APS student members weigh futures in both industry and academia

As a child, Jessica Doan dreamed of the careers many kids do. Maybe she’d be a cowgirl one day, she thought, or a police officer. But the San Francisco Bay Area native — shaped by research on the Apollo missions and the film Interstellar — settled on a career that’s no less exciting, and enrolled at San Diego State University as an astronomy major.

Doan applied herself academically, pursuing a summer internship in particle physics research and a senior research project on inflationary cosmology. Her path to graduate school seemed intuitive. “I was very complacent in where life was going to take me,” she says.

But in early 2025, her senior year, Doan was beginning to think through other options — including careers in telescope data analysis or science communications, which did not require advanced degrees.

Physicists as problem-solvers

Doan is not alone in considering a pivot to an industrial track. With federal funding for labs and universities facing threats, industry offers an attractive alternative for job-seekers.

“If you're in a traditional research role, and you think that might be at risk, you're going to have to broaden your perspective and look at industry and think about things that are maybe more applied, more business-oriented, more defense-oriented,” says Eduardo Oteiza, vice president of sales at Vescent, a Denver-area tech solutions provider for the quantum industry. “There are many startup companies that are trying to commercialize ideas in AMO [atomic, molecular, and optical] physics, and it is still being funded, fortunately.”

Vescent employs physicists in a variety of roles. For example, the company has a “whole R&D team that investigates new technologies,” Oteiza says. And to recruit for those sorts of opportunities, Oteiza and his colleagues frequently take Vescent’s show on the road. He staffed a booth at the Career Fair at the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, in June.

“I was there not only just to do the regular go-to-DAMOP to meet and greet, but also to hire, to look for a new candidate for a sales position,” Oteiza says of his trip to the Pacific Northwest. “I did chat with several people who are very interested in moving out of traditional academic research because they were concerned about where academia was going these days.”

And why would a trained physicist be a match for a sales role?

“Physics trains you how to solve problems, how to gather data, analyze the data, come to a conclusion, and implement that,” Oteiza says, referring to the average physics graduate as a “problem-solver.”

“If you're going to design a new kind of product into the market, you need those skills,” he adds.

Kristen Hill, director of product management for CO2 lasers at the Washington-based company Novanta, agrees. She identifies “grit” in physics students and early-career job seekers, a trait that’s critical in her line of work.

“Say you want to measure this one particular thing, but there might not be a tool that exists to measure it,” she posits. “In addition to understanding [the] phenomena, you also need to design the equipment, whether it's, you know, soldering up a circuit or figuring out where to put a thermocouple.”

A community of career guidance

Those are skills that Hill values, so she invested her own time at the DAMOP meeting by serving as an APS Career Mentoring Fellow, counseling students in 1:1 sessions on how to make themselves more marketable.

At DAMOP, Denuwan Vithanage, a Wesleyan University Ph.D. candidate, was one of Hill’s mentees. Vithanage has always intended to enter the industry workforce after his Ph.D., so in his meeting with Hill, “I asked [for] some advice to craft my CV, to convert it to a resume” that would be appropriate for the sector, he says.

“A career in industry would be more aligned with my personal goals rather than a career in academia,” he says, in part because the earning potential can be higher right after graduation. “I would be very happy to do research in an industry setting.”

Besides, he notes, with the Trump administration's scrutiny of university resourcing, industry might be a safer bet in the short term. “I think whatever decisions they're making right now [are] affecting more academic institutions, not necessarily the private sector,” he says.

Vithanage had attended previous DAMOP meetings, but “when I registered for 2025, and they had this career fair, I was like, ‘Okay, I feel lucky because I'm actually looking for jobs in the near future.’”

Vithanage also found value in a DAMOP session on accessing APS career resources, as well as the chance to network with exhibitors.

As for Jessica Doan, the astronomy student, she eventually applied and accepted admission to an Italy-based astrophysics and space science program through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Program — a decision, she says, that helps her keep her head down through the current administration’s review of higher education.

“With the current reduction in research funding, research groups who may have been able to admit more graduates to their institution must have stricter budgets to last a while, which means there are even fewer graduate positions open for the foreseeable future,” she says. “It definitely does play a part in me thinking that I would like to pursue a career in Europe more so than in America.”

While Doan is excited about the academic track, she’s glad she thought through all her options, including moving into industry. With help from APS, she was able to consider both paths.