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I've felt strongly about this subject for quite some time it's something that doesn't get talked about very often in the academic world largely because people in the academic world don't know the world outside of academia very well not always the case but often and I certainly didn't either when I was going through my my grad school and and postdoc experience so I actually the spokesman of the Deezer experiment that I had done my postdoc with and I were chatting about this at one point and back in 2012 I could kind of give him a hard time about some of the stuff that they were doing I didn't like and to his credit he invited me to come to NIU and actually unlike Andrews they paid for me to come out and and present a little bit about my background I have BA some physics from Andrews I was here until 93 one of the there was a couple of things I did interesting here I worked with Mickey coots nur doing doing some work on astrophysics stuff I think I may have had a little bit to do with some of the atomic stuff you're doing at the time but I think it was mostly Dave that did that at the time not me but we definitely did some really cool astrophysics tough with quasars and trying to see if you can see evidence for a closed universe with that I also got to spend a research semester at Lawrence Livermore Lab with do they still have that program yeah I don't think Livermore has it but Argonne certainly has it I know the physics majors still go and do it and and it was a really cool temesta to spend there doing some research stuff I did some work with fusion power plant of fusion reactor designs which as my advisor there said those have been 20 years away for the last 50 years and now it's even farther since then so yeah I did my PhD working University Wisconsin I finished that end of 99 I actually defended my dissertation of the day before Thanksgiving in 1999 it's definitely a day you remember I did research both at CERN at the aleph experiment and a daisy which is in Hamburg Germany CERN is typically more well known that's in Geneva Switzerland this Daleth experiment was on the Leppa Collider there which was all electron Tron Collider and then Daisy there was the HERA accelerator there that did electron PI electron or positron on proton stuff mostly looking for proton structure measurements but my dissertation was actually the other way around using the proton to probe into the photons that would come off an electron and actually see a photon connect that it has structure so my dissertation was a measurement of photon structure was more virtual and which is basically a neat little confirmation and an detailed way of looking at the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that was pretty cool it was actually the first measurement anyone had done showing that virtual photon structure diminishes as a photon gets more virtual we could that would be an interesting lecture all by itself but anyway it was the we got to be the first ones to actually do that that was my dissertation research very exciting then I went on for postdoc with Brown University I was working at the d0 experiment at Fermilab so this is proton and proton collisions oh I forgot to say at Daisy my group that I was part of was responsible for building the calorimeter first-level trigger so in particle physics I don't know how well everyone knows probably fit mostly math and physics majors in here yes yeah all right so now I don't have to you know be quite as careful you guys catch up so the the work at in particle physics you have these huge experiments I mean they're the size of a fairly sizable building and they're just packed with electronics and so you have to do every group is you don't just get to get at the data and do cool stuff with the data right that's what my dissertation was was doing cool stuff with the data but you have to do service work and actually build the experiment if it hasn't been built already or if it has been built already you have to actually you have to maintain the experiment you have to keep fixing it improving it whatever and so the group I was in was responsible for the calorimeter first level trigger which was really bleeding out like bleeding edge electronics and still kind of is even though that was back in the 90s we were we were actually running a ten megahertz clock in in our well two clocks but we had we had 10 million beam crossings per second we were sampling the data from every one of those and there was about 250 kilobytes of information that had to be looked at for each one of those so how do you do that so it was a really interesting challenge and this is the beginning of where well there's in your undergraduate you're doing lots of problem-solving so that's that's that's your first training then you start going to grad school if you do go to grad school and you start having to like work on electronics understand it from soup to nuts right I mean we were designing the electronic soldering stuff together then going and drive building drivers for this stuff and then you had to do all your analysis stuff which meant writing code you're very comfortable with with electronics and computers and anything to do with like IT like stuff that went if even more when I was a postdoc I built the data acquisition system for the D 0 experiment so this was you know pulling in huge amounts of data from this big experiment and getting it to a computer farm so the people who could so that you could do your third level analysis before you figured out what the right to tape and to do that literally did everything you can possibly do in nit and and and in the physics world you kind of have to in the science world we don't have so much money to go hire 20 people to do something instead one person does it and figures out all 20 keep parts of that capability that have to be