Careers in physics

[rockytriton]

Hey everyone, I've been thinking of going back to college for physics. I currently have a bachelors in computer science and work on the industry, though I am starting to hate it. I am wondering what kind of careers I could get with a degree in physics. First off, would I need a Ph.D to do anything really, or would a bachelors or masters do for any decent careers?

[UncleAl]

http://www.aps.org/

American Physical Society

Employment statistics

 

Why would you train to pull at oars when you could be captain of the ship? Bulk education is FOB the lecture hall anyway - walk in, sit down, don't draw attention to yourself. They money you pay is for Official accreditation at the end.

[Buffy]

I'd actually agree with Al here: You can learn lots without the sheepskin, and the real money is in being the boss. You get to make the decisions without necessarily knowing what you're talking about, but its really cool when you do know. A PhD can be a real monkey on your back careerwise...

 

Get an MBA, rule the world....

 

Cheers,

Buffy, M.B.A.

[rockytriton]

heh, sorry I have no interest in getting an MBA or in ruling the world. Just making a good living doing what I like. I currently do that but I'm not liking it so much anymore, not as challenging as it was at first.

 

ok, I looked at that site Al (thanks for the link btw), it seems that most of the positions are for professors, and you need a phd. I've seen a few for 4 year degree holders. I don't see anything about money though, do you think I could make 100k+ in this field? If not I guess I could make the wife get a job! :lol:

[Dark Mind]

I'd like to learn more as well. I'm going to major in Physics once I go to college and I was also interested in where it could lead :lol:.

[Erasmus00]

I'd like to learn more as well. I'm going to major in Physics once I go to college and I was also interested in where it could lead :lol:.

 

As someone who recently came out of undergrad with a physics degree, I can say there are lots of paths open. Financial companies heavily recruit any technical major, as it demonstrates problem solving and numerical abilities. Video game companies actively recruit physics majors with programming skills because for some reason realistic physics seems to be all the rage right now. One of my best friends is working for a defense contractor, and another is programming satellites.

-Will

[Qfwfq]

I currently do that but I'm not liking it so much anymore, not as challenging as it was at first.

You can sure say that again, about sw development.

 

Right now I'm participating in a very chimpanzee job, converting bunches of old VB6 management projects to work on Oracle instead of Sybase. And guess Rocky what I have a degree in, from a well esteemed university. :lol:

[Dark Mind]

I'll be sure to choose my jobs wisely after college :lol:.

[rockytriton]

You can sure say that again, about sw development.

 

Right now I'm participating in a very chimpanzee job, converting bunches of old VB6 management projects to work on Oracle instead of Sybase. And guess Rocky what I have a degree in, from a well esteemed university. :lol:

 

Yea I did the same sort of contract a few months ago. Convert a system from Mainframe with DB2 using PL/I source code to AIX with Oracle using C source code (not even c++, just plain old C).

[Qfwfq]

At least you were writing in C, and that must have been the brunt of it!

 

Here we are making the minimum essential changes on badly developed VB6 code, the contract is weighed by number of queries and we have to execute them all which is the trickiest part for some of them that, after years of haphazard sw maintenance, are unreachable in normal use. That's what I'm on at the moment. If we trace through procedure calls and find that it's trivially uncalled we rem it out.... wheeee! Otherwise we have to force execution in debug mode, coping with bad data values and whatever, hammering away...

 

I've just hit an insert that gives a not enough values message, table must have been altered and I'll have to sort it out. Even in normal execution I was getting inserted value too large for column, I'm supposed to check how it goes on Sybase, each of these programs has dozens of nuissances to it...

 

Ugghgh! :shrug: ;) ;) ;)

[Qfwfq]

I'll be sure to choose my jobs wisely after college

When you can choose!!!

 

I can only keep hoping for better times to come, but people aren't so optimistic lately! BTW, I'm glad you've changed your avatar back! :shrug:

[rockytriton]

At least you were writing in C, and that must have been the brunt of it!

 

Yea, but I know C like the back of my hand, it's easy to me. I never saw PL/I code before that contract though. Also, finding good documentation on PL/I is next to impossible. To add insult to injury, we were not able to run any of the old code to see results, the input to the programs was the output from running other programs, so we weren't able to do real unit testing to make sure the things would actually work. Luckily, they did. It just sucks working with a bunch of people who probably got their degrees in accounting and are working in IT. These people gave huge estimates because they said the code was very complex because it used linked lists.

[Buffy]

...I never saw PL/I code before that contract though. Also, finding good documentation on PL/I is next to impossible....

My favorite description of PL/I from one of my professors: "PL/I is like a gigantic Swiss Army Knife: its got a tool for everything, but by the time you've found the one you want, you've cut yourself...."

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Qfwfq]

Last summer I did some bits of maintenance on a nightly batch that churned data from accounting, representing payment receipts that had to automatically close the right office procedings in the right cases, and we couldn't simulate this data and even other data wasn't being updated on the test DB. Sometimes I just couldn't run a full test except by checking production data the mornings after release.

 

One bad I had to fix up was because of a confusion due to a value being '-' in one table when it was null on others, it had escaped notice. As I was pondering over the bad cases extracted with a test query, the main user phoned because one of these cases had already been spotted casually.

It just sucks working with a bunch of people who probably got their degrees in accounting and are working in IT.

Just the kind of thing that happens to us, with the main customer here.