My husband has a PhD in physics and makes good use of it as CTO of a small company. In addition to management, he does research, product development, writes (and wins) gov’t grant applications, and writes patents. He also gives invited talks at conferences and evaluates grant applications for NSF. He has enough citations on papers he’s written in industry to compete with most tenured faculty. He went straight from his PhD to an industry job.
There are good jobs for PhD physicists (and engineers) in industry if they do fairly hands-on research for their PhD on something that is likely to have some practical applications in the near future. A number of our friends in management at various tech companies have a PhD (not that they’d make a point of mentioning it). I schedule monthly technical talks for a local engineering networking group, and most of the speakers (generally the VP or Director of Engineering) I schedule have PhDs. A few of the engineers have a Masters. The PhD may not make as much of a difference in the first job in industry, but it can make a difference later.
We also know a number of physics PhDs happily working at NIST and Los Alamos.
I’m in the last year of an engineering-ish PhD program. At this point, I am pretty much just a very poorly paid employee. I have no intention of trying for a tenure track job, as I am already pretty burned out by the funding scramble. One of my advisors is a new faculty member, and he no longer even has the time to do any research, he is just trying to stay on top of 5-6 grant proposal avenues so that, maybe, he will get into a tenure track position in a few years.
When I lived in the US, the owner of the local car repair shop had a PhD in mechanical engineering (from a UC school). It was wonderful how he could explain clearly and accurately what the problems were, and how he seemed to be unable to make up the lies and bs that many mechanics use to try to charge more.
Few people head off to grad school with full awareness that there will be many “cuts” along the way. I don’t think there really is any way for people to understand that until they see it happening - which often means that they first see it happen to themselves.
Part of our role as parents/friends/extended family/co-workers/supervisors, is to help each other keep our minds open to other work/life possibilities - and not just immediately after completing the PhD or post doc. It is almost certain that there will be further “cuts” over each working person’s lifetime. Positive attitudes, decent networking skills, and reasonably up-to-date professional CVs can make a huge difference when those shake-ups come.
There is a huge demand for Math/Physics/CS PhDs in the financial sector. Quantitative Finance is the way of the future. In 50 years, there will be no humans managing money, just machines. That’s the career track that such PhDs should focus on.
Although I have a PhD and a long academic career (social sciences), I only recommend students to pursue PhD’s these days on a highly selective basis. They really really really have to be well fit for the program, willing and able to accelerate it. It is still possible to get tenure, but the pressure to expand instruction to either adjuncts or on-line off-campus modes, reduces the chances for the traditional research-oriented tenure stream appointee.
Recently my daughter, who has been teaching as an adjunct based on her BFA-MBA degrees and finding that she really enjoys it, asked me whether she should get a PhD to qualify for a full-time appointment. I said “No. A PhD would most likely allow you to teach as an adjunct, just like you are now. Focus on your client work.”
There is huge demand TODAY in quantitative finance. But a kid who is now in HS contemplating a PhD with that career goal in mind should understand that today’s hot field is tomorrow’s Master’s in E-commerce (the hot career of 1999-2001, and then it died), the Master’s in Real Estate (the hot career of 2001-2008 until it died) and possibly any of the petroleum disciplines (which are already getting cut, quietly, today… not much fanfare on CC since so many folks believe that Engineering is the holy grail which never gets cut or downsized).
There is already a shakeout in the quantitative finance world. Someone at DE Shaw or Bridgewater is safe. Someone at a 5 billion $ hedge fund- likely not. Someone who is in asset management at a size below that- I’d start dusting off the resume.
The point being that it’s silly to assume that a 14 yo “wants” a PhD and “wants” to go into quantitative finance, when there are hundreds of potential career paths. The careers that many of us fiftysomethings are doing didn’t even exist when we were in college, and it’s a fair bet that there are plenty of careers that our kids will wind up doing that don’t exist today.
Of course, a parent could certainly push his or her 14 yo towards a PhD and towards quantitative finance, but I’m sure you’re too sophisticated for that.
My point is that a kid who thinks they want to study CS or Physics should be doing it because they love CS or physics. Not because “I got a PhD but can’t get a tenure track job so i can always work in quantitative finance” is what the kids friends, parents and neighbors have been telling him for 12 years, past his post-doc, and then he finds that quantitative finance has blown up.
I had friends from college who were “discovered” in the early -80’s by banks and asset management organizations. They were early “rocket scientists” when hiring physicists was a novelty. October 1987 put many of them on the unemployment line-- and these were people whose only work experience was TA’ing at a university, or developing financial models for trading algorithms. So when Wall Street contracted… they didn’t have a lot of options to fall back on.
Far from trying to predict the future- I’m trying to point out that no tree grows to the sky. Fields that today are booming, up and up, money pits, etc. may or may not be viable in a decade.
Hey, I’m closing in on that 50s thing. I know plenty of working engineers in their 50s and 60s … and retired ones in their 70s and 80s who built the lunar rovers. Most of them are not PhDs as far as I know, however.
@oldfort, you don’t have to spend money on a good PhD.
There is the time and opportunity cost, but a PhD in many fields can be useful to have outside of academia. Really, it comes down to whether you really are passionate about doing research on something.
C’mon, @oldfort, I have to believe that you still have a pulse on your industry so please don’t play dumb. You and I both know that the front office is contracting and middle office is growing.
The big money days on the Street are over and won’t be back for generations. Look at the '30’s as a guide. Regulation/deregulation cycles are decades-long.
Front office maybe contracting, but they sure are not spending the money on quant guys either. The middle office maybe growing, but it is by number of FTE, not how much they they are paying/FTE. One also does not need a PhD to work in the middle office, not exactly brain surgery.
Even if the front office’s pay has contracted, they are still getting paid a lot better than the middle office. A lot of them in their 30s are still able to afford to pay for their kids’ K-12 private education and multi million $$ homes. D1 is an associate. She just received a 25% base salary raise, but they just heard their competitor(s) gave their associates 50% raise, and now D1’s firm may do the same. I don’t think they are doing the same for their middle or back office people.
“There is the time and opportunity cost, but a PhD in many fields can be useful to have outside of academia. Really, it comes down to whether you really are passionate about doing research on something.”
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve not found a PhD to be worthwhile in my corner of the business world. Certainly no one would pay extra for them.
Finance, risk management, compliance, information security, trade settlement…are all middle office. I worked at a half dozen banks from front to back, and sat on the trading floor in one capacity or another most of my career. I tend not to make things too complicated, especially when it comes to systems or any kind of analysis, and it has served my employers well.
Most of these 5 billion$ hedge funds are under the radar, could be 5-10 person shops and doing very well.
However, people working at DEShaw, Bridgewater and Citadel are not as safe, they are known as ‘revolving doors.’
If you can accurately make such calls, you are severely underpaid.