built so when my analysis worker there was on electroweak physics I I was in the Tevatron working group Tevatron was the name of the collider and we published the most sensitive at that time measurement of W gamma cross-sections looking for anomalous coupling so anything non-standard we were essentially looking for non-standard physics and didn't find any as is usually the case I've been working at Bank of America since 2005 it's a rather long story but it was very surprising left turn into the non-academic world I had always intended to be a professor I wanted to be a professor my parents are professors their parents were teachers it's definitely the family right and that was what I had always intended to do but yeah I'm not doing that so what happened and how did that happen is is a pretty interesting story so that the story is you know I've worked all across the company now and in fact this is a little out of date in terms of what I do I now I'm actually working at the at the company helping drive the policies for the whole company on how we are automating and modernizing how we do software development something a lot that often isn't realized in the popular media is companies like well any company these days is an IT company banks especially but everything is is almost private primarily an IT company and banking if you think about it is almost entirely IT right how much how much of your banking actually involves physical money not that much it's mostly about electronic transfers and things like that right so banking actually is very much an IT business and at one point I think it's still true we were one of the largest if not the largest software shops in the u.s. of any of any business like we're way larger than Microsoft for instance in terms of number of developers and how much we develop so we've built a new we're trying to modernize one of the things big companies have a problem with is often will be sort of it's hard to change right you do have so much stuff it's hard to change the the common statement is you know we're trying to turn the Titanic and it you know doesn't want to turn so it can be quite a lot of effort I'm involved with a an effort right now to modernize how we do things so automated building deployments if you've know what DevOps is if you don't you should know because it there's there's definite openings career-wise in the future of DevOps where you know we really have automated everything from like the developer checks in code and the next time a human touches it is not is never it goes all the way through gets tested automatically gets deployed to various environments gets handled and there's a defect in the code it'll end up all the way in production having been fully tested before it actually even gets to production there's companies that have gone from you know say one deployment a quarter to ten thousand a year by doing this kind of thing I don't think we're headed there obviously I'm banking you don't want things changing multiple times a day the other companies that benefit from that more than we do but certainly you know there are improvements there now I'm not here speaking for Bank of America I want to make that really clear that is who employs me now and you know I try and be a a value-add there so I will say a few things about what my experience at Bank of America is to help you understand the kinds of things that you can do elsewhere do not take me as speaking for the company it's a much bigger company than me twice we said about 250,000 employees I think is what we're at now we round 50,000 developers it's a big company and I'm certainly not senior enough to be making any statements for the company so so I'm talking about what the whole reason for this talk is to talk about being and is mostly focused on physicists but I think mathematicians know math and physics are pretty closely related and I think the attitudes and the skill sets that mathematicians and physicists have are pretty similar so when I say physicists on these slides I mean both and I just haven't gone through and you know modified all of them but you know physicists going out into or hard science people going out into the academic world are out of the academic world bring a lot of unique things so what I want to do is look at you know how what is it that motivates us right I'm still I still view myself as a physics one of the really important things when I made that transition from the academic world to the business world I really didn't want to go and it was emotionally difficult and what made it easier was when I realized I'm still a physicist no matter what because guess what once you've had a physics or math education you're permanently warped there's no way to fix it all right you are and you just you're different and you always will be and what are some of those differences and why are they a good thing so let's talk about what Y we get motivated what do we like doing why are you a physics or a math major you didn't choose this because it's easy I'm pretty sure all right cuz it ain't if you've chosen cuz you're e cuz it's easy then you're a lot dumber than I suspect you are it's not easy so we like the challenge we don't like doing easy things right we like working on interesting things something hard and eventually something cutting edge right you're not here because you just want to work on something boring the rest of your life you want to do something that no one else has done we like doing little smug let's admit it alright we know we can do things other people can't do and we like that and that's a good thing we like to be for me anyway and I think most of the people I knew in the physics world and still no we like feeling like we're expanding human knowledge right we're out on the edges and we're learning new things like I I had to brag a little bit I was the first one to measure blah blah blah right I felt good I added something that no one else knew before and we like to think we're making the world a better place and this last point is going to come back it's hard to get motivated to do hard things if you don't think it's actually gonna make things better right and like I said we'll talk a little bit more about that so from an academic point of view and I certainly always had this the only real academic the only real job path that I saw and I think most of my almost all of my grad student buddies were the same way people I went to undergrad with as well certainly in postdoc you it was it was still it was starting to be a little less true but we still had the same idea that there was really one path and that was into that sort of academic job being a professor at a research university maybe maybe getting a job at a at a national lab and doing research and the fact of the matter is nope the fact of the matter is there aren't that many jobs a year this is statistics from a little while ago but these haven't changed this is still about right they may be a little bit off but it's not very far the actual number of jobs per year is not very many there are a lot more PhDs granted every year fifteen hundred then this small number and that's just in the US and when you're competing for a job in academia you're not just competing with the US you're competing with the whole world everyone wants to come here right this is where the good stuff is so you can already tell from these numbers and this number which is just the US you can already tell that your main path even if you go get a PhD and do a postdoc which I highly recommend is a great experience and we'll talk about why that's such a great experience but even if you do all that you're probably going to want you're probably going to have to find a job outside of academia and I'm going to argue here that that's actually not only in the mainstream because most of the people are gonna have to do that but it's a good thing and it's something you should want to do or many of you should want to do because it's there's there's huge pluses to it so we talked a little bit about the pluses and minuses of non PhD granting and working PhD granting institutions but as you can see I mean that the main point here is the vast majority of people who go and get a PhD or have an undergraduate degree are going to end up finding a job outside of the field so why should you want that well first of all it's there's a rather large number of jobs per year you are you are either that are available in a non-academic world I put question mark because it's thousands and thousands and tens of thousands but another key point is it's an unsaturated job market these I actually just got off the phone I'm setting up to do a presentation of one of the senior leaders in the company to talk about how to deal with finding talent we struggle with it we have open positions we can't find good people and that unsaturated job market has a couple of impacts not only is it easier for you to find a job which isn't a good reason to tell you to go that to consider that kind of job because wait we like doing hard things we already said that right it's not because it's easy the big plus there is make the world a better place we talked about that before if you go into academia there are we said a few hundred jobs a year and a few thousand people wanting it when I was applying I did one round of applying for research professorships there were there were ten positions open in the particle physics that were at research universities this is what I applied to ten positions I had an inside source at one of the universities who told me they received 300 applications for their one position so there are about 300 people applying for 10 positions now obviously that kind of makes you I'm gonna I'm gonna beat them right but it's something that didn't occur to me until many years later if I didn't end up in one of those positions somebody really good was gonna end up in that position right I think I'm pretty good I want that position but if I don't get it guess what someone really good is gonna be there and they're gonna be doing cool work maybe even the same work I would have done probably because usually they're hiding it for a specific kind of research but if you look at the job market outside of academia if you don't take it if you don't bring your skills to to that job who is and you have unique skills and we're gonna talk about what we bring as these kinds of people us bring to the market and what we have
s a unique value add that that other people don't have there's all sorts of advantages to the non-academic world you know I live in Colorado I work from home I leave the house when I want to not because I have to that's kind of nice there's there I get to live where I want I get to live in a beautiful place my my home office I sit there looking at the mountains you know that's pretty nice pays pretty good you actually do a lot of mentoring and teaching I've become a manager primarily because I love teaching alright it's in my blood I can't help it and it turns out being a manager is primarily about teaching and so you're pulling people in and you're teaching on might's you're not done learning when you get your first job or your second job or your tenth job right you're gonna be learning the rest of your life and if you're good at teaching that's gonna help other people so all sorts of advantages to it but what I really wanted to focus on was what is it that we have to offer and this is to me the most important part of this you know telling you the yeah there's jobs up that yeah you already know that but what I struggled with and everyone I knew in grad school I actually when I put this together the first time I talked to everybody that I knew in the physics world was you know 100 plus people and ask them you know will