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Letter from Boston

Job-Hunting Physicists

By MASAKO YAMADA


職を探す物理学者

雅子さんが属する研究グループは、実にさまざまな国籍を持つ人で構成されています。最近、夕食を共にしたのですが、そこで話題となった将来の仕事についての意見もさまざまでした。博士課程修了後、彼らはどんな道に進むつもりでいるのか、見てみましょう。

When you are in a research group as large as mine, you are bound to encounter different sorts of people. My group recently had dinner together at a local Chinese restaurant and I noticed that my dinner table consisted entirely of foreign-borns, one each from 10 different countries.

I've spoken to many of these people about their future employment plans and I've been surprised by their varied responses. Partly this comes from the fact that, after so many years of specialization, many of them plan on leaving the world of physics.

Of the people in my group who have already left or who plan on graduating soon, I know a couple of investment bankers, a few computer programmers, several postdocs and one basic researcher for a large pharmaceutical company. Some of them plan on staying in the States, and others plan on going "back home." They have many reasons for choosing the paths that they do, so it's impossible, really, to determine which — if any — is ideal.

Most of the people in my group from western Europe seem to want to go back after their stay in the States. They have families there, and job opportunities are not bad. This is not true, however, of people who come from less affluent countries. They sense more opportunity in the States, and many of them choose to stay. Some of them endure the loneliness of settling here by themselves, while others bring over their entire family with them.

One of my groupmates has many conditions that his future job must fulfill: regular working hours, not much travel, a Boston location and green card-granting procedures. Salary and personal job satisfaction are almost secondary to him. This is because he has uprooted his family to come to the States and he feels the obligation to create a steady home atmosphere for his young daughter, who is becoming a Bostonian.

Another one of my groupmates selected his job almost on a whim. He was at a conference in Montreal where he struck up a conversation with a basic researcher from the pharmaceutical industry. Although he'd heard a lot of negative things about industry from university academics, he thought the work sounded interesting. The researcher casually told him that the company was looking for new researchers back in his home country and she practically offered him a job on the spot. Although he went through some perfunctory official interviews, the decision to work for that company was almost made for him.

A couple of the people in my group are lured by the big bucks at Wall Street-type jobs — trading, brokering or consulting. Although people say that the academic life is competitive and challenging, financial industry jobs require a constant, high level of energy and speed that I find at odds with the grad school life.

However, since graduate students are forced to live for many years without material luxuries, I see why some are attracted to the thought of making up for it after graduation. Wall Street is known to welcome disgruntled and disillusioned physicists with open arms, and it seems that more and more of them are running into those open arms. That is not to say that the work is easy or stress-freefar from it — but they are willing to take the challenge.

A few of my group mates are gung ho about pursuing the academic track and are shunning the potential to earn lots of money by taking low-level research positions. Even the best-paid postdocs earn little money compared to what a person with similar intelligence and education can expect in a private job.

I've noticed that these people don't necessarily come from affluent countries, but they are free to pursue what they love because they don't have children or sick parents. The primary drawback of academic life, in addition to its not paying very well, is that there are very few permanent jobs, and many people end up taking roads that go around in circles.

Some of the most interesting internal conflicts exist within those who don't really have a good reason to choose one path over another. One of the people in my group seems to be wavering between a high-intensity job in New York, a prestigious postdoc position somewhere in the States and a vacation-cum-temporary-research job in Europe. The option to make such choices is a true luxury — and I think it's a very young, very American one.


Shukan ST: Nov. 20, 1998

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