High-energy physics as a career springboard

Abstract

As well as being crucibles of research, today's big physics experiments are alsofactories for students - in more than a decade almost 700 have graduated fromthe Delphi experiment (see appendix A for a description of the experiment and alist of the collaborating institutes) at CERN's LEP electron-positron collider.Personal skills are a valuable form of technology transfer. The expertiseacquired in the large international collaborations running today's major physicsexperiments is diverse - computing, electronics, project management and so on.In addition are the interpersonal skills acquired by being a member of a largeinternational team working on a complex problem. Today's physics students aremuch in demand. To see how this happens we have analysed the careers of thestudents involved in the experiment since its beginnings in 1982.The education systems are very diverse in the various countries. It has beentried to broadly group the degrees into two main types: doctoral studies andlower-ranking degrees (diploma like and master like). Some countries do not havea master programme, some like France have essentially only doctoral programmesfor physics studies and possibly lower level education for engineers. Othercountries like Italy or Germany have degrees such as the `Laurea' or `Diploma'that can comprise thesis work of widely different levels and depth.The reach of this study is limited given that, typically, it is possible tofollow up people employment only for the first job after the completion of auniversity degree. In particular, it gives only a lower limit estimate on thenumber of people who end up having a career in the private sector as in manycases a doctoral student gets a temporary (typically for two years)post-doctoral grant as first employment. For a subset of students it has beenpossible to follow up past the first temporary research employment: this limitedstatistic will be used to estimate the number of people who will eventually endup in the private sector after their research post-doctoral experience.We have examined the general trends for all the students independent of the typeof degree obtained and we have also looked in detail into the careers ofdoctoral students.We have analysed separately the trends for women.