Advice for Physics Students
John J. Schaub
Jan 27 , 2023
Recently I got an invite to return to my alma mater Simon Fraser University and deliver a short talk to undergraduate Physics students. My ego forces me to believe that they are inviting me back as a successful professional who is going to provide all sorts of valuable wisdom but the reality is the faculty was probably trying to figure out how to get across to students how badly your life will turn out if you do not apply yourself in Statistical Mechanics and my name came up. Either way I am excited to do the talk and wrote this post as a summary of the points covered.
Point one, be careful who you take advice from. People love to give advice but what people do no understand is that advice is like a route on a map. If you asked someone 'how did you get to where you are?' the route you get is going to vary depending on where they started and what travel options they had. Trying to follow the same route if you are starting from somewhere else or travelling a different way is not likely to work. And this completely ignoring the fact that you might not even be interested in arriving where they are. The vast majority of advice givers including myself are oblivious to this fact and will happily offer up all sorts of questionable suggestions with no notion that the listener might be coming from a completely different place and circumstance. So as someone getting advice make sure you get a good sense of who is giving the advice and how their personal background and goals might differ from your own and then adjust or ignore as you see fit.
To give you a sense of my background I was in many ways a stereotypical Physics student aka the rather bright eldest son of a poor family so there is probably a decent bit of overlap in my background with many in the class. There are a few places however where I differ from the typical and you should take these into account when considering anything I say. The first major difference is my academic background was vastly different from most. I exited high school in grade 10, a long story, before returning to graduate then enrolling at BCIT to complete a Robotics diploma. I then worked for a few years as an electronics technician before returning to university via the Langara to SFU route. This meant that by the time I was in my third year at SFU I was 24 and in a terrific hurry to graduate. In terms of personality I am very much a generalist while many Physics students tend to be comfortable with specialization. I am also very much a pragmatist rather than a perfectionist which sets me apart from the typical Physics student. You should be very careful in considering how these differences in personality might impact outcomes because the difference between appropriate career choices for specialists and generalists in particular is extreme. The final major difference which advice givers are often reticent to admit is that my experience is rather out of date. I graduated from SFU in 2003 at that time Google was still a startup and the term Data Science was not yet in vogue. The world is vastly different today then it was when I was sitting in a classroom and I am by no means smart enough to know exactly how that is going to translate. Suffice to say you should take anything I or any other advice giver tells you with a grain of salt.
Point two, knowing yourself is key. Carrying on from the previous point it is absolutely key that you understand your strengths, weaknesses and goals before making any grand life plans. I will make a particular note here about the human tendency to compare themselves to their immediate peer group and how far astray that can lead you. Unless you are an absolute savant your assessment of your personality and skillset is going to be entirely skewed by the fact that you are operating in one of the most streamed academic environments in existence. The reality is the typical Physics cohort makes Electrical Engineering look normal in comparison so measuring yourself against your peers in this class is not going to serve you well if you want a career outside academia and perhaps the narrow confines of more theoretical data science (which is so populated by Physics grads that it might as well be Physics).
A corollary here is the importance of writing down your goals. Written goal lists serve three critical purposes. First the process of writing a list forces you to think about what you actually want to accomplish. There is a very real possibility that you will ask some important questions at this stage. Second writing a list invites you to consider the big goals and the subgoals you need to accomplish to get there. That is a list of goals can be pretty quickly turned into something that looks like a plan and plans are critical. And finally a written list holds you accountable if nothing gets done. A quick once a quarter scan through your list of life goals with provide a pretty obvious indicator if you are not making progress.
Point three, people and circumstances change. Trust me on this some of the things that seem important to you at 22 are not going to be relevant by 32. This point is an absolute, you can ignore everything I said previously about different people having different experiences. Everyone's goals change. In fact if you arrive at 32 with the exact same interests and goals as you had at 22 I would suggest that is a warning sign that something is seriously wrong. Nothing about this fact should be taken as an excuse not to make a plan and work towards it but if you find yourself at 28 think 'gee that goal I had at 22 is not so important to me anymore' just drop it and move on to something more interesting.
