I’ve long toyed with a mid-life pivot into a different field. Mostly, I lean towards IT as the most practical for me, but I love the idea of finally studying a hard science, which I grew to love, but never really got a good formal education in.
I’ve heard/read, for example, that there aren’t necessarily tons of astrophysics jobs out there, so if you only have a bachelor’s degree, you might have a tough time. I don’t even know that this is true, but I use it as an example.
What are the hard science fields that would be the opposite of this? I could imagine there might be a lot of Chemistry-related jobs, for example, maybe? But I have a hard time imagining what you could do with a pure Physics degree (without also focusing on Engineering or something supplementary)? Would Biology get you anywhere by itself?
Or is it just the hard truth of all hard sciences that you’re pretty much worthless with just a four-year degree, from a job perspective?
I’ve got a bachelor’s degree in geoscience, which got me a job without issues - in IT.
No, as much as high school guidance counselors try to tell you different, there’s nothing magical about any STEM degree that will reliably get you a job.
For most jobs, the “filter” is getting the job itself. Not having a relevant degree might prevent you from getting a job, but having the degree doesn’t mean you will be selected. There are exceptions like getting into medical school really sets you on a pathway where as long as you stick with it, you should end up with a job, bit that’s cause it’s really hard (and expensive) to get into med school, so that part is the “filter”.
You might hear of a particular skillet being really hot that guarantees you a job, and that does happen, but it is really ephemeral. By the time you get a 4 year degree, the landscape may have changed.
You can absolutely get a job with a 4 year hard science degree, but you can’t just go to class, get all A’s and step into a job. You need to be connected throughout the process. Also keep in mind what type of job you want to do, and where it is geographically. You might have good job prospects with a geology degree and fossil fuel expertise, but the jobs might be in undesirable locations.
Great thoughts, thank you. You addressed a lot of the questions I was getting at. For example, nursing and various related positions (running CAT scans, etc.) truly seem to be in-demand everywhere. But often when I hear about some supposedly in-demand field that pays well and check near me in the southeast, I’ll get maybe half a dozen results.
Yeah, nursing is probably a job that is always going to have steady demand, but it seems like (and I could be totally wrong here) there’s a pretty broad range of job opportunities where some might work you like a dog and pay horribly, while others are great.
If you are interested in jobs in your area, definitely reach out to some people to ask their opinions on long term job prospects. Your local hospital’s CAT scan technician (or whatever their title is) can tell you if they are hurting for people, or if all of their peers are close to retiring.
For chemistry? No.
The most common job track for someone with a BS in chemistry is something on the analytical side. Think: contract lab that processes environmental or pharmaceutical samples. All you really need to know how to do is press some buttons and follow detailed instructions. So - the work is both exacting and boring. And to find this unfun job - you will be in direct competition with every biology major in your region. And there are hoards of them. And the hiring manager will be one of them. If you can score a job, be prepared for the low pay that goes along with a plentiful labor pool, along with the frustrations of working with people that don’t have the ideal frame of reference for talking through problems.
Other options?
In my area, microbiologists are in higher demand, so I think someone might get by with a BS. Standard bio majors seem to have had an idea of becoming naturalists or park rangers after graduation, so many didn’t specialize. They can count birds or frogs and are still acting weird about having to memorize the Krebs Cycle, but aren’t really up to speed on aseptic technique or all that other micro stuff.
Physics? I can’t even imagine.
Engineering is interesting. 30 years ago some people came to my highschool to talk to the “indoor kids.” They were pitching the idea that “the engineers of today are 30-40 something baby boomers who have high paying jobs that they absolutely love! In the next 5-10 years we will be facing a crisis as they all retire early, and GenX could easily be called the Baby Crunch.* There’s no one to replace these engineers who are living the dream! You’re looking at a great opportunity if you study engineering.” A good portion of my class took that advice. Bwah-hah-hah-haa! No one retired early. Great pay + great job = early retirement? No.
No engineering grads that I knew got a decent job because there were no openings and a high number of qualified applicants. Companies did find some cheap engineers, though. The ones I know now (GenX and Millennial) found other careers and swallowed the bitterness.