their input on it and and by and large people yeah we don't really understand what we have to offer outside of physics right when you're working in the hard sciences you feel stupid most of the time this is something people don't realize outside of that's outside of people who've done this you know the people don't realize that you feel stupid most of the time I certainly did and you know you're always struggling you're always working against the fact that nobody knows something or you're learning something for your first time you see you feel dumb and so you don't really feel like wow what do I really have to offer I don't why would anyone want to hire me so what I wanted to really this is really what I want to hit on more than anything in in this presentation is what is it we offer now one of my former bosses actually I asked him you know what what do you think of physicists and this was his quote and I was rather surprised to have such a clear quote I mean executives are not known for giving really clear statements but he did and he said you know that physics minds are the brightest that there are and I think it's true all right you you you've come here and well as I said once a physicist always a physicist you have a diversity of thought and a lack of fear of the unknown you do a lot of homework and it's always different and you're getting thrown different stuff at you and this is true for mathematicians just as much as physicists you're always learning something new you're always getting challenged and quite frankly you end up getting a little bored if you're not getting challenged with something and something new is coming in and it but from the data is completely different than the normal person you all are weird because the normal person does not want to have to deal with something new they want to they want to kind of you know one of the things that absolutely shocked me when I became a manager was one of the guys that worked for me we kind of set up what our vision was and what we were gonna do and then the team was just killing it and I had nothing to do I was putting my feet up and I'm like am I supposed to do now these guys are you know I I would every now and then have something to do to like explain what we're doing or get a roadblock out of their way or keep somebody from annoying them for the most part they're just doing I'm like you know right I'm lazy I mean I I felt bad and I'm like well you guys are doing all this great work you know what should I be doing and their response very clear and this has happened multiple times over the years people who work for me constantly will say no no you keep doing what you're doing we don't want to do that like that's nasty work and what it is is it's the it's the it's the unknown it's the something weird is coming how we're gonna handle this what is our plan somebody's asking a question I don't understand what their question is how do you deal with that and people with a hard science background fear of the unknown what you're talking about that's what we look for right so it's a big advantage coming in and and the business world is full of unknowns they're not bleeding edge of human knowledge kind of unknowns but they are unknowns and just having that courage to be able to step into a weird situation that nobody's ever done before that has ever been there is a great example I got hired at one point I moved around different positions in the company at one point I applied for a job with my current boss this was around the time I first built this deck actually and she had two positions open one was working on environment support which was what I had been doing so I was applying for that and the other one had to do it test data so the data you use the test software so you've written some new software say if I don't handles you know savings accounts or something so you need to have data to push savings accounts through that app and make sure it's doing what it's supposed to do well I applied addition cuz that's what I'd been doing and she looked at her my resume and said you've done data stuff before like he said big data right you've done data stuff before we need someone to figure out how to handle test data well the reason that they were looking for something to do it is it's not one of the things that gets trained in your in your computer science department here or anywhere else it's not really a trained expertise nobody knows what to do with test data well you figured it out I'm kidding I love that but nobody else wanted to do it like I've been doing that since 2012 now and I've never had someone challenge me how I'm going to do it I love it but you know everyone else is kind of afraid of it because there's no like I can't don't find a textbook that tells me what to do or I can't find a webpage it tells me what to do it doesn't exist I get to make it up that's awesome there's no one to tell me what to do you know and so so that that fear the unknown I mean diversity of thought coming up with your own solutions for difficult problems that no one else has ever done before this line is huge in the business world and it's something you do every day and you will continue doing as you go through your education if you go into grad school it'll get it'll get more and more energy if you go into a postdoc as well even more and so while I'm sitting here arguing you know maybe academic isn't the mainstream obviously academic jobs are great and if you end up in one that's awesome but if you end up somewhere else you are bringing something to the table that otherwise would not be there and that's one of those things analytical capabilities all of us all that homework you do means you're really good at problem-solving like really good again you don't feel it you mostly are feeling stupid right I always did all right know that homework I don't get it whatever pull your hair out finally figure it out thank God now comes another one you don't even have time to celebrate really all right you're just done and moving on to the next thing that practice means that you can be faced with with situations that need to be analyzed and you're gonna do the analysis without even thinking about it either I'm regularly meetings where someone presents something and I'm immediately like wait a second but that means this B's this which means this that's gonna be a problem that's good or whatever and I pipe up and I bring that in and Eversole oh that's just great insightful whatever I don't like yeah what do you mean it's just normal thinking you know so that analysis you will do naturally you already do it naturally and you will continue to build up that capability and that's something my boss wrecking comments on all the time all analytical skills I'm actually supposed to be having my year-end review right now with her in this hour but I figured I'd rather talk to you guys and I know that's what she's going to talk about primarily that's what she said for years analytical skills now I'm not that different from any other physicist I'm probably I didn't get a professorship so obviously I'm not the top so you know if I am like that certainly you guys are too and you know that's sort of very related to that next point about correlations just seeing relationships between things right that's again a lot of what you do in your homework you're looking for hey I know this bit I know this bit if I put those together I can do this other thing all right and being able to put things together see how they work together is a huge part of of what is needed in the business world and again stuff you guys train to do constantly people with business degrees people with IT degrees they don't get this training they don't get to they don't get trained how to analyze they don't get trained how to see correlations they certainly don't get trained on how to use math and statistics and algorithms and logic a little bit of logic for the IT people with if they're taught how to code although I've noticed that coding is not necessarily all that strongly taught these days in most schools I don't know about here but it's as I've been in there's nothing than that much logic there and my current job and this is very common thing needed is we need some metrics to measure we're trying something we want metrics to measure how good that thing is is it working how is it working how much are we spending on it how what benefits is it giving us and I don't know how to say this other than rather derogatorily but my co-workers are terrible at trying to figure out a useful metric they'll throw out a number and we're done there's a metric well what's it mean what's the error on that how accurate is that what's it mean how good is your data underneath oh yeah and they just don't know what they're doing with data or numbers or anything to do with math statistics especially and any sort of algorithm or logic oh my goodness and again what are you training to do that and that's what's needed out there big time so yes this all basically comes down to being powerful problem solving you guys are building those skills you've already built a lot of them you'll continue to build more and and so that that problem-solving makes you need an incredible single contributor type person in in an organization but it goes beyond that because with that academic background especially for those who go farther into it but even though even at this point you probably teach each other fairly regularly right you're helping each other hey I know how to do this here I'll show you how or I don't know how to do this you show me how right that was all the time that's how we get through this stuff that means you know how to teach and as I said being a leader of an organization or even a small little team is a lot about teaching and mentoring and helping other people be better and I actually have gone in recent years I don't do anything anymore I call myself a do-nothing manager my team does amazing work and I'm teaching them and helping them and you know oh yeah I get roadblocks out of the way and I go and I do the sales job to the executives and whatever but I do a lot of teaching and and you know they're gonna do a presentation help them do it better they're gonna they're trying to analyze something help point them out how to do it you know that teaching becomes extremely valuable so those two laughs these are really kind of the overall like summary of what it is but there's a lot of detail behind it and you may not realize what it is you've got I certainly didn't and I know most of my peers didn't either for me what I have seen to be difficulties in trying to get out there into the non-academic grow the academic world people know what a physicist is particularly other physicists right and it's been interesting out my dad said something about how we hired a number of physicists it was because we were telling our bosses about each other and they got and we said yeah my buddies are exactly the same way I am oh can we get them to kind of thing though they didn't really know at the beginning but a guy that I went to grad school with kind of paved the way and there was a second one I was the third one there were a couple more that came after me actually it's more than it's more than the five I said because there were a couple I hired as well out of Fermilab but you know a lot of people are not really sure so it does you can run into the problem of people not really being sure what you are so what's really important is you need to know this list what is it you offer because if you can get in the ear of somebody every time I've actually gotten an interview with somebody to explain what I am and what I bring well they give a job offer every time but getting to that point can be a little tricky