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Interview with the employers of recent graduates

This is one in a series of interviews with employers that have recently (in the last 5 years) hired staff who have completed a 3 or 4 year or Honours level undergraduate degree with a Physics major or a Physics-based multidisciplinary major. We’d like to gauge your opinions on the value of an undergraduate Physics major as demonstrated by your employee(s).

Could you please provide the following information?

Type of firm

Hospital radiotherapy.

Employs about 15 Medical physicists and 3 biomed engineers.

Jobs done by physics graduates

Quality Assurance on dosimetry, specialized computational applications.

Level of education of physics graduates

Now, only advertise for higher degree or prior experience. Used to take physics graduates prior to 5 years ago, into on-job training.

We would like you to think about physics graduates who have worked for you in the last few years. Please try to separate physics graduates early in their employment from those who have worked with you for some time. We would also like to concentrate on graduates with a basic (not postgraduate) degree with a Physics major.

Responses based on 1 graduate of applied physics employed about 5 years ago, and yearly 21-day ‘work experience’ by 3rd year applied physics students.

Are there special knowledge, skills and approaches that these Physics graduates have?

As they come straight from uni: Practical skills are quite good; Understanding of physics not so strong.

Please comment on their ability to learn and adapt.

Faced with new situations, they pick things up quickly.

How could Physics graduates be better? Do fresh graduates from other disciplines meet these expectations? Is it reasonable to expect university graduates to come with these attributes or are they better learnt/developed at work?

Basically they’re OK within the limitations of their training. They do not have prior experience in the personal contact (patient interaction) which they meet in the hospital environment. Eg. Privacy matters.

Can’t compare with other disciplines.

After a couple of years of employment, are Physics graduates different from those from other disciplines? If yes, in what way?

Compared to radiotherapists, physics graduates are always going to be behind on person-person skills. It is not in our base-level training. We are always more technically-oriented than people-oriented.

Would you employ a Physics graduate in preference to those from other disciplines? If so why?

Not entirely applicable. As work involves a lot of IT & networks, did consider employing a specialist, but decided it was better to train a physicist.

Graduate attributes table

Please fill in the first four columns of the following table by ticking the box that represents the level to which your employee(s) with a Physics education demonstrated a particular attribute, as gauged at the start of their employment with you, i.e. the attributes they have.

	Have attribute				Required
	not at all	a little	some	a lot	(greater,_less or_OK)
computational skills				X	OK
consideration of ethical and social issues			X		OK
experimental design		X			More
information retrieval			X		OK
laboratory skills			X		OK
oral communication			X		OK
problem solving			X		More
project planning		X			OK
research methodology		X			OK
teamwork			X		OK
written communication		X			More

Please say if there was another valuable attribute.

Comment on the desirability for better problem solving – they can tackle a problem if given directions, but less able to handle a ‘blank sheet’ situation.

Could you now please fill in the last column, this time indicating whether a particular attribute should be present to a greater or lesser extent at the start of their employment, or whether it is about what you require (OK)?