Kendra Rand - Abstract for "Careers for Physicist"

Program Coordinator
Society of Physics Students

  Future Physicists Day meeting information

Thinking About Your Future: A Great Time to be a Physicist

The majority of today’s physicists aren’t Einstein look-a-likes bent over notebooks or blackboards. They rarely study the block on the incline plane and most of them don’t spend much time drawing circuit diagrams. A large fraction of physicists are “hidden”, in the sense that they leave or never enter the traditional Ph.D.-to-postdoc-to-professor career path.

Data from the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics and from a survey of members of the national physics honor society, Sigma Pi Sigma, show the vast array of actual career paths taken by physics degree holders. These varied paths lead to many exciting places--from practicing law to medicine, creating atomic clocks to satellite flight software, and from non-profits to Fortune 500s. A physics background is excellent preparation for jobs in a wide variety of sectors and some of the coolest fields imaginable.