So What Are You Going to Do With That Degree? Physics Majors Get That Question, Too

As a STEM field, physics is probably not the most-obvious example of a discipline that has to reassure students and their parents that someone who majors in it is employable.

Even so, professors sometimes find themselves justifying the major to students, who are often pushed to choose engineering or computer science, which seem more directly linked to jobs.

Skepticism about the usefulness of the discipline is just one of the challenges that physics faces, and it is part of what motivated the American Physical Society’s five-year, $2.2-million effort, which it announced last week, to establish effective practices for undergraduate programs.

The society also described a mismatch: Many undergraduate physics programs are designed to prepare students for careers as research physicists. “In reality,” the project’s leaders wrote, “over 65 percent of students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in physics do not pursue a graduate degree in physics or astronomy.”

That statistic raises questions. What happens to all of those other physics majors? What can physics departments do to prepare students for a variety of career paths? And what lessons might other academic disciplines draw from those efforts?

The discipline has been asking such questions for a long time. The American Institute of Physics — a federation that provides services to its member societies, which include the American Physical Society — has a long history of collecting data on graduates, said Patrick Mulvey, a research manager there. The institute has tracked enrollment in physics programs and degrees awarded since the early 1960s, Mulvey said, and has conducted follow-up surveys of graduates for more than 30 years.

Physicists have been interested in knowing how their graduates fare since at least the end of the Cold War, said Jean M. Quashnock, a professor of physics and astronomy at Carthage College, in Wisconsin. That’s when a drop in government grants pushed the discipline to think about its purpose beyond preparing students for a narrow set of research careers.

Last week’s announcement, he said, draws on work the discipline has done in recent years to track where its graduates land and to locate best practices for preparing students for a broad range of careers.

Nearly half of physics graduates go directly on to graduate school, according to figures for the combined classes of 2015 and 2016, the most recent available from the institute. But just 60 percent of those students continue in physics or astronomy. Twenty percent are in engineering, with the rest studying something else.

Of the graduates who are in the work force a year after completing their bachelor’s degrees, two-thirds work in the private sector, mostly in engineering and in computer or information systems. Smaller groups are employed by colleges, high schools, the military, and other parts of the government.

Other private-sector graduates work outside of STEM altogether. Some report that their jobs — junior trader at a bank, for example, or analyst at a consulting firm — require them to solve technical problems. Others, working in roles like associate at an investment-management firm, bartender, or baker, say they don’t regularly engage in that kind of task.

Physics departments can use the institute’s data to help advise students, Mulvey said. It also maintains a state-by-state list of employers that have hired bachelor’s-degree recipients in physics.

It’s no accident that physics graduates can step into a variety of professional roles. They are “prepared problem solvers,” as Quashnock puts it. But that doesn’t always mean students know what opportunities are out there, or how to package themselves to seize them. That can be a challenge for students in any major.

Career Development

It’s a challenge that physics departments at a variety of college types are helping students meet.

The department at Carthage, for instance, recently replaced its traditional student thesis with a portfolio that students build over three years, Quashnock said. The portfolio serves a dual purpose. The final product helps graduates land a job, by demonstrating to employers the kind of work they’re capable of. And the process of putting it together, Quashnock said, helps students not only understand and translate the skills they’ve acquired, but also reflect on what they’d like to do with them.

To further aid in that process of reflection, Carthage also lets majors “try on different hats,” Quashnock said, by offering experiential-learning options connected to careers as different as working in aerospace and teaching middle and high school.

Other departments have built career development into their degree programs. Florida State University has a required, one-credit seminar for majors that gets students thinking about career opportunities in their first year, said Susan Blessing, a professor of physics. Students interview a faculty member about the path to an academic career, and hear from graduates in immediately appealing careers, like working at SpaceX, and less obvious ones, like an alumna who does computing work for a door company.

Students also spend time on résumés, writing one that reflects their current experience and another that shows the experiences they’d need to accrue to be qualified for a job posting that interests them.

Professors want to maintain enrollment in the major, Blessing said, but it’s also important that students who choose it really want to be there. “By the time you’re in the middle of your junior year,” she said, “if you want to change your major, you’re really stuck.” That’s particularly true, Blessing added, for similar majors, like engineering, which have a lot of required courses.

The physics department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland has taken a different approach, incorporating career development into one of its required academic courses. The course, which covers electricity and magnetism, is taken by students in their third semester in the major, said Josh Grossman, an associate professor in the department and its chair. The course includes weekly career-development activities, like researching graduate schools and nonacademic careers, Grossman said.

One benefit the department has seen: More of its students are doing undergraduate research or taking internships, presumably because the course gives them a jump-start in applying for those opportunities.

One way the University of California at Davis helps students see the practicality of a physics degree is by offering the option to major in applied physics, with concentrations including computational physics and physical oceanography. Offering those programs requires the department to work closely with other departments and even a different college, said Pat Boeshaar, a distinguished senior lecturer, but it’s worth the effort to help students understand their options.

When students do want to continue studying physics in graduate school, they face a challenging and narrow path. Davis addresses it explicitly, by sharing how competitive its own graduate program is. Right now, the median GPA of accepted students is about 3.7. And academe simply does not offer physics Ph.D.s the same opportunities it did in the past, Boeshaar said.

But there is good news for physics majors: Their undergraduate degree can open many other doors. In the wider world, she said, “we need technically trained people who know how things work.” Majoring in physics, departments like hers argue, gives students exactly those skills.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.