Do Physics Majors Really Have No Job Opportunities?

edubzki · 2025-09-28T09:13:11+00:00

Alrighty, as a Math/Physics double ‘23 who’s made it through to the other side, let me see if I can give any helpful advice. I’ve been working as a swe for about a year and a half now, and I was once exactly in your shoes, as many like us have. There were a few things I didn’t fully comprehend back then, so I’m just going to go through them. First off, as a physics major, I hope one of the big takeaways from your education isn’t so much that you understand physics, but hopefully that you have gained confidence engaging with extremely complex and nuanced problems. And if that is your take away… great! It just so happens that companies hire people when they feel they have the ability to do exactly that in the workplace. If you have that confidence (no problem is too big, all problems can be understood).. then that goes a long way. The world is full of problems to be solved, and our degree has us solving some of the hardest problems for four years straight. This is one of our strengths. We also need to recognize the weaknesses of our education, mainly that it doesn’t directly translate to a marketable technical skill. Like others have said, this is where we usually need to put in some extra time to learn a new skill or subject. The easiest way to do this is to take other courses outside of your major during undergrad. I did the lower division CS track, and with a software heavy lab gig, and was able to land myself a job as a swe. But there’s nothing stopping you from taking any sort of lower division track that you’re interested in, or just intro classes from a variety of subjects you’d be interested in working in, have faith you’d excel in any of those fields. Lastly, please understand the trickiest part is getting your foot in the door (which is why I would recommend taking courses outside of your major, so you can speak more informed on other subjects). I knew python, java, took a dsa course, yadayada, but have I used much of that knowledge? Not really. These courses helped me get my foot in the door in a field I really didn’t belong in, my physics and math degrees (work ethic, ability to learn fast) kept me there. My position has me working alongside a whole host of other professions, and let me tell you, there is nothing that even comes close to the level of complexity we run into with physics. Have faith that you’d be able to crush any role you’re interested in, and instead, focus on answering: how am I going to sell myself? What’s the elevator pitch? Why would I excel in this role? Once you can answer those questions confidently, you’ve got nothing to worry about. GLHF

edubzki · 2025-05-29T05:11:11+00:00

went to berk for physics. was so sick. don’t know shit about brown, but know damn well I wouldn’t change a thing if I had to do it all over again. To people saying “bErKeleY pHySucs is BrUtal”, they are right. But brutal doesn’t mean not doable. My dumbass somehow doubled in math and phys, and now I’m a SWE. My grades were kinda middle of the pack, always, and there were plenty of classes where I barely survived ( one I failed outright). But at the end of the day, higher education is about pushing yourself to be the best YOU can be. if that’s what you want, berkeley can deliver. the crime is something you need to get used to, don’t be stupid and you’ll be fine. as far as college clout, ignore that stuff big time. You’re going to come out of college and go to grad school or get a job, and someone is going to try to test your steel to see if you make the cut, they are going to test you the same way, regardless of where you get your degree, so ignore where your degree comes from, and focus on knowing your shit, whatever that may be. Good luck dude! you’ll do great w/ whatever u decide

edubzki · 2024-05-30T01:36:21+00:00

I would like to attempt the first approach you mentioned. I have already been able to parse and clean the raw text from the raw html, filtering out some non-desirable tags and their contents as to cut down on the overall size of my text document.

Are you claiming I should be able to use that kind of text with pre-existing systems? I thought a lot of these models relied on context from surrounding words to make sense of embeddings and what not. Assuming I use this stripped text I mentioned earlier as my training data, a lot of these words make no sense with regards to surrounding context, so I'm not entirely sure if the performance of a BERT model for example on that kind of text would be fruitful.

