Developing Careers in Physics -- Perspectives of Particle Physics Researchers from the VBScan network at various stages of their careers
DDeveloping Careers in Physics – Perspectives of Particle Physics Researchersfrom the VBScan network at various stages of their careersVBSCAN-PUB-09-19
Kristin Lohwasser Department of Physics and Astronomy, Sheffield University, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Outlooks of particle physics researchers on their careers and the general chal-lenges in establishing their careers over different career stages are surveyed usinga questionnaire distributed to participants in an ERC-funded research network,“VBScan”. The respondents displayed a great deal of insight into what is neededfor a career in academia, or ore specifically particle physics, though they also didnot downplay the element of “luck”. Some notable differences between careerlevels could be observed in problems raised and attitudes towards careers. a r X i v : . [ phy s i c s . e d - ph ] D ec . Introduction Navigating an (academic) career or just understanding one’s role in the wider community of one’s field ofresearch can be a difficult experience. Internationally, about 20% of PhD students will stay in academia orcontinue working in fundamental research [1, 2]. This insecurity before tenure as well as the different tasksand duties of their roles, the challenges faced by PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, junior and seniorstaff members can be quite different. Studies show that career goals and perceptions change over time dueto the increased influence of personal relationships and disillusionment with career prospects in the field ofstudy [3, 4].Particle physics and particle phycistics have been the object of anthropological and sociological stud-ies since its beginning [5, 6, 7], being an ideal playground to study decision making and construction ofscientific truth or knowledge [8]. More recently, the focus has shifted towards the impact that large col-laborations have on crediting of scientific work [9] and more specifically on authorship [10, 11] and alsoknowledge acquisition inside the collaboration [12]. That having a career in particle physics research andthat there are implicit requirements and expectations, that are not always made transparent has already beenpointed out by Sharon Traweek in Ref. [5]:It is widely understood among the senior group members in American labs that it is notsufficient for a postdoc to do this sort of mundane job well; independent, risky work must beundertaken as well. So far as I know, no one tells this to the postdoc. Some sense it immediately;some discover it when they realize that their hard labor is not getting the attention they want;others never learn.Whilst further work describes very briefly the perceived means of researchers trying to distinguishthemselves within a large collaboration [9], it does little to explore the outlooks of these researchers on theircareers and their possible struggles in establishing their careers over the different stages of their career. Thepresent work aims to close this gap using a structured questionnaire which explores first general attitudestowards physics and the initial interest in the subject before exploring attitudes towards careers, what ittakes to have a career in physics and how they judged their place in physics changed over the years and howresearchers felt about their current position within the field.
2. Methodology and Sample Properties
The questionnaire was created to be online accessible and a link was distributed via various VBScan net-work mailing lists (totalling about 150 subscribers). The VBScan network is a scientific network sponsoredby the European Research Council (ERC) within their COST network programme . It is open to researchersaround the globe, but travel funds are generally only available to members of the participating Europeanresearch institutions and meetings are organised only in European member countries . In general, the ques-tions were formulated to be relatively open and required free text answers, that allowed respondents to The main goal of the VBSCan project is to investigate the Vector Boson Scattering (VBS) process and its implications for theStandard Model, by coordinating existing theoretical and experimental efforts in the area and by best exploiting hadron collidersdata, thereby laying the groundwork for long-term studies of the subject and creating a solidly interconnected community of VBSexperts. ( https://vbscanaction.web.cern.ch/ ) The 38 COST Member Countries are: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, CzechRepublic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg,Malta, the Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, The Netherlands, The Republic of North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, xpand on those aspects that they were most interested in, providing a qualitative overview over attitudestowards particle physics and careers.Out of the more than 150 possible respondents, 23 replied. Out of those, 12 prefered to stay anony-mous (the questionnaire gave the option to fill in an email address), whilst 11 people allowed themselvesto be identifiable. Fig. 1 summarizes the career levels of the respondents. Slightly less PhD students (4or 17.4%) and post-doctoral researchers (5 or 21.7%) have replied compared to permanent researchers (7or 30.4% for both junior and senior researchers). Still, numbers are similar for the different career lev-els. In general however, answers from post-doctoral researchers, junior and senior permanent researcherswere much longer and generally more detailed than those of PhD students. Five respondents were female,corresponding to 21.7%, which is reflective of the number of females in the field [13]. (7)(within the first 10 year)Permanent/FacultyPhD student (4) (5)researcherPostdoctoral (7)(>10 year on permanent position)Senior
Career level of respondents
Fig. 1: Career levels of the respondents: It is split up roughly equally between permanent (60%) and non-permanent researchers(PhDs, post-docs, 40%).
