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Breaking Away from Programming?
Captain Numerica asks: "I've been working as a programmer since I graduated from high school. I've been paying my own way through college, and now I'm about to graduate with a BS in Physics. I plan on continuing my studies to a PhD in Physics, but first I need to get on my feet financially, as a fellowship/TA position isn't yet sufficient for the debt I've accumulated in my more irresponsible years. I'm leaving my university with a great deal of programming experience -- a fact that I might want to advertise to potential employers. However, at the same time I don't want to become type-casted as just a programmer, as my real skills involve analytical and experimental physics. Has anyone working as a research engineer/scientist come out of college under similar circumstances?" For those of you with significant programming skills, but the wish to focus in areas more suitable to your education, how did you avoid falling into the Programmer IT Trap?
Apply for research positions in companies, and not for development ones. At least where I work, the two are clearly distinct. Product research is done by HW&SW researchers, and generally requires a Masters or PhD. These people make patents, algorithms, or fairly raw prototypes. Product developement is done by HW&SW developers, and generally requires a degree. These people develop products for sale, and sometimes productize the ideas that come from research. If you are looking to go back to academic research, then the research angle is the one to pursue. Development (and I speak as a developer) is always same old same old, even when it's a new product, since it's all about "the process". Following the process, renewing the process, refining the process, documenting the process, auditing the process, ignoring the process when it comes to crunch time, .... blech.
I am under the impression it may be best to work on your masters while being employed.
... next year I'm going to be starting on my Ph.D. studies, and I'm going to be doing it full-time on a research assistant's stipend. This means cutting my income roughly in half, which in turn means downgrading my lifestyle by a fair bit -- and you know what? I'm okay with that. I've lived on a lot less money than I make now before in my life, and I can do it again. It will be worth it to get some sleep every once in a while.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I'm just finishing up my M.S. on this plan; while it's allowed me to maintain a fairly luxurious (by my standards, anyway) lifestyle while I've been in school, it's also been a hellish amount of work, and I haven't been able to devote as much energy to work or school as I'd have liked. The way I look at it is that any graduate degree worth getting is hard, and any job worth doing is hard, and so it stands to reason that doing both at the same time is going to be really hard.
I'm glad I did it, but
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Have you ever worked with National Instruments' LabVIEW environment?
It's a little-known fact that LabVIEW has something like a 90+% marketshare in the realm of, well, I'm not sure what you'd call it: Engineering/Scientific-ish data gathering - the kinds of things that Engineers and "Scientists" do in their laboratories and out on the assembly line floor.
Anyway, if you search at monster.com, you'll see that there are often more hits on "LabVIEW" than there are on "MCSD" [Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer]:
So if you know LabVIEW, and you're pretty good at the physics/math/EE stuff, then you could do some fairly interesting work at a pretty good salary while you pay off your debts.Also, it's another little-known fact that National Instruments offers certifications in LabVIEW, so that you can earn yourself a little "diploma" which might open a few more doors: