on to Ph.D. are usually more competent and more useful to the university. This is FUD created by graduate students to prevent competition.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#106

Post by SantalBlush »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #77
SantalBlush wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your mind, do you think a physics degree or a statistics degree is better suited to doing data analysis, and why?

> do you think a physics degree or a statistics degree is better suited to doing data analysis, and why? For finance, physics 100%. (The more experimental, the better.) When you're forced to map your theories to reality, and deal with the divergence, you develop an intuition for a certain set of problems. Those problems recur in commercial data science.

I'm not sure how this speaks to the superiority of physics over stats in this regard.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#107

Post by learc83 »

singingfish wrote: post #84
sidlls wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't overconfidence. The academic material these individuals study is directly and specifically related to the work of a data scientist. Statistical analysis is built in to any reasonably good physics curriculum starting with undergrad lab courses and proceeding through statistical mechanics, quantum physics and beyond.

I tend to agree. If I have a bunch of applicants for a programming job, given the choice between a similarly capable computer science graduate, or a natural sciences graduate (e.g. physics, chem, bio, oddly psychology - except I'm biased I have qualifications in the last two) then I'm likely to pick the non CS qualification applicant because of the breadth of experience, and the implicit recognition that the computer…

That really depends on what you mean by "similarly capable."

If we're talking a psych grad who taught themselves the equivalent of a CS degree, then sure. That's usually not the case though. Non CS grads tend to never learn the boring parts.

As someone who worked professionally for almost a decade before getting my CS degree, what I learned during my degree has made a huge difference. There were so many gaps in my knowledge that I didn't know I had.

I've also hired plenty of CS grads, and non CS grads, and in my experience, the CS grads tend to outperform the rest all else being equal.

Are you sure that you're not seeing selection bias here? Non CS majors tend to be career changers (or they've had time to finish and degree and learn CS) and are therefore older on average.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#108

Post by SpaceRaccoon »

oneepic wrote: post #41

I've also heard the opposite, that it leads to absolutely nothing and you are kind of treated like a PhD dropout, at least in the US. Just be careful, I guess, and get plenty of advice from real people who took that path (successfully or not). Oh, and a bachelor's in engineering physics seems to lead to nothing as well. Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as the…

>Have had quite a few friends go to career fairs and every company rep lost interest as soon as they heard the words "engineering physics".

It's true, but I'm glad it happened this way. I don't want to work at any company that doesn't recognize the value of this degree. I'm a SWE in a FAANG now, and I think I do much more interesting work than if I had just joined a company looking for a CS grad. And to be clear, I only have a Ba.

But, advice to other EngPhys grads looking for jobs or internships: don't mention the Engineering Physics degree until you've got the rep interested in you (by talking about experience, etc) or frame it in a different way. For example, my EngPhys specialization was computing, so I would talk about that first when I was at career fairs.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#109

Post by analog31 »

rongenre wrote: post #19
plazmaphyujin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say yes. Pursue physics only because you love it. Unless you want to go into Defense the job prospects are terrible. However, learning physics teaches you how to learn anything and how to do it fast. This turns out to be an invaluable skill for programming, so physicists make great programmers. You just have to earn it on top of all the physics.

Yeah it's very much like that with my math degree. Demonstrated ability to torture myself with difficult concepts.

I mentioned in another thread, if you can get good at something that other people hate, you won't be unemployed. Although, it might take longer to find a job if it's not a fungible skill.

But the secret is, it's not torture. For most people, it's prohibitively difficult to reach the expert level in something that we're not inclined to enjoy.

Re: A physics master’s degree opens doors to myriad careers

#110

Post by repsilat »

elamje wrote: post #95

This should be nuanced with the fact that a Master's degree in the US is much different than Europe. Typically, in Europe, STEM fields do a "Masters" but it's really equivalent to junior and senior level coursework in the US. This was the case for me as an exchange CS student in Sweden at KTH, and it seemed that all of my Euro friends that were getting masters in their respective country just treat a Masters in STEM…

For a countervailing viewpoint, I got a Masters in CS from Georgia Tech, and it was just coursework at the level of my 3rd and 4th years of undergrad in New Zealand. Bit of a let-down.
Post reply on HN