The geographical origin (“country of origin”) of participants reflects roughly the dominance of re-searchers from Italy, Germany, France and Spain in the VBScan network (5:4:3:3). Further three respondentscame from other European countries and one respondent originated from outside of Europe. As probably tobe expected in the very international environment of particle physics, about a third of respondents (8) werenot living in their country of origin. Also a third had studied or completed their PhD somewhere other thantheir country of origin (8). Five (21.7%) were still working abroad after they had done their PhD abroad, six(26.1%) did either work abroad or had done their PhD abroad, but not both. As a consequence of the highmobility of the researchers, everyone had worked for more than one institution. 30.4% had already alreadyworked at six or more institutions as summarised in Fig. 2. All of the 4 PhD students that had answered hadchanged institute for their PhD.
3. General attitude towards Physics
Before concentrating on career advice and career goals in a more narrow sense, the questionnaire aimed toinvestigate, what drew people towards a career in physics (or specifically particle physics) in the first placeand how they felt their initial fascination or understanding of physics had changed over the years.
Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom. Non-COST Members can join basedon mutual benefit, they are spread across the Near Neighbour Countries and International Partner Countries. ne (0, 0.0 %)Two (3, 13.0 %)Three (7, 30.4 %)Four (4, 17.4 %)Five (2, 8.7 %) Six or more (7, 30.4 %)
How many institutions have you worked for (incl. PhD and undergraduate studies)
Fig. 2: Number of institutes respondents studied at and worked for.
What did inspire you to study physics? What was the thing you most loved when studying physics? Why didyou decide to pursue a career in physics / do a PhD?
Despite the fact that the answers were formulated freely, a few main themes emerged. Doing physicsand research is to do with challenge, problem solving, understanding nature and how things work. Peopleexpressed a genuine interest, often as a motivation to study physics with the specific interest in particlephysics being sparked at university.Most used in the answers were the following words (frequency given in brackets, removing suchwords as particle, physics, liked, love, work, decided): challenge (3) curiosity (3) interest (4) mathematics(3) nature (5) problems (4) research (4) study (4) understanding (5) university (3) how things work (4).A few people cited specific popular science shows or books that sparked their interest:
Dexters Lab,Stephen Hawkings, Mr Tompkins (Gamow), Time life magazines about the big bang & particle reactions inthe early universe .Two quite typical answers given are:My secondary school teacher inspired me to study physics. I liked most to solve difficultproblems. I did a PhD in physics because I couldn’t get enough difficult problems. [PostdoctoralResearcher]Most loved in my studies were stages of increasing level of understanding about complexmatters; doing research is just like doing cross-words, but for much more complicated and muchcooler problems. [Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]
Asking for the difference between expectations and how physics changed over the years for people , answersbecame a bit less idealistic and show some disillusionment: And how were things different from what you expected / how did physics *change* for your over the years? t is full of stress. We are always in a rush to catch a non-realistic deadline which is imposedby someone who is not working in the analysis and it feels like running with no end. I wouldreally like it if we had more time. Also, I started my PhD when there was a lot of excitementaround the community in the field and as the years pass, this has lessened a lot. [PhD student]A reference to formalities and visibilty by another student was echoed by a postdoctoral researcher,who described the university to be no different than the corporate world . This is also reflected to someextend by a senior researcher pointing out that [t]he personal initiative, autonomous learning and the abilityof defining one personal scientific and professional plan turned out to be more important than what [theyhad] initially perceived during University studies .A few people at postdoctoral or junior researcher level mentioned that things got increasingly difficultor complicated and complex, refering both to the actual research problems as well as to the environment(in terms of how research is organised). Most senior researchers mentioned administration and increasedbureaucracy as obstacles. Only two people out of the 19 respondents reported an overall better experiencethan expected.A question more focused on the positive aspects followed , that invited people not to dwell on unex-pected problems as possibly the previous one, but to concentrate on the perks of the jobs.There were a lot of commonalities between the answers of the 21 respondents, most of them inde-pendent of their career stage. More than half (11) enjoyed collaboration and working with (many different)people, with more senior researchers emphasizing the working with young people and generally mentioningteaching in addition. The second-most mentioned point is freedom or flexibility (7, 33.3%), of either sched-ules or of organising one’s own work or or pursuing one’s interests. ”Learning new things every day“ wasmentioned by 5 (23.8%) of respondents, in addition thinking about new ideas or working creatively appearstwice as answer (9.5%).
