Interview with recent graduates currently in the workforce

This is one in a series of interviews with recent graduates 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 value your opinions on your undergraduate Physics and how well it prepared you for the workforce.

Please fill in the following table of personal details:

I’d now like to ask you a series of questions pertaining to your Physics undergraduate studies (Physics below may be read as `multidisciplinary’ if appropriate).

1. What features of your undergraduate Physics studies were of most help to your learning?

Lab sessions in second and third year provided hands-on experience which was then applied in the EPIC (Education in Physics with Industry Co-operation) program. Tutorials were extremely helpful; for instance, tutorials in Quantum mechanics were enlightening. Having someone go through examples at a pace you could follow, and being able to ask questions, helped to consolidate the ideas. Lectures were also useful; there is some power in the auditory experience. Hearing someone explain a topic helps; it is harder to learn from reading. At Year 12, those who did best practised lots of examples. At Uni (and Year 12) I tried to visualise the concepts, not just look at the examples. There are times when the penny drops. “Understanding means you’ll have to do only a quarter of the work.”

2. How were you made aware of employment opportunities for Physics graduates in your undergraduate Physics studies?

I always looked at opportunities on notice boards around Physics (for reassurance as well as for information). On the EPIC program I became aware of other opportunities such as technical sales. Towards the end of the degree I used the web to find further study opportunities. I was always aware of multidisciplinary opportunities, and studied a Geophysics subject in second year to address uncertainties in job opportunities.

3. What aspects of your Physics education have helped you most in your career?

At DSTO (for the EPIC program and a one-year contract), prac experience was most useful, for fitting data to models, and for performing and writing up experiments. My current position involves extracting meaning from large quantities of data using data processing packages (20% data processing, 80% computer programming – little programs for streamlining data processing and educational testing and evaluation). The most helpful aspect for this is quantitative problem solving. Subjects from Mathematics improve employability because they encourage wrapping equations around real phenomena, observing data, equations and theory coming together. Programming courses were weak in uni Physics, and I would recommend including programming in Semester 1 of Second Year.

4. Is it an advantage having done Physics? Do you think you have an advantage over graduates from other disciplines? How? Are there special knowledge and skills that Physics provides?

Past job experience is an advantage for the current position, but it’s not clear how much this advantage is related to Physics study. Problem-solving ability is an advantage, but is this a latent ability? How do we know when it was developed? In learning Physics, we are exposed to experimental reality and mathematical theory, and try to make them consistent. It is the same in Psychometry where behavioural and learning outcomes are compared with statistical models of cognitive development, leading to predictions, then experiments to test the predictions.

Graduate attributes table

Please fill in the following table by ticking the box that represents the level to which a particular attribute was used or developed in your undergraduate Physics subjects.

Please say if there was another valuable attribute or further comments.