I was at a careers talk given by UCD’s head of physics recently so I know a bit of this.
Lots of them go to the semiconductor industries (Intel), or computer programming, or electronics industries.
A lot (of the space scientists especially) stay in astronomy and space science.
And a lot of them go the the financial services industries (where their knowledge of data treatment is very useful). Apparently quite a few have recently gone to work with Paddy Power.
Dear ahopkins
thanks for your brilliant question
Common jobs for people with a physics degree include academic research, teaching, working in industry, finance and accountancy. As physicists tend to be highly numerate, analytical and logical, and are frequently also creative thinkers, excellent at problem solving and meticulous. So these are good, safe jobs for physicists.
But there’s a job that’s well suited to the physicist that most never even think of pursuing. The entrepreneur.
What is an entrepreneur? Someone who creates a business out of nothing. In other words, someone who understands either implicitly or explicitly that wealth is not a conserved quantity.
People with a business background worry about targets and objectives and incremental improvements. Physicists ask, “what is the underlying model here and how can I increase performance by an order of magnitude?”
In short, physicists think big. They understand scale. And they are ideally placed to spearhead innovations that disrupt entire industries.
hope it helps
thanks 🙂
Ahmed
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