4. Careers in Physics
The questionnaire further aimed to explore, both what people thought was expected for a career from thewider community as well as what they thought they needed as advice. Already in Refs. [5, 9] a few pointswere made: dependable, diligent, responsible, and willing to work long hours, to come up with novel solu-tions to difficult problems (analysis, detector design or construction problem).
Indeed a few of them were also made in answer to
What do you think it necessary for a successfulPhD or a career in physics/academia? . At least 8 people mentioned hard-work or working beyond the timeof a normal 9-to-5 job , and further 5 variations appearead in the answers such as stamina or perseverance ( Endurance and perseverance in once’s work, both in good and bad moments. ). A PhD student mentioned
Hard work and inhuman levels of motivation , indicating that this attitude is indeed still prevailent.Communication skills as well as scientific networking, presence and visibility at workshops and con-ferences were mentioned 8 times (38%) as well, emphasizing the need for collaboration inside the particlephysics community, which has not been highlighted that much specifically in older works. Notable is how-ever, that especially younger people emphasized networking and communication. This might indicate thateither their importance has changed (due to the increased size of the collaboration), or that it is so ingrained What do you enjoy most about your current job / your current ”role in physics”? The word cloud created from all answers to this question has been added on the title page. or the more senior people that it is not so much noteworthy.Beyond collaboration, support from a mentor or supervisor but also from friends and family is recog-nized (3 or 14%):
Trying to keep a good balance between work and private life.
Further two respondentsadded resilience to that list with one of them saying:Partly creativity and curiosity, but also a lot of resilience, on occasions low self esteem,being a white man is also a useful skill. [Postdoctoral researcher]This is the only response, that discusses specific challenges for females, although this remark here isunspecific, specific challenges have been studied and discussed in Ref. [14].Three respondents quoted luck as an external factor (
And a little bit of luck (from the human and thejob-market point of view) ) as an important ingredient in a job market as tight as academia.A PhD student gave the most comprehensive description, including external and internal factors:Regarding external factors, 1. a caring supervisor, 2. a concrete timeline for the phd fromthe beginning (even though it seems to me that this cannot happen, because it depends on theanalysis group goals and pace, and also new things that arise, but I think it would be nice tohave one), and 3. a group to discuss. Regarding the personal work, questioning everything youlearn and do, and this is how new ideas come. Present your work often, do not wait until youfinish the whole project. Also, try to be involved in many things, as many as you can, to be asmore ”complete” as possible. [PhD student]Asked about the most common mistakes people made in their career planing or when working inphysics, often similar things were relayed, namely about visibility and work-life balance ( [it is a mistake tojust have] physics-related life and friends (hanging out only with colleagues, ”living” in the office, etc) ).A few new points were brought up:[A] lack of modesty and of optimism can be an issue during interviews. [Permanent/Faculty(within the first 10 year)]As well as:assuming that just because you are good you will get the job. [another Permanent/Faculty(within the first 10 year)]Most mentioned however was focus (4 times mentioned verbatim) and related topics such as lack of long-term goals and getting distracted or giving up on something. This included getting too focused onone issue ( tunnel vision ) as well as not balancing between personal interest and community interests . Insummary, lack of consistency and lack of focus on long- and middle-term achievements aligned with theinterested of the broader field were identified as issues or mistakes.Interestingly, the more senior the respondents, the less concrete the advice on how to achieve a careeror what mistakes to avoid becomes, often just a few words such as
Endurance, resilience, passion anddetermination were given.sked, whether they (still) wanted a career , more than half (13) said unambiguously yes , whilst 3gave maybe as an answer and 4 did not respond. One person said outright no :When I look at ”successful” colleagues (full professors, heads of department) I think Iwouldn’t like to be in their place in 20 years from now. [Postdoctoral Researcher]For some people the yes seems well motivated:I like working in physics because I am mostly free to select which work I do; moreover, thework I should do is usually well-motivated and not forced down my throat (I worked outside ofacademia for some time) [Postdoctoral Researcher]Those who were not sure, were mostly permanent researchers, who stated:Maybe, too much time wasted on secondary issues (but no reference wrt industry from ownexperience) [Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]I just started my career in physics and there are aspects, that I am still not sure about/soldtoo. Who knows, I might change career at some stage to work less or to move to another placewhere I want to live [another Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]there’s still a lot of fun in it, but I got somewhat desillusioned along the way [Senior ( >
