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Jef wrote:If you want to work in a specific job or sector it pays to do some research. For example, although my GF has a first class degree in economics she has not had much luck in getting a job in the financial sector. She has had to apply for a masters with much more of a focus on the pragmatic business application of economics in order to gain the practical skills employers are specifying in job vacancies. My advice would therefore be to research the software and skill sets specified by potential employers in your chosen field before fixing on any particular course.

I am planning to give myself a year to do research before I make my decision, so hopefully I am able to gain the knowledge I need by this time next year. I know that I am interested in doing research as a profession.

My job search after getting my degree in May hasn't gone well, either. One job recruiter told me I would have a hard time due to unemployment (there are more people with more experience plus a degree competing with me for jobs), only having an undergraduate degree (as he has been interviewing people who just obtained their Masters), and having little professional experience outside of school projects.

However, no matter which postgrad course you do it will improve your employability, regardless that the sector for which you are trained may not be the sector you are employed within. I can say with confidence that even though my academic qualifications are of little direct relevance to my current employment I would not have been interviewed for the position had I not had those qualifications.

That is something to consider as I have been given advice to receive a graduate degree for the purposes of being more desirable to employers. Thank you for the advice.

snowman wrote:Well, physicist have one large advantage over all other graduats. They can work in every field. They can work in science, in physics, engineering, informatics, management or politics. As physicist you learn analytic thinking which is a basic feature wanted in most jobs.

Thank you, I will take that into consideration.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:I am doing a post-grad course in education at the moment, and one unit involves supervision of Masters/PhD candidates. It makes official what we all know by anecdote- 80% of PGR degrees fail because of supervisor problems. [Only 20% caused by the candidate]. In other words, the supervisor is the main thing to worry about. Get a shit supervisor, and you are pushing shit up hill. Or I should say, the supervisor must not only be competent, but committed and you have to have an excellent working relationship. It is no good placing priority on your dream project because no one might be interested-it is not too much of a conflation to say that many PhDs end up doing what their school and supervisor wants them to do, which may only be tangential to what the student wants. They have the funding bucks, so that is how it goes. There are exceptions of course. If the student is clever, he/she can frame the question in a way acceptable to funding bodies. This is of course, what the post-doc has to do for the rest of their lives. I may be exaggerating the situation a bit, but not by much.

Thank you, I know very little of what experience to expect as a graduate student. Would you recommend talking to graduate students in a program before entering that program to get an idea of what the culture is like and who would make a decent supervisor?