I’ve heard that something similar happened in the 2010s with law degrees. In the 2000s it seemed like every 30-yo with a crappy job was studying nursing. Point being - if someone is saying that there is a desperate need for workers with Skill X and that they make a great living, it means that companies don’t want to pay current market rate for Skill X. They want you to take out loans to train yourselves for the skill they want at the price they want.
*Demographics. In the US the birthrate fell dramatically in the '60s and '70s. Before Doug Coopland came up with a marketable name for it, GenX was being called a Baby Crunch. Reasons? Birth control. Oil crisis. Vietnam War. Boomers waiting a bit longer to start their families. Reasons.
Thank you for such a detailed answer.
It’s shitty, but employers tend to use an expensive degree as a form of prescreening. You can get an HR job or similar with a bachelors in literature.
Or is it just the hard truth of all hard sciences that you’re pretty much worthless with just a four-year degree, from a job perspective?
Where did you get that idea? Engineers generally only have a four-year degree, and they famously make good money.
I think it was a video or article on astrophysics that I encountered some time ago. But the idea that stuck with me was, “Don’t bother with astrophysics unless you have a Masters or, ideally, Ph.D.”
I’m not claiming it’s the case, I just have no exposure to that path. I don’t know what it looks like to study a hard science and then enter the job field from that angle. Engineering is a helpful example.
If you want to work in academics, you need Masters at the very least, and a PhD if you want to be more than someone’s grading monkey. That’s true of hard sciences and it’s really true of softer subjects.
Astrophysics has no commercial applications that I’m aware of, with space forecasting for the government being the closest thing. So, if you want to use an astrophysics degree for astrophysics, then yes, 4-year is nothing. However, you can probably convince some finance nepobaby you’re a genius and make money as a quant with just a bachelors in (astro-)physics.
Do you want to work in astrophysics, or just in a hard science job of some kind?
This is helpful.
I meant it to be broad. Just a good job/realistic job prospects in a hard science-connected field. I potentially have the opportunity to go back to school and I’m wondering what scientific paths, if any, can lead to job prospects with a four-year degree. The reasoning being that I hope to transfer some credits from my previous degree and can’t really commit to six or eight years of additional study right now. But 2-4 is potentially feasible.
Yeah, then you can figure something out I’m sure. What is your background? If you can bring past experience “with you” to some extent, you’ll have a much easier time, even with just 2 years of education behind you. Everybody shits on hires fresh out of college.
This is the part where I make a disclaimer that I’m not exactly a career rolemodel, I just hear a lot of talk and know people from all kinds of backgrounds. And read the statistics on things.
My background isn’t really related to science. I got a degree in Broadcast Media, then worked mostly in Politics and Marketing/Communications. So I’m not sure a ton of credits will transfer, but I’m hoping to get an idea across a spectrum of possibilities.
Hmm. Well, if you do go IT, you could look for a UI/UX (user interfaces/experience) role where they might see that as an asset. Or maybe do marketing analytics - anything math heavy could potentially get you into that. I don’t even mean college credits, I mean job experience on your resume (since you were worried about finding a job afterwards) - it’s just as important in non-academic hard science as in other disciplines.
The academic credits are another thing, though. Hard science education can be pretty demanding, and the drop-out rates in some of them - like engineering - are sky-high. Then again, professors say older students almost always do well.
No. A charming personality and connections is the only thing that will get you a good job. Otherwise it’s luck and a numbers game
that is, once you have the degree
I do think people underestimate how significant “who you know” and the social aspect of getting jobs. Just make friends with people and seek opportunities to meet and get to know people relevant to the field and places of employment where you want to work.
I’m going back for a degree. I’ll be over 40 when I graduate. I found that a lack of formal education was a filter for a lot of positions.
I wrecked my back a few years ago, and that made going back into heavy equipment or high access positions pretty dangerous. So I started looking outside my field and what I found was basically any bachelor’s degree open doors.
