job offers during physics PhD

[opelton]

Hey physics grad students,

How common is it for companies to throw finance/business offers to physics PhD students at your school? (either asking you to leave, or for after you finish) And what kind of offers are they? (job, pay, etc)

[TakeruK]

I don't know enough to give a number like "X percent of students get such an offer". But, it's certainly not rare. Financial companies definitely like to recruit from Physics PhDs. However, from my limited anecdotal information, usually the student has to do something first to initiate, like go to a career fair, attend a recruiting event on campus, respond to a call for interest etc. I'm not in a Physics department right now, but both in my past Physics departments and in my current earth science department, we will sometimes see an email come from our department admins sending out a ad/recruitment call for companies that want to recruit science PhDs. I know many PhDs in my department that go this route, and it helps a lot to let people know that you are interested.

[TakeruK]

Oh, and as for what kind of offer, in many cases, you do a summer internship first before you get a permanent job. One student I know defended early because they wanted to pursue this career path and spent the summer after their defense on the internship. Others might do something like take a leave of absence from school for a summer to do an internship. Some people do get full/permanent jobs directly after graduation too though, so you don't always have to intern first. 

Most people will finish their PhD first though, especially since having a PhD is what makes the company interested in you in the first place. You have to keep in mind that the "real world" job cycle moves a lot faster than academia---once you finalize a contract, they often want you to start in a couple of weeks! My friends who went this route often pull together a very last minute thesis and defense so that time period is quite stressful. However, the contract negotiation stage can take several months for you to work out things like salary, benefits, etc. (depending on what kind of position it is) so that's about the same time to really push yourself to get to a stage where you can defend on a few weeks notice.

[opelton]

Thanks TakeruK for the reply, it was helpful. Hmmm.. I need to think through what I want to do in life. I love physics, but a career in research seems like high stress low reward to me at the moment. 

[TakeruK]

2 hours ago, opelton said:

Thanks TakeruK for the reply, it was helpful. Hmmm.. I need to think through what I want to do in life. I love physics, but a career in research seems like high stress low reward to me at the moment. 

Definitely good things to think about. I've attended several recruiting events by consulting firms and financial firms on campus now. And to be honest, I personally find many of these positions to also be situations where the stress is not worth the reward. I think my school has a reputation for students who work a lot of hours and want to work a lot of hours, so perhaps this was their target audience.

For example, I was really interested in a consulting firm called Exponent. I went to their recruiting event and the description of the work was really cool. Basically doing physics/engineering problems to solve puzzles/answer questions about how products fail. But weirdly, the recruiters (including alumni from my school) were spinning things like "Travel almost every week" and "work 60 hours per week on really cool projects" as positive things. I love the opportunity to travel in academia but I would find being away from my home an average of 2-4 days per week even more stressful than the workload I have now! Sure, the starting pay is great, at about $100k/year, it's 50% more than the best postdoctoral fellowships, but if I'm going to leave academia, I'm looking for ways to reduce stress, not increase it. I feel like the only difference between a job like that and a prize fellowship postdoc is the $35k/year in exchange for being away from home almost 40% of the time. Not worth it for me, but I know there are others that would love this.

I'm applying to postdocs this year but I'm open to non-academic positions in the future. I don't think every firm is going to be like Exponent---I'll be looking for something that is more like a 9-5 and travel every 2 month at most. I know there are others on this forum that have gone to non-academic careers so maybe they will pop in. To be honest, I have not yet seriously looked into non-academic careers because I think I have a good shot at academic positions I'm interested in. But we'll see how my job search goes in a few months

[opelton]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah, that Expotent job sounds like a cool job in principal, but there's no way I would agree to those hours either! Sounds like you might have a solid path ahead of you in academia, best of luck

For me, I think I'm going to start out with a PhD in physics, mainly because I still feel hungry to learn more. I'll re-evaluate how I feel after a year or two.