With declining enrollments, physics departments are challenged either to excel at providing a traditional academic physics program or to adapt their programs to prepare graduates better for the broader employment market. The survey identified 7 "big gainers" and 28 "big losers," in terms of changes in the numbers of physics majors. The losers tended to be large departments in PhD-granting institutions, and the gainers were relatively small departments. The losers cited a number of reasons for the drop in student numbers, including increased competition from other programs, notably computer science and engineering; poor employment prospects for graduates in the geographic region; declining preparation of incoming students. The gainers had all taken some action to change their enrollments. Their efforts included instituting a double major with a department like electrical engineering or a 3-2 program in which students transfer to an engineering school after three years; increasing opportunities for student research; doing more student mentoring; and offering practical career skills.
Another source of information about departmental innovations is the APS career and professional development liaison program. Under this program, started in 1998 about 200 undergraduate and graduate physics departments have selected faculty members to serve as career liaisons. The program provides a means to funnel career information to the departments and acts as a forum for the departments to share initiatives or "best practices" with each other. Depending on the degree of change, the groups are put into three categories.
1. Business-as-usual. Virtually all departments provide advice to students on a one-on-one basis and through postings on departmental bulletin boards or a local Web page. The extent, accuracy, and timeliness of this advice vary widely with the knowledge, interest level, and mentoring skills of the faculty in charge.
In some departments, students are assigned to handle career-related activities, or they do it by default, in others, a faculty member takes the initiative.
Faculty members are at a loss when it comes to jobs in the private sector. That's especially true for jobs on the periphery of a technical area, such as management consulting or product development. It is a professor's responsibility to become more knowledgeable about the physics marketplace, even if it takes a little time from research. Faculty members might start by learning about the jobs held by alumni from their own departments. Or they might invite as prime-time colloquium speakers various alumni and other researchers who are doing research in areas far from the department's interests.
Physics is fortunate to have an excellent pulse on employment and enrollment trends from statistics compiled by the American Institute of Physics. Physics Today and newsletters of various professional organizations report on current career issues. Also helpful to students are employment listing services and career workshops, such as those run by AIP's Career Services Division.
Information about the health and appropriateness of specific career paths, particularly outside of the traditional sectors of academia and industrial and government research laboratories, is more difficult to extract. Various careers are explored in a recently released CD-ROM, Careers for Physicists, which was produced by AIP. Periodically, certain fields suddenly become hot, as photonics and information technologies are today. Physicists have their best shot at entering such fields if they can react quickly, before the field is widely publicized. For instance, one new field that emerged a few years ago was bioinformatics, the computer-based methods of piecing together gene sequencing and analysis. A few physicists recognized the relevance of the math they used in physics and got in on the ground floor.
2. Evolutionary changes. Many departments broaden students' horizons by supplementing the physics curriculum. Increasingly, departments are inviting physicists who work in diverse areas to give departmental seminars or talks at chapter meetings of the Society of Physics Students (SPS). Speakers can be drawn from industry, alumni, or from speaker lists. Some SPS chapters organize tours of local industries and research laboratories, or go on "road trips" to section meetings of the APS or the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Career-skill courses. A number of departments have instituted seminar series or courses in career-expanding areas. These range from interdisciplinary courses such as biophysics and skill enhancements such as computation and electronics, to the practical and nontechnical, such as business, scientific writing, and the like. Some allow or require students to take courses in other departments; others hold seminars on pragmatic topics like how to search for jobs and prepare for interviews; still others integrate career-oriented course offerings into their formal program.
Internships. Programs that involve students working with professional physicists, either in an industrial setting or in a university laboratory, work well for undergraduates, especially when done under the mentorship of a caring adviser. Such internships or research positions give students a realistic sense of what a physicist does. They also offer students the opportunity to work in a team or group environment, make decisions that have impact on the success or failure of the project, and feel the responsibility and satisfaction of being creative.
3. Revolutionary changes. Some departments have made significant structural changes to reinvigorate their undergraduate or graduate programs. The addition of a dual-track undergraduate curriculum seems to have been a factor in enabling departments to maintain their size or even to grow.
Southwest Texas State University has created a flourishing undergraduate and master's degree physics program that builds on the strengths and labor needs of its predominant local industry, silicon chips. The SWT physics and technology departments have entered into an effective collaboration with local industry.
Professional master's degree programs. About 50 US physics departments have instituted master's degree programs tailored to employment in such industries as semiconductors, medical physics, electronics, optics and photonics, instrumentation, computation, and environmental monitoring. A few programs are unabashedly oriented toward business. For example, Case Western Reserve University offers "Entrepreneurial Physics," and the University of Southern California has "Physics for Business Applications." Professional master's degree programs include courses and projects that lay a good foundation in physical principles and teach problem-solving skills pertinent to their focus disciplines. The programs also provide practical, hands-on training and experience, often in an industrial setting.
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