I did what you’re describing and it worked out well for me, but YMMV. Here’s what I did:
I got an undergrad degree in physics, and was hired right out of school by a government contractor. My only hard skill from the degree was coding in LabVIEW, something I never have done in the workplace. Arguably my only real use in my first job was to be a person who submitted a timesheet that could be billed as a person with a STEM degree.
I changed jobs for a much better contractor where I did a lot of “system engineering” style analysis with MatLab, which I mostly learned on the job, and eventually moved into Python which I learned entirely on the job. Python really resonated with me, particularly using it for Data Science applications. I got a Masters degree in Applied Physics from a highly renowned school taking after hours courses that my job paid for. Most of the courses had no conceivable application to my day job.
I eventually was hired away from the contracting world and am a Data Engineer for a private company.
The thing a physics degree truly demonstrates is the ability to learn difficult concepts, think analytically, and have the math to back it up. If you go this route, you’ll kind of be a generalist right out of the gate and need to be open to trying a bunch of new things to figure out what works for you. A master’s degree certainly helps, and learning a useful programming language really helps. Be prepared to start somewhere as an analyst, and build from there.
Thanks for your perspective, it’s super helpful.
Was your physics degree a second degree or your first/primary?
It’s interesting to hear Python was so useful as I’ve wondered whether hiring managers snub their nose at Python (it’s the only language I have semi-real experience in, so far).
A BS in Physics was my primary degree (I double majored so I also had a BA in a language that has never been of any professional use to me).
Python is so ubiquitous that it’s a great tool to know for a multitude of applications, and it pairs well with a physics background since that increases your usefulness as a generalist.
It is important to make the distinction between a programmer with a hard science/math degree and one with a computer science degree. The former will likely struggle more with building up larger libraries, following best practices for modularity/extendability/backwards compatibility, and other computer science sort of stuff that the latter will ingrain much better. The flip side is that computer science tends to not have as much of an emphasis on a math background, so analysis and Data Science applications often benefit more from the science/math background than the comp sci one (please note that I’m making highly generalized statements here based on what I’ve observed).
To summarize, if you want to build an app to do something, you want comp sci, but if you want to build a statistical model and have the ability to rigorously validate it and explain what it’s doing, you’re going to need that math background.
Several states have licensed geologists and environmental scientists.
You can also get a degree in biology and become a certified wetland delineator with some minor additional education.
Thanks, it’s interesting and helpful to hear specific jobs that exist in these various fields.
For physics specifically, a bachelor’s degree probably won’t be enough to get a job in physics.
You might be able to get a job as a technician in a lab, but they typically will look for people with a master’s degree for those roles. With just a bachelor’s , you’d need to get your foot in the door by already having some relevant experience, which is a possibility if you get some research experience in college and pivot that into an internship or something. But it would definitely require effort and luck.
cries in early 2000’s Biology degree
Bioinformatics may suit, especially if you go hard at understanding biochem. In fact all the Informatics (Medical, Chemical, Geo, …) have good prospects, and at the very least will get you quickly past the bottom IT rungs and likely in interesting places. Mathematics (perhaps Computational) is surprisingly versatile and very much in demand if you can be creative about presenting yourself, you’ve proved you can handle some of the most complex shit out there.
But it’s probably worth making a mini research project out of exploring your options, weeks spent now might be very rewarding long term.
Super helpful, thank you. I will look into informatics. Yes, I’m trying to do as much research as possible between now and ~January, when I may have the chance to go back.
I can second bioinformatics if you have the aptitude for biology and IT, the pay can be 10-20k higher than a similar wet lab science job. But technically the skills you have could get you paid more in pure IT (science generally pays less). Demand is high, so the barrier to entry is generally lower (no hard requirements for phd, only a bachelors minimum or work experience in a similar field). Less physical labour too. Downside is that team sizes are usually small so you’ll be doing alot of multitasking.
Yeah, you can get an ABET engineering degree for marine technology that will let you work on-shore, or on ships anywhere in the world. A lot of union jobs too.
A computer science degree can open a ton of doors with a lot of money behind them if you actually learn the course material, and spend extra time getting good at programming, data, or software architecture while you’re at it.
