A few days ago I was contacted by the physics school of my former college to give a speech about my role in the private sector as a physics graduate, for which I feel thankful and happy because of the opportunity to contribute to others on the same path I was a few years ago.

I began my physics major in 2010. A time featured by a culture strongly biased towards two main 2 career paths: 1) work as a college professor right after getting a bachelor’s degree while simultaneously doing a masters, eventually a PhD as well, or 2) go to another country to study all the way up to PhD and return to Costa Rica as a college professor and researcher. Most other possible professions for a physicist were, on average, unknown. Research and teaching were the default perspective for a job and most of us were satisfied about it. We wanted to make complex research in topics that would change the world and inspire future generations.

Chances are that most people chose a major like physics because of a love for the science and an intrinsic passion for discovering. As freshmen we dream about the unknown places of the universe, or the fundamental particles, the world of high energy and speed, a plasma engine that will put the next generation of ships into space one day, the quantum computing revolution in the world of information, or simply the joy of sitting down with pen and paper to create theoretical knowledge. There are many situations that make a scientist dream, and the path to many is to study a fundamental science.

“I chose physics for the high salaries”

– No one ever

But before moving on with this post, I want to share a though with any physics student:

What got you into science is a part of you, that curiosity and passion is part of who you are and you are the only master over it. No matter how hard, unfair, or far from ideal your career could have been, nor any non-linear raise of complexity , nor the overwhelming load that is constantly testing your mental and emotional limits, and neither any situation that made you feel not smart or skilled enough. It’s not the educational system what makes you be who you are. Regardless of what you don’t control, everything you’ve done so far and the features that make who you are have the potential to help you build an amazing career. Go claim it.

Completing the picture

Continuing that, unconsciously biased, perspective of thinking about teaching/researching as the only career choice, let me tell you about the Blind Men and the Elephant mental model.

A group of blind people are touching an elephant. One feels a snake, other a wall, another a rope and so on. If you group them all on the side of the elephant they’ll all feel a wall. They’re all locally biased to a single part of the elephant just as my generation, alongside the bulk population of Costa Rica, did when they considered that physicists only serve the purpose of teaching/researching. A stereotype that was enforced by the fact that most physicist were indeed working as professors at the time.

This perspective underestimates what physicists are capable of doing and helped created an environment which made us struggle to find a job in the private sector, as well as prevented recruiters from hiring certain people capable of providing value to their companies.

Physicist have superpowers, a set of rare and valuable skills relevant in the private sector, let me tell you about them:

Physics develops skills valuable to a company

It’s easy to focus on what seems most obvious. Numbers, analytical solutions, mathematical models, lots of calculations, etc. however, those obvious skills rely on having another, parallel, set of skills that allow students to handle the demands needed to engage in topics as complex as quantum mechanics, electromagnetism or relativity.

Undergraduates spend between 4 to 7 years solving problems that demand:

• Very clear problem definition: I consider this as a critical skill for any company. Real life problems are hard to scope and requirements can easily be ignored, unprecise or biased. Failing in this step is expensive to any resource that a company has, like money, time and work.
• A keen eye for edge cases: Edge cases appear everywhere and are common to be ignored, but being able to predict key edge cases will allow to solve problems from early stages of a project giving room to tackle issues before they get too complicated or expensive.
• Quickness to develop creative solutions: In physics you’re literally trained, on a regular basis, to create a new solutions to previously unknown problems. Learning to develop not only one but many approaches to chose the most optimal according to the case.
• Ambiguity handling and tolerance to complexity: Topics in a physics major scale in complexity as the career advances, rudely. It’s also frequent that the books or teacher’s explanations fall short, so students learn to understand and apply concepts with a high level of tolerance for complexity and capacity to remove ambiguity. These are both valuable skills in the industry that many people don’t feel comfortable with.
• Quickness to master complex topics in short time: In relation to the previous topic. In physics subjects go fast, no matter if it is two-dimensional vector addition or rigid body rotations. Understanding the topics on time becomes a valuable skill as well.
• Mathematical and physics skills: Maths and physics are the elephant in the room here, however, to master mathematics is helpful in almost any career, they are prevalent in all fields in one way or another.

This set of skills serve as a base. Over this it is possible to add a filed of specialization, like management, engineering, finances, music, arts, software development, data science, etc. Fill it with whatever profession you want, these skills will raise the value of the professional you have at the end.

The most famous example to mention, love it or hate it, is Elon Musk. Here are a few more of examples from the APS of physicists outside the stereotype.

I personally know software developers, data scientists, program managers, process engineers and an experimental physics PhD who has been in VP positions in big tech since a long time ago.

A few tips for physicists looking for a job outside the academy

Getting an entry level job could be a long, difficult and frustrating process. There isn’t a hack or a formula to guarantee a quick success, but there are a few tips to make your applications more attractive to companies:

Take the time to write a good resume

You resume is your entry point to apply for a job, you don’t want it to work against you. Remember you are a scientist, and scientists research, so research on how to do a good resume. There are many online resources to learn about it, make it your homework.

I’ll mention the topics that I find the most important:

• Be selective, less is more: Be concise, clear and relevant on what fills the page
• The most relevant goes first: Begin with what the recruiter is looking for. What skills make you the right fit? What success stories show you are a good choice for the role? What key requirements you have from the job description?
• Keep it simple and readable for humans and machines: You want to show it to your mom and find she got the main points quick and easy, and you want to avoid tables, images or other features that filtering software can’t read.
• Be specific to the position that you are applying: A lot of data analysis certifications are not the best material to fill a resume for a frontend developer role.

Avoid:

• More than 2 pages: A 10-pager is invitation to take your resume to the trash bin.
• Long list of certifications: Focus on what’s relevant for the role at hand.
• Unnecessary information: Space is limited, telling where you made elementary school or being the first of the class in third grade is for a casual conversation, on a resume is a distraction that consumes needed space.

Once you have it ready, it would be a good practice to let it rest for a few hours and read it from the perspective of a recruiter, or share it to a person with no physics context to

Learn behavioral based interview questions

Soft skills are shown, not told. The resumes can be one of the most utopic places in the world, because everybody is a team player, great communicators, empathic people that are emotionally smart and also leaders. A list of soft skills can easily be a list meaningless words copied from google. Use evidence to support your soft skills.

For this learn how to answer to behavioral based questions, both for your resume and for interviews, there are 2 very common approaches that help you and the recruiter at the same time, STAR and SIB.

STAR:

• Situation
• Task
• Actions
• Results

SIB:

• Situation
• Behavior
• Impact

Read about them, train yourself to answer to them and have them in your job finding toolbox. In a nutshell, you have a particular soft skill, maybe more than one, for which there is a context (situation), so you took an action that relied on those skills and because of that there is a result with a positive impact.

Try to deliver value in real life for experience

An important problem many people find when looking for an entry job level is having no working experience to put in a resume, or to respond to a behavioral question.

What do you do when they ask you “Tell me about a time you solved a pain point for customer?” and you never had a customer? My advice: Think about real life situations you can apply today.

Some examples are:

• Do you have a group project at college? This is an opportunity to lead a team, to create communication channels, to mediate between the teacher or other skills that you can identify and apply
• Are you a private tutor at college? You can think about ways to enhance the experience of your customers, or you can deliver an online tool to match tutors and students or think big and look for maintainable ways to scale your little business
• Can you think about a little project to deliver value? A small business that struggles to track the sales may benefit from an excel sheet you developed and helped maintain
• Do you have an struggling classmate? Imagine he is your customer, how can you improve a pain point for him?
• Are you a volunteer in a project? This is also experience as well

You can take leverage from your current environment, pick up skills, identify situations and take actions. My advice: work backwards from a skill or situation and deliver a result within your reach. And consider also that you are an student, no one expects you to develop a top-level, high scale solution for an entry level position.

Work your narratives

Most of us are terrible writers. The basic need is to deliver a message to a receptor, however we see the world from out point of view. Whatever babbling you say in an interview or write in a resume makes sense to you, but not necessarily to others

Work your narratives for each topic or question. This is another topic to research online, but I’ll also stand out my top X:

• Write your narrative, read, edit, repeat.
• Avoid weasel words, go to the point.
• Show it to others, get feedback, see if it’s clear and concise.
• Research on how to make a good narrative.

Statistical thinking

If you took a whole course on statistical mechanics and probably spend at least one test solving problems about dices, coins, and other games, then apply probabilities in real life.

Picture the situation of an independent event of low probability, one in which you only have one try. For example a expecting a 7 in a 20-sided dice? How do you improve your chances of winning one of such events?

By throwing it many times, make n bigger. In other words, apply to as to as many fitting positions for your skills as you can, increase n.

There’s a lot competitors when trying to land an entry level job, getting rejected is the most probable on your sample size of applications, odds are better when you have a higher application frequency.

Be persistent, be smart

Job hunting is frustrating and can quickly drain your energy. Is easy to regret your life choices when you are in a bad period. You are a smart person, use that brain to find the path of least resistance. For example:

• Make a list on valuable soft skills and leadership principles to have a cheat sheet. From this list make STAR/SIB questions to have as a cheat sheet for resumes and interviews
• Have a sheet with an application form already filled, so next time you have to fill one it’s easier to just copy and paste instead of filling it from scratch
• Prepare a very general cover letter to customize when you need one
• Have a master resume with everything you have. Trim what’s not important when you apply to a particular role.

Think about more actions that can help you ease your job hunting.

Specialize

So far you know about those skills that are valuable outside the academia, but your field of expertise is physics. If you picked a job area that is not related to physics you need to gather the specific skills for software development, engineering, data analysis, metrology, finances, business, etc.

Now, if you already picked this skill, be flexible about it. In physics you know a lot of math tricks and formulation tricks, like making an spherical cow or radius R, to solve physics problems. Think of it as your mechanisms toolbox. Develop mechanisms to be efficient at your field.

Specific case: What are the basics for software engineering roles?

Software engineering is a common role for physicists. However, is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you know how to code, then you can be a software engineer. Anyone looking into phython videos on youtube can make code. There’s nothing special about just throwing code and having it running, not any working code is good, nor makes you competitive in the field.

There’s a set of skills that make a person fit to be competitive for a software development role. The following are basic skills that I consider every software engineer should have:

• Master of a backend language. Java, python, C#, C++, rust, node, call it what you want, you need to be proficient enough, the analogy is a spoken language, you are proficient in German when can read, write and talk German. In other words be able to put what’s in your head into the code.
• Data structures and algorithms. These are to software development as learning linear algebra and calculus are to physics.
• Basics of database handing. Learn the types of databases and how to work with them. Take a glance here.
• Design patterns and when to apply them correctly. A correct usage of design patterns will prevent code smells and design pattern overuse. Take a glance here and here.
• Understand the basics of software architecture. You could take this as the layer of abstraction after design patterns. Take a glance of some here.
• Version control. Work in software engineering is collaborative and needs to be traceable and recoverable, most software roles rely on a version control system like git. Take a glance here.
• Be fluid on a frontend framework. Angular, React, Vue, RoR, etc. Pick one and be fluent on it, understand how they work in general as well.
• Maintainable, clean, code. More often than not you’ll maintain code, as well as your code will be maintained by others. Dirty code is a nightmare for everyone and expensive as hell.
• Basics of cloud technologies. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. Understand cloud technologies, they are very similar.
• Basics of code lifecycle. From the requirements to the final product. Take a glance here.
• [Optional] Basics of software engineering methodologies. Some use cascade, some agile, other’s DevOps.Take a glance here

Suggested sources that may come in handy:

• Amigos code (youtube, linkedin): Friendly, cheat sheets, tips and tutorials on Linux, Python, Java and other resources
• Design patterns from Christopher Okhravi. Good explanations, easy to follow and understand
• Cracking the Coding Interview: Great book for algorithms, and very fit to coding interviews.
• Hackerrank and leetcode: Great tools to practice algorithms
• Clean code: No need to marry with all of the CleanCode philosophy, but the book is great to learn how to code clean
• CleanArchitecture: Basics of software design and architecture.
• Pragmatic programmer: Good book with a varied scope of advice.
• Head First Design Patterns: Good book on design patterns
• Freecodecamp: Resources for any topic you may think
• Udemy: Cheap, quick and easy courses.

Hope you can find something of value in this post 🙂