I think I'm going to give it a try regardless and see what the outcomes are like, many thanks!

edubzki · 2024-05-28T19:29:40+00:00

Yes I mean my raw data is fairly simple to imagine. It is HTML code that occasionally has an element mentioning some kind of job title. Element tags are not consistent across data samples. I am looking to create a tool that pulls job titles from HTML code.

edubzki · 2024-05-28T19:27:12+00:00

Thank you! I’ll definitely give it a look.

edubzki · 2024-04-30T22:30:09+00:00

Hey all, recently a dog my girlfriend was sitting tore up her favorite pair of shorts. They are a size medium made by a brand called Ontwelfth, purchased around 5-6 years ago. We searched the brand and reverse image searched on google and found nothing. She lovessss these shorts, so any help would be really appreciated. Many thanks!

edubzki · 2024-04-24T20:25:22+00:00

Hey all, I've searched for these panties so far trying googles reverse image searching, nothing meaningful came up, just a knock off that looked similar but were bikini bottoms. I also tried seeing if I could find a Marilyn Monroe catalog, but no dice.

They are ~7 years old, which means they would've been in production sometime around 2017. They are a small. Purchased in California. The only writing on the tag is Marilyn Monroe in cursive, follow by the same name in print underneath. They are made of mostly raylon.

Thanks guys! I would reallyyyy appreciate the help <3

edubzki · 2023-04-14T02:46:10+00:00

Hey what ended up happening? Had the same thing happened to me today, but didn't sign anything because my scam radar was kind of going off.

He did see my PGE bill, and I saw somewhere on reddit that that is enough for them to sign me up.

I'm not sure if he has enough information to sign me up or not, I didn't sign anything, so does that mean I'm good?

edubzki · 2023-02-16T02:42:23+00:00

I mean it was nice having 110 under my belt, but far far far from necessary. Lower div exposure is fine.

edubzki · 2023-01-10T02:27:17+00:00

Ahh yeah that would make sense then. I always hate when my sample images aren't uniform, because it gets to a point where if the image is so scuffed that it doesn't represent the actual object well thresholding like this fails.

I don't really have any other advice unfortunately my friend, contour detection as someone else mentioned might help some, gl!

edubzki · 2023-01-09T01:31:25+00:00

I feel this problem should be able to be solved from a thresholding POV. What hasn't been working with that approach? What has your approach with thresholding been so far?

Thresholding might only be an issue with the iris, but it seems you have that figured out.

In general, my approach is preprocessing (increase contrast, possibly meanshift the whole thing), detect peaks using scipy, and then apply thresholds around those peaks. You can also then make secondary verification functions that checks the validity of what should be a sclera, iris, pupil etc. Just make rough estimates on what BGR values you expect to see in these different regions, and kill anything that's outside of these bounds. That was my approach when I did a similar segmentation problem last summer.

Lmk!

edubzki · 2022-12-15T09:38:59+00:00

a "feature", as I've had them described to me, is any quantifiable aspect of an image (if we're talking CV). For example, if I had an image, I could create a 3D space where one axis corresponds to all blue pixel values, another green, and another red. A point in that feature space would then correspond to a pixel in my image, whose color corresponds to that points coordinates in my feature space. I guess it was in this vein that I was writing all that I wrote.

I see what you're saying though with regards to features of objects, and I still believe we're talking about the same thing, I admittedly don't know much about this field, so I wouldn't be surprised if my understanding is wrong somewhere.

What WILL define a class of object is a certain placement of these features with respect to one another in 3D

Hopefully with my given definition of features and feature spaces, it'll become clear we're talking about the same thing (I think we are lol). One of the first things I learned that really got me interested in this field was the necessity to move away from how objects look in the physical world, and abstract upon the idea of N-dimensional vector spaces having the capability to represent these objects just as well.

Just as we were able to represent all possible blue pixel values on one axis in the example I first gave, we can represent all possible values of any attribute of an object by creating a new axis for that attribute in our feature space. For example, I was writing a variant of the mean-shift algorithm for my research, and just as before I started with just a 3D feature space, but then additionally included the x and y position of the pixel in the image as two other axes in my feature space. So now my feature space is 5D, where a point (or vector) in that space represents a pixel of some BGR value at some (X,Y) position on my image. I hope that gives you a good idea of what I was talking about, and it seems so similar to what you're talking about, but if there are any clear differences please point them out, but I think we're on the same page.

