| Higher Education and academia; Apparently, maybe that's more of a local thing, there are no job offerings in industry* for Physics BSc or MSc other than web development or data science, since most R&D Jobs either require experience and/or a PhD. Although I chose Physics mostly due to my curiosity, desire to understand how things work and the romantic idea of working in large scale physics experiments or performing researched that mattered. I soon realized, after working in different groups over 3-4 years, that academic R&D is fully driven by the publishing frenzy and scientific rigor is sidelined most of the times. Naively, I assumed that this was mostly due to the fact that I was not at PhD-level, and thought that the academic research world was not like this. I applied and got a PhD grant at a different institution, and to my surprise+shock nothing really changed, other than the added weight of pseudo-responsibility that was bestowed upon me. Maybe I have been unlucky, but the work just feels empty most of the time and void of any of the "spark" that initially got me into physics(and higher education for that matter). With that in mind, I should have pursued a CS, EE, Math degree or a professional/technical degree. Ironically, I'm currently pursuing a new master's degree in parallel with my PhD in an attempt to pursue a job in a different area(non physics academic research/webdev/data science). *Non-academia |
My most apt description for physics is "useless engineering" when it comes to jobs; a decent overlap in content, but none of the opportunities.
(I also wish I had done math; I've come to realize that's what I like about physics, outside of astro)