Employability as a Physics Graduate

This blog post is quite late for being the first one of the year, I know but even before all of my assessments from over Christmas were handed in, we’ve been thrust straight back into uni work and I’ve been getting used to university hours again.

Since it’s my second year at Leicester I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might do when my degree is over. A physics degree presents so many different routes to go down, from further study to careers in research to completely different jobs. It’s hard to know where to begin narrowing down the options, which I suppose is better than having no ideas of what to do with your degree. It might not be immediately obvious that physicists can work in many different sectors such as education, engineering and medicine depending on what interests you. The Institute of Physics has a section of their website all about different career directions as a physics graduate here which is quite helpful.

If you decide that you’ve for some reason had enough of physics at the end of your degree there are still lots of job opportunities out there. Graduating with a physics degree gives you all kinds of skills that employers are looking for. In my one and a half years here I’ve become far better at managing my time with all the deadlines, become better at condensing my ideas and processes into concise reports and essays and I have improved my problem solving skills exponentially both as an individual and with others. Being very good at maths could get you into a career in finance and great leadership on group projects could lead you to a management position, depending on where you want to get to.

I am not 100% sure what I want to do after my degree but I am in the process of narrowing down my options. If you’re interested in a particular field then that’s great and you can spend your spare time doing extra research into that area, doing online courses and finding a related summer internship if you can. If you are not sure then those things can help you cross out some things that you definitely don’t want to do. The career development service at University of Leicester can help you build your skills, refine your CV and help you with interviews among many other things. It’s definitely something I will be using this year and my final year.