I was so honored to be invited to our SPS Zone 2 team members at Ithaca College to give a talk called “Career Paths of Physics Degree Holders”. This talk was done as part of my role as an APS career mentoring fellow.

First off the students were amazing! There was lots of good questions and discussion! At the end of the meeting we were talking about ways to set up events between Ithaca’s and Adelphi’s physics club. (Hey Adelphi students, the Ithaca students actually turned their cameras on.) It was awesome!

I was so happy that one student called the talk “zero BS”. OMG that is the highest honor you can give me. I just dived in to the topics and tried to give the students a realistic picture of what searching for jobs was all about.

There were two things I loved about the presentation that APS made for the fellows. The first was the slide animation that showed how while > 50% of PhD holders start working at universities only about 30% are still working there after 15 years. The other 20% had slunk to industry jobs. Why not just start there. I wrote about this here.

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The second thing I loved were the physics profiles. Check them out here! I will definitely be using these in future talks. The information is presented in a nice way online and very logical for the website; however, I really liked them in the power point format. It was easy for folks to just flip through and not have to make any decisions. They can be exposed to everything. I even made a poorly formatted one from my own industry days.

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For the second half of the talk, I broke with the talk that APS prepared (which had a heavy influence on PhDs) and focused on resume building. I tried to get students to recognize that it is important tailor application materials (cover letter, resume, etc) for individual companies and graduate schools. The research and networking is really the important part of the job search process. And I loved that I got to use my line “when you hit submit on a job ad, it is akin to hitting the delete key.” I have to walk back from that a little bit, but its good to get the discussion going.

Teaching at Ithaca would be dream. It is such a wonderful school, great students, and of course Ithaca is gorges. Rosie and I stopped in Ithaca recently to go swimming at one of the gorges on our way to Erie. (In Erie, we have Windergreen Gorge, which is like a 1 out of 10 on the gorge scale.) It is a beautiful area. I think I would miss the speed, diversity, power, and grit of the NYC area though.