ELIAS & DREW: Excelling in an undergraduate physics program requires intelligence, work ethic, and time management skills. With such skills so universally sought after, it is strange that those graduating with a physics degree often feel limited to only a few paths.
Granted, many students continue into a physics PhD program and then work in academia. The progression is a natural extension of the type of work required for an undergraduate degree. But many students enter physics graduate programs not because they know exactly what they want to do, but because it seems like a logical step.
Another popular option is to pursue engineering. Not only does the choice allow a physics student to handle familiar material, but it also permits graduates to move away from niche research and toward more product-driven projects. A third, less common, path for physics majors is to go into finance, using analytic skills learned in physics for completely different systems and models.
Those career paths all offer opportunities to do great work. However, physics majors often are unaware of other options. They have been told that a degree in physics opens the career world to them, but they are shown possible careers through a very small scope.
We would like to present a different choice: the world of science policy. Currently only 43% of those with undergraduate degrees in physics enter the workforce right after they graduate, with a 39% job success rate. Of those with jobs, only 5% are working in civilian government or national labs. This leaves at most 2% of those with physics bachelor’s degrees working in policy for the government.
Our experience
We are two rising seniors, ready to complete double majors in physics and political science. Thanks to the generosity of Nobel laureate John Mather, we have spent the summer on Capitol Hill as the two “Mather Interns” through the American Institute of Physics. Having learned a great deal about science policy, we believe that we can provide a thorough account of our experience as physics students in the world of politics.
DREW: It can be difficult to give a full, honest description of life on Capitol Hill, the epicenter of science (and other kinds of) policy in US government. Many scientists think of policy as a messy-looking mystery, causing them too often to avoid politics. As a result, those affected by science policy can feel disconnected from the process by which it’s made.
Drew Roberts
Gaining an inside view of the policy process was one of the most valuable parts of the summer for Elias and me. Elias worked for the minority staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while I was with the minority staff for the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
The environment in the two committees differed significantly due to their size and jurisdiction. Elias worked in a big committee with a wide-ranging jurisdiction. His committee has a large staff to cover most administrative duties. Elias was therefore free to focus on comprehensive research projects, often lasting weeks, to help committee staff better understand a topic. He could dive fully into new topics—such as vehicle-to-vehicle communication for upcoming automated car fleets—and learn all that he could in order to distill it into an efficient summary of the field.
Elias was able to use many analytical and problem-solving skills that he has learned in his physics education to tackle these problems. Additionally, his technical background allowed him to understand the underlying technology—transmitting information over light of a specific frequency—more naturally than staffers without science backgrounds.
The House Science Committee has fewer members and fewer staff. My job necessarily included some administrative duties, which ranged from welcoming guests to answering phones and making copies. Although performing those chores certainly wasn’t the most glamorous part of working on the Hill, that work keeps the political machine moving. The real challenges of my job came between these administrative tasks.
My most substantive contributions were to prepare materials for Congressional hearings. The materials include a memo, explaining the hearing in detail and the party’s take on it, and a set of suggested questions that congresspeople could ask the witnesses. The materials distributed before each hearing ensure that members of Congress are well informed on their speaking issues. For several hearings, such as one on advanced energy technologies, I was tasked with writing sections of the memo and questions.
Topics like energy innovations are clearly in the wheelhouse of physics students, so it was good experience to see my analytical skills come to fruition as a member of Congress asked a question based on my writing.
ELIAS: In a way, the two of us were predisposed to be interested in science policy because we both also study political science. As part of Drew’s curriculum at the University of North Carolina, he was required to take a certain amount of social science classes. In his freshman year he stumbled upon a political science course. Although the course did not tempt him to abandon physics, he was intrigued by the issues it caused him to consider, and decided to take more classes.
Elias Kim
I went to Vