Most scientists and engineers find careers in three general sectors of society: colleges and universities, industries, and federal and state agencies. Their work includes an array of activities, from the conduct of basic and applied research to the design and application of new commercial products to the operation and maintenance of large engineering systems.
You can make your planning more effective by appreciating the direction in which professional careers are shifting within that larger picture. For example, for many students, a PhD will mean a career as an academic researcher. But more than half the students who receive PhDs in science and engineering obtain work outside academe—a proportion that has increased steadily for 2 decades. And full-time academic positions in general are more difficult to find than they were during the 1960s and 1970s, when the research enterprise was expanding more rapidly.
As our society changes, so too do the opportunities for careers in science and engineering. The end of the Cold War has removed some incentive for the federal government to fund defense-oriented basic research. Increased national and
global competition has forced many industries to reduce expenses and staff. That means that there are fewer research and development positions in universities, industries, and government laboratories than there are qualified scientists and engineers looking for them.
Powerful changes have swept through the universities. For example, there are strong public pressures for universities to shift their emphasis toward teaching and toward undergraduate education; the number of positions for permanent faculty has decreased; professors are no longer required to retire at a particular age; and more part-time and temporary faculty are being employed. All those trends affect the universities' ability to hire scientists and engineers.
At the same time, small and medium-sized companies in some fields are increasing their research and development activity as they develop new technologies. The natural advance of technology is creating new opportunities in information science, software design, biotechnology, data processing, environmental engineering, electronic networking, manufacturing and computational simulation, and forensic science. Government agencies are converting some of their defense-oriented efforts to research in environmental work, communication, information, and other fields. Recent graduates with skills in more than a single discipline are attractive to businesses in these and other multi-disciplinary fields, especially if they have dual master's degrees or strong minors
Scientists and engineers are learning to apply their expertise more broadly. Professionals in the physical sciences find employment not only in the discipline of their degree but also in a wide variety of related careers where their analytic and reasoning abilities are valued.
For example, increasing numbers of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers find their skills valued in the financial arena. More than 14% of the firms recruiting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 were financial companies, nearly 3 times as many as in 1983. Graduates are being put to work writing software, using computers to capitalize on market inefficiencies, constructing financial models that predict fluctuations in securities prices, and designing complex mathematical tools to assess portfolio risk.
In engineering, careers are being transformed by several intersecting trends. International companies now draw employees from many nations, seeking out valued experts from a global pool of labor to work project by project. Companies value multilingual workers with a breadth of competencies—managerial as well as technical—and the ability to access and apply new scientific and technologic knowledge. The more flexible and mobile you can be, the more opportunities you will have and the greater will be your control over the shape of your career.
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