Expert: Daniel Mazur - 2/9/2007

Question
hi,
my name is salem and am 16 gd. lev. 11.  i will be pleased to take your valuble time to ask you what is the best career related to physics and is it highly demanded career?. second what do you do and why did you choose that career?  

thanks  

Answer
Hello Salem,

thank you for asking, I will try to give you fair answers.

As you probably have expected, the "best" career is different for different sort of people, even among physicists themselves. Some go for research and development in the industry with high salaries and a large number of short- to medium-term projects. Some enjoy teaching, so they become university professors, where they can find the right balance between teaching duties and research. Yet others would be most interested in working in a (small) team, with a few medium- to long-term projects, and in the struggle for understanding the workings of nature. Those would find the best careers as researchers working in a national laboratory paid from some government grant. What the best is, depends strongly on each individual, what he/she likes, enjoys,...

Physicists are generally in a moderate demand, there are always positions open. The less encouraging may be that as you leave a university with a degree, you already have some specialization and for a every given specialization, the number of openings may be, at that moment, quite low. Or, if you wish, there will ALWAYS be some job opening for a physicist somewhere, in every country, for almost any specialization (theorists have the toughest time to find jobs I am told). But if you're seeking a famous place to work at, or a big paycheck etc.,...

<sigh>

... well, then you really have to be competent, a hard-worker, and you need to be very good also in areas other than physics/science. I mean, you must be skilled to do computer programming, as an experimentalist you need to be able to do in-door construction work, understand electricity and electronics for building and maintenance of equipment,... You need to manage your time well, be able to manage a team of people, be literate (scientists write articles about their discoveries), and finally be inventive and adaptive. The last thing is not taught at schools, but it's an important by-product of science education. To sum up, physicists are in a good demand, they get decent salaries, but to make a good career out of it, one needs to be quite a "renaissance man", i.e. good at pretty much everything.

My specialization is the experimental materials science, I investigate novel materials with interesting magnetic and/or electronic properties. I am currently at the stage, when I received my Ph.D. in Physics and am seeking a good job. I intend to either stay in pure science (at some research institute or national lab) or science together with teaching (a university), because I enjoy teaching and tutoring. I chose this career because since high school I wanted to "know everything about nature" and physics is the most basic natural science. I loved the subject then, I liked problem-solving, and I love it still - especially the part of "playing" with some hi-tech "toys", seeing, what they can do and thinking-up, how I can use it for some research benefit. What really becomes of my career, that shall be decided in the next few weeks or months...

I think I gave you a decent sketch of what career-physics is about. Use it well:-)

Cheers,
Daniel