5. Career advice
A further set of questions was asked to understand, what career advice people would like to have for theirown career or their own current worklife . Naturally, answers were very different for the different careerstages.PhD students were most interested into the transition between PhD to postdoctoral researchers, withquestions evolving around how to choose the best next step:How to chose the best workplace for me. Seems that there are opportunities but how tochoose the one that serves my future best. Choosing by the subject of the postdoc, the institute,the group, the postdoc on which you develop new skills? [PhD student]Postdoctoral researchers were more occupied with the question of how to get a permanent position,how to apply for grants or even on how to secure private funding for research (i.e. through agreements withtech companies, performing consulting activities for them, part time job etc.) . Another point raised was thequestion of uniqueness and how to demonstrate it. Would you like to have a career in physics (if you already have one: would you like to do it under the current circumstances?)?Why? Why not? What are the things, that you personally would like to have advise on for your career/your worklife? . Separate answers wererequested for each career level and it was stressed, that also advice from PhD students to e.g. senior researchers was welcome (suchthat every person should be able to answer all four advice questions for all four career levels):
This could be *also* advice from aPhD to a senior staff member (e.g. ”please, do not give us as much guidance... / please, give us more guidance... ) . unior permanent researchers were interested in questions of balance, between research and sciencepolitics/grant/networking, or of the general workload (possibly referring to work-life balance). Manage-ment issues as well as interest in a global overview of problems as seen by more senior people were alsomentioned.There were very few responses from senior researchers (especially given, they usually provided veryreflected and detailed answers compare to e.g. PhD students). The only ones were Be optimistic and
Stayaway of your duties and do what you like .Further, specific advice was asked for the different career levels, in an attempt to investigate, whatpeople thought to be most helpful for a specific career stage . It turned out, that these indeed were muchmore specific answers than those aimed to figure out what to do to have a career.Concerning the specific advise for PhDs, postdoctoral researchers concentrated on their well-being( One day after another, talk to people when you get stuck, don’t neglect yourself, make sure you are happy forat least one day a week, keep going , do not be scared of building your own life/family... it is a hard life, butit is doable ) and only gave very general work advice ( Work on something to understand it , Work regularly ).Advice to PhD students from junior and senior permanent researchers centered on them broadening theirhorizons and indeed for them to try to to gain independence ( try to follow your ideas , explore your interests,also beyond your supervisors interests , keep questioning what you are [beging told] ).Talk to your supervisor. Tell her/him what works, what works well, and what doesn’t work(well). Feedback in both directions is important. Try to be selective with your topic, and withthe place you do your Phd. Look for places and supervisors with impact, but chemistry betweensupervisor/student is also important. Try to find a mentor, someone at the level of a permanentresearcher or a postdoc other than your supervisor. Like the research you do, otherwise it is notthe right one. There will be phases of frustration, keep going. [Permanent/Faculty (within thefirst 10 year)]try to read a lot of different stuff and see, what you can understand. Talk to people, listento what the senior people discuss - this will broaden your knowledge beyond what you areactually doing, which is very very useful. Try to be proactive (even if it’s not perfect), but try toget advise/feedback early on your ideas. [Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]Advice for postdoctoral researchers was basically the same on life and work from Phds and postdoc-toral researchers themselves ( do not be scared of building your own life/family... it is a hard life, but it isdoable ), whilst there was a pronounced shift in the advice from for postdocs from permanent researchers.It’s obvious anyhow, but also clear from the answer, that the postdoc phase is deemed to be the decisive one, the most difficult phase. Scientifically the best and most proliferatic, but the most uncertain one, with manychanges .Similar to the advice to students, independence was praised ( Insist on having freedom to assign timeaccording to your decision ), as well as setting and working towards goal. However, for postdocs, [learning]skills in grant writing and networking was emphasized as well as to further expanding experiences: What is advice that you can give / would like to give? You could give an example of a situation where this advice would havehelped ind time to engage in teaching. It gives a broader view of our field and can lead to fruitfulcollaboration with students. Strive to win your own research funding to show you can leadindependent research. [Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]The decisiveness of the postdoc career stage was underlined by advice to also think about when toend it – independently of the outcome:Put in a balance if you want to pay the price of being wandering around until 30’s or 40’s,specially if you have a family. Set an exit time cut-off. Do not extend it for ever. [Perma-nent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]Advice for junior staff researchers was only given by junior and senior researchers, however with verydifferent focus. The advice from junior to junior staff was focused on finding a new balance in that role,along the lines of the following advice:The most important thing is to find the right balance between partner/family and career.This applies already to earlier stages. For junior staff, one has to split the work time betweenresearch, grant work, sometimes teaching and on the other hand supervising the members ofthe group. This is a difficult task. Try to find a good balance here. This should be weighted bythe demands of a tenure procedure, or the demands of finding a permanent position (which ismostly research output) if the junior position is fixed-term. [Permanent/Faculty (within the first10 year)]Senior staff members mainly advised to develop one’s research portfolio (
Develop a unique feature inyour work , Don’t stop. Keep going. Don’t follow beaten paths, explore new direction ) and did not commenton other aspects of academic careers, academia in general or life.On the other hand, there was much more advise given by PhDs, postdoctoral and junior researchers tosenior researchers. Mainly these are wishes on how senior researchers should fill out their role, namely teach[ing] skills like grant writing , [setting a] timeline and clear goals from the start of the PhD and [giving] guidance to PhD students . Seniors themselves mainly concentrated on how to treat colleaguesand collaborators, which also includes students: Show responsibility for your collaborators , Be nice toyoung colleagues and motivate them . Common between both groups of research is the appeal to be open tochange and acknowledge the need to evolve with it:Be open to changes in the way how research, teaching, human relations, networking, coding,etc. is evolving in these years. [Permanent/Faculty (within the first 10 year)]Stay young, don’t do more of the same. [Senior ( >
10 year on permanent position)]
6. Conclusions
As in other publications [15] almost all respondents describe a career in science to be highly desirable,however almost all seemed to be acutely aware of the difficulties and the unpredictability of attaining apermanent position in research and academia. This has at least the advantange of the non-permanent re-searchers being aware and on some level being more pro-active in developing a career, which should beseful also outside academia. It is evident, that also the more senior researchers are aware of the problemsof the academic system, which is also reflected in the strong appeal to take care of collaborators.There are some further indications, that career perceptions change over time though for the respon-dents of the study this seems to correlate most with roles that are changing over time and an increasedresponsibility in teaching and adminstration. It is noteable that with age, the downsides of academia (work-life-balance) and the high competition are much less often verbalised. It is hard to tell, whether this has todo with settling down in a permanent position in academia specifically or whether this is more generally a”coming of age“ and a development of serenity that has calming effects. This question could presumably beanswered if also people having left academia could be included in a follow-up study.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the respondents of the questionnaire and the support through the COST Action CA16108. K.L. isfurther supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under ERCgrant agreement No. 715871.
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