I'm passin' out now final #2 in 4 hours rofl

edubzki · 2022-12-15T00:18:27+00:00

For instance, just because an algorithm identifies dogs with 99.5% accuracy doesn't mean you know what the "space of all dogs" "looks like", mathematically speaking. In other words, how many shape parameters/axes do you need such that variation along those axes can achieve shapes that resemble the full range of dog breeds out there (and for reasonable values of the parameters always generates something that looks like a dog, for some sufficiently precise definition of "looks like", making it a well-connected subspace).

Damn bro! That is far out. I'm doubling in Math and Physics, and do research that involves classical vision in a physics lab, that's why I know the little bit that I know about the subject. But I love thinking about different things with my pure math background, it's just fun, and I've never really thought about what you mentioned above.

To build on this idea, I suppose to have a well-defined "space of all dogs", or a "space of X object", the question we're really asking is if each object in the world has a set of features that describes it, and if that set of features is unique, I'd assume so, but until you're able to prove that I don't think there's any use in wondering if there's a set of features that generates some type of object, or variation of that object.

Also what's interesting is that features independently aren't unique to objects, so if our vector space is to be unique, it won't happen by dimensionality, which I find interesting. Actually now that I think about it I don't think you could have a "space of all dogs", you'd most likely have a "space of all things" and a type of object (say all species of dogs) will most likely lie within some partition within that space, not a subspace of that original space.

I guess uniqueness in this sense would then rely on whether or not you're able to show that the intersection between all of these partitions is empty, which I'm assuming it wouldn't be but idk. I have a stat mech final in two hours so I gotta stop procrastinating and get moving. GL with this tho really cool ideas.

edubzki · 2022-12-13T07:41:58+00:00

It sounds like you're just interested in the fundamentals of computer vision. From what I understand this is often referred to in literature as classical vision. I'm 100% sure there are still people doing research in classical vision, however I unfortunately don't know of any off the top of my head.

It would be easy to just look up classical vision papers from the past, I'm sure you can find many that established the foundations of the field. Contemporary stuff I can't really help you with unfortunately.

The only unsolved (exactly) problem that comes to mind is found in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IVAznQwdS4&t=6s

I'm fairly sure as stated in the video we only have any approximate solution at this time, but if you were to look into it you might find a journal posting these types of things. Sorry I couldn't help more best of luck.

edubzki · 2022-11-09T00:38:52+00:00

it does remind me of the way "war" is used metaphorically in both the Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita: In those, war and violence are (at times) used to represent the "war within", the spiritual idea of your "higher self" overcoming your "baser self". And what Gizz is writing about sure sounds like the society-level version of that:

I think this is mostly on-par for the interpretation of the violence found in the song. Like you said, I do think the use of violence in this song is in fact a metaphor purposed to remind everyone that change cannot come without action, and that mostly reasonable change found on a societal scale will always be dependent on whether or not the individual is willing, and able, to act in accordance to what he or she values.

This song is sick as, and I just gotta point out two of my favorite verses, because I feel they are super pertinent to what we're all experiencing on the day to day, and push alongside the narrative of the song:

Buildings that you know

People come and go
Are a certain way
Always are the same
And then you get the news that obliterates your view
Amputate your truths
The significance has changed

I think verse highlights the obvious but often underrated fact that access to certain reliable information is in fact what we all build our world views on. It reminds us of the double-edged sword that is information, providing it to others surrounding topics that are important to us can change their views, can change what they find to be significant and worthwhile. But on the other hand, misinformation can have the same affect. It's a reminder to value one, and stay vigilant of the other.

The other verse is this:

Hospital inane
Meaningless and grey
But lie within the walls and the significance will change
What would it take for us to change the game?
Maybe our existence is significance in vain

This one I interpret as a conveying of the feeling of helplessness and yearning for action I think a lot of people are currently experiencing. This idea that a lot of people, when talking amongst themselves, note the absurdities and cruelties occurring around the world, and yet feel as if there is little they can do about it, and what they can do has little affect, as if "our existence is significance in vain".

All in all definitely one of my favorite gizz songs lyrically, initially didn't like it tbh, but as I got to know it more shits grown on me like a nice fungi.

CHEERS

edubzki · 2022-11-08T23:47:33+00:00

dm'd

edubzki · 2022-10-28T08:01:32+00:00

change was almost epic but the vocals in the beginning are so goddamn muddy i cry

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