With respect to circumstances you would be wise to consider how changing world circumstances might effect you personally and impact any plans you make. I have recently written about the coming changes due to AI and while I might be wrong about the specifics changes will occur I am fairly confident that the impact of AI would make following my exact career path inadvisable at best for a new graduate. Other major changes that you should keep in mind are climate change, demographic decline, advancing urbanization and geopolitical changes due to changing energy sources. There are no doubt some major items missing from that list my best advice here is to read history as these things tend to follow fairly similar patterns and do your best to remain flexible and adaptable.
The sad corollary here is that your opportunities in life are often time and circumstance dependant and as you age and the world changes your options will change even if your goals don't. As an obvious example if your goal was to become an elite athlete you had better be well on your way at this point. So when you are looking at your list of goals it is wise to consider if a given goal has a best before date on it and prioritize doing it sooner rather than later. If for example you want to climb Kilimanjaro doing so in your early 20's is way easier then your 40's. To be clear it still doable at 40 but your knees will ache for weeks afterward.
Point four, you need to know what your options are. Carrying on from the previous point it is almost certain that you will have the experience of learning something was an option long after it is no longer an option. This will make you sad. So to avoid being sad you should endeavor in life to have as developed an opportunity awareness as possible and learn as much as you can about what other people are doing because a lot the really interesting things are going to be happening at the periphery of your network. This piece of advice is especially critical for students in Physics because as I said previously the Physics undergrad is incredibly streamed and the likelihood of you discovering unique ideas or opportunities inside your program is pretty slim. Elective courses are the undergrad lifehack to get outside your bubble and I would go so far as to suggest you take them almost at random. I can almost promise that by doing so you will discover life long interests that you would never have otherwise encountered for me it was film. You are also likely to reenforce some of your preconceived notions such as the fact the Social Sciences are lacking the rigor of Astrology and that is fine as well, at least you can backup your opinions with experience. The other undergrad lifehack is internships. You absolutely must do at least a couple internships during your undergrad. Do not listen to anyone who says internships are optional they are mandatory especially in a program like Physics. Finally I am a huge proponent of random networking services like Lunchclub which introduce you to people that you would essentially never meet in your daily life and in my experience these meetings are as valuable or even more so then the sort of deliberate networking you would do typically.
Point five, so what are the options? Time to get in the weeds. With a Physics degree you really have three options which will turn into multiple possible career paths after about five years.
Path one is the pure academic route. That is get very good grades and move on to a prestigious university for your PhD. This is not the route I took and I cannot say I would recommend it but it is absolutely an option. The thing to be aware of is that the folks who go this route often decide after five or ten years that academia is not for them and choose to become Data Scientists so it is not like you are absolutely stuck. Quite the contrary a PhD in Physics with a few years in industry as a Data Scientist is a fantastic job by any objective standard.
The second major path is the one I took which was Data Analyst or Jr. Developer to whatever. The thing to keep in mind on this route is that unless you have connections or some absolutely next level resume writing skills a Physics degree on its own is not going to get you a job doing much interesting. In my case my first job as a Data Analyst came far more because of my BCIT diploma than my SFU degree. With a couple of years of experience I was able to leverage my SFU degree into a proper Data Analyst job at a tech company and really start my career. As an aside I know of multiple Physics grads who have ended up taking a BCIT program post grad as a way to find a job. Rather then doing that I think it is more effecient to just minor in Comp Sci and do a couple of internships. To be clear once you have your first real job or two on the resume essentially no one asks about your undergrad anymore so it is very much a check box. One note is that if you are going to do corporate jobs as I did for much of my career a post graduate degree of some sort is generally expected to move to more senior roles. MBAs are the obvious route but I would strongly advise against them. The reality is MBA degrees are considered cashcows for universities and are generally terrible. I was actually accepted to the SFU MBA program and dropped out after a couple of classes despite my employer being willing to pay for it, the program was that bad. Unless you are accepted to a global top ten program and your employer is paying for at least half of it do not bother with an MBA. For my part I did an M.Sc. at a third tier university while working with my employer paying nearly 100% and would highly recommend that approach. I got the checkbox, zero debt and was able to get it done in a few years early in my career.
Path three is the startup founder route. You need to go into this one with eyes wide open as survivorship bias is a real issue here. Most startups fail and the failure rate for startups founded by students directly out of an undergrad is solidly higher than average. That said this route is an option and of the three is the highest risk, most interesting and potentially most rewarding path. Rather than go this route if you are interested I would suggest route two for at least a few years to get some experience and get yourself in a solid place financially. Another point on this path is that if your intention is to start your own company the only reason to complete an undergrad is as a fallback employment option and as previously discussed Physics is not the right degree for that, you would be better served switching to computer science or some flavour of engineering if you are getting an undergrad as a pure safety option.
Point six, so how do you build a successful career? You have lasted through the intro now we can get to the good stuff. As a Physics undergrad you have probably seen data indicating that despite having fairly dismal career prospects upon graduation by their mid 40's Physics grads are earning among the highest salaries of any undergrad. Do not take the rest of this discussion as questioning the value training in first principles thinking or rigorous problem solving as both are fantastically valuable but I would suggest that a lot of outcomes from a Physics degree are actually the result of selection bias rather than pedagogy. I am not the first person to point this out and some of the others have went to the extreme of actually collecting data which clearly indicates that students accepted to highly selective programs achieve similar outcomes wither they actually attend the program or not.
To understand what is going on and what it means for you consider the five factors that are going to impact career success: Intelligence, Work Ethic, Perseverance, Connections and Luck. The thing is Physics and frankly all the university programs that have solid career outcomes select strongly for multiple of these criteria. There is a ton of objective data on intelligence and Physics undergrads are absolute outliers ranking as the highest of any undergrad cohort. Work Ethic is harder to measure but I think it can be accepted as a given that no one goes into Physics or Math or Engineering for that matter thinking it will be easy. Perseverance is similarly hard to measure but Physics like Math is Sisyphean and will absolutely humble even the most capable, no one gets to the end of a Physics degree without perseverance.
Now we have arrived at the two X factor success criteria. These are the ones where your degree and personal attributes are unlikely to be of much help. It is these two criteria that you should focus your efforts to maximize potential career outcomes. Let's get Luck out of the way first. Luck matters a lot. You also cannot really impact luck and you need to accept that but you would be wise to consider the fact that luck is often a matter of putting yourself in a position to be lucky. Applying for scholarships that you probably aren't qualified for, reaching out to mentors that are likely to ignore you ect. Luck as far as you can control it is a pure numbers game and taking a thousand 1000:1 shots has a real chance of paying off and outcomes in life tend to be cumulative. Looked at this way luck can be reframed as perseverance aka are you willing to continue failing long enough for the stars to align in your favor.
Next up we have connections or network and this is the one that you are likely going to need to spend some real effort on. The fact is the stereotype of the socially awkward Physics student exists for a reason and nothing in your undergrad work is going to help you address this weakness. I have covered networking in a previous post on Early Career Tips for Product Managers which might be of value but specifically for Physics students I would highly recommend you join at least a few of the extracurricular clubs ideally ones populated by non Physics students. Rocket club was my go to networking event as an undergrad but you would be well served to broaden your horizons a bit. Beyond that you are going to want to spend some real effort on online networking via LinkedIn. This advice applies less to those attempting a pure academic path way but for any other route a solid online presence is unfortunately essential. The simple reality in building any career in any sector is that who you know or more importantly who knows you will make all the difference as you advance.
I hope this had some value, I also published a reading list for undergrad business students a while ago that might be of interest as well. As always if you have any questions do not hesitate to reach out.