so you need to know how you're writing your resumes and you know writing cover letters and things like that and and playing the game getting getting a phone call with somebody so you can explain it but you have to have this explanation down because just saying I'm a physicist or I'm a mathematician okay so but if you can explain what you bring that's that makes it huge in the business world they are always every business I know is looking for good people desperate to find good people is very hard to find good people but they won't know you're good unless you tell them you're good so you're going to need stand what you bring to the table now this is sort of a basic foundation of what you bring each one of you is different right you're gonna have different things that you're good at this teaching and mentoring I actually think from my personal career this one has actually been the the most important part of the whole thing even when I was a single contributor I found myself being a translator between two people who spoke perfect English constantly communications and being able to write I mean I'll get up in front of groups of people and present is what has been the biggest thing for my career at that might at the company I'm at now so that's for me well it's probably true it is funny how often I feel like wait a second this sounds an awful lot like a sermon I probably should dial that down yeah yeah absolutely well I actually wasn't here was up in what is now your office so when I was here and I think you guys still do this we had advanced lab for physics for it one of the upper division physics classes and the advanced lab class you would have to do some different more difficult than normal than you know like a general physics or physics or psych I Neville lab and it usually didn't work for quite a while and then you finally got it working and then you had to go give a presentation about what you've done what it meant and defend what you what you had done and the perfect there was one particular professor at the time I don't know how is he ever around the department anymore probably not Bob Kingman anybody you know Bob yeah so he at least when I was there always made a point of really being difficult I mean really difficult more difficult than anything I ever ran into in grad school as a postdoc or in my my non academic career and it was fantastic you know at the time you hate it but it has meant I know how to put a presentation together and I constantly get compliments from bosses and whoever else oh you came in with a clear message you have clear evidence behind boom boom boom and we're done today is a little bit of a sloppy thing cuz this is more an informal discussion but you know you you will get probably good at that especially if you spend much time in this field either of these fields very long at all so for me that's been the biggest thing I think more than anything I get analytical skills are great all of that thing but understanding and then being able to communicate it to other people is an extraordinarily rare skill very rare I think more rare than even the analytical skills I knows a lot of smart p
ople where I work but I don't know very many people who can get up and talk about it in a way that anyone's gonna understand so if you have that now there's another one so understand what you're bringing to the table be able to explain it in five minutes to somebody and you'd be surprised how quickly you know things come together and and some of the things you have to point out is you're not just the jack of all trades and master of none my background most physicists background is you kind of do a little bit of everything and so people think well okay you've done a little bit of everything but you're not really good at anything well that's not actually the case most physicists I know are jack-of-all-trades master of most of them which is pretty obnoxious for everybody else to deal with but it's true and they love it as long as you're not kind of you know an arrogant pain in the butt about it and of course there's a communications perception everyone's watch you know Big Bang Theory too much and they think everything you know physicists are like Sheldon Cooper and they're gonna be difficult to deal with it's not the case right we know that but they don't and so being personable being a being an approachable person being a normal person when you talk to people big plus all right and so my final statement here on this subject is the world needs more physicists and mathematicians working in every kind of human endeavor we bring unique things to the table we do stuff and we can and we add value in ways nobody else they may be chemists and biologists have a little piece of it but come on we know better right my wife was a chemistry major when I met her so I always have to get old honestly I mean come on really I don't see enough nodding of the heads yeah we we do stuff other people don't do right I mean seriously we know this right let's be it's okay to be a little arrogant sometimes when you're right yeah and you're in a safe audience here so yeah so we've got things to bring that wouldn't be there otherwise so we need to be out there so if you're pursuing an academic career that's great and and obviously the academic career is a way of prolonging and continuing the the values that come here right all this stuff you're learning is coming because you have good teachers and maybe you're a good teacher and you should be part of that prolonging it but the majority the reason we need to do this stuff is not so that we can keep doing this stuff so that it provides value out there and we have that we really have that capability and it's it's very exciting actually it's it's it's kind of amazing I I i finished my days at work pretty regularly and you know I've touched my life or somebody call my folks I had this thing happened at work today and it felt really good because I was able to do this thing that wasn't getting done otherwise it's pretty cool feeling and I never expected it you know I like I said I was intending to do research I wanted to be a particle physicist I was you know had my day dreams of being a Nobel Prize winner I had worked for someone who's this close to the Nobel Prize it was really exciting stuff and then a friend of mine had been hassling me for years to come work outside at the bank and he actually conned me into the interview we were gonna go car racing is one of my hobbies and and he like now let's go to the let's go to the car show this is in Chicago okay let's go to our show cool calls me up the knife we're all by the way we're so you can bring your resume he's been bugging me for years and I asked him what he did and I thought sounded horribly boring and probably what he did was honestly but he all right fine I had just been turned down by all 10 of those schools that I applied to yourselves I mean feeling bad or whatever what and it was a fantastic gonna be what five minutes and I was like this sounds pretty fun what they wanted was somebody who could actually look at there was a there's an application that 85% of the fortune 500 we're using to do their treasure management so it's all the banking for big companies essentially on a website and it's 40 applications that are feeding into this website and if anything went down it was a problem and you know an individual developer or database admin or network person or whatever who's gonna fix this well database is fine well a number just fine well my app is fine yeah but it's still not working and so they were putting together a team to go in and have that holistic approach and just rule over triage and fixing things and it sounds kind of fine like fun could you get a little bit of everything and so I did it I had from it was on a Friday and the next Monday they needed a decision so I had a weekend to decide to change my life and I have not regretted it at all maybe the first couple weeks that was tough they actually let me finish I was finishing up my W gamma paper and they let me finish that and I posted it in my in my cubicle and I it was interesting people actually came by and read it which I'm not even sure my physics buddies read it but yeah it was a really it's been a really rewarding thing I've been there 15 years now and I feel I still feel like I have unique things I'm bringing to the table constantly and and I have hired a number of other physicists other friends of mine been hired by other people in the company and in every case I don't think there's any exceptions I can't think of a single exception in every case when we've hired a hard science person to come in they have been a unique contributor a highly valued contributor and you know someone who has had a very good career so you have options you have a lot of things that you can do there's more stuff in this deck about how to do it I I do think that it's important for your professors and I and I believe your professors here do this you know are not just preparing you for the academic career paths that are preparing you for how you do the non-academic stuff - how do you write a resume versus a CV things like that that's also in here I don't want to spend too much time on that it's more about the you have value outside of academia and I want to make sure people understand that because if you have that I also happen to know you know from my experience with people from the hard sciences and once they're motivated it's gonna happen so this is mostly a motivational thing or at least I hope so so I think that's enough of me ranting so any questions comments yeah it's almost all indirect almost all indirect there are some times like math and physics comes in uhsorry math and statistics come in but it's pretty minimal I gets the simplest stuff it's amazing like you know just understanding how to look at data and instead of just looking at an average looking at a distribution none of my peers has ever made a histogram and when I make a histogram I have to spend 10 minutes explaining what a histogram is all right so so there is a little bit of direct stuff from my academic background I would say almost all of its indirect though just the ability to look at stuff ability to understand data in general there are some things in terms of their a little bit of the the statistic stuff comes in and then of course I don't know if you count like the programming and the IT stuff it's not really math and physics but it's stuff I did directly to to make physics results happen but I would call that probably more indirect so it's almost all indirect however having done this the direct stuff that you're doing now is key to having that indirect capability you wouldn't have the indirect capability without having done the direct stuff you're not going to just get it somewhere and the reason I know that is nobody I know who who I work with has this skill set without having sort of that hard science background my boss is actually an engineering is an engineer by trading like he was environmental engineer and mechanical engineer and I have found my bosses that I really respect and really do well I'll have the hard science background so you don't get it without it so it's a good question it is I'm actually it was something I was thinking saying I was just sitting in her offices for he came down here and she had a review sheet from a quantum mechanics class and I was looking through it and was like yeah we're not about half of this so yeah you do you do you do tend not to use all of it but but you use but but those skills whether you're using it to do some sort of weird mathematical thing for physics or math or you're doing some analysis of things at work that have nothing to do with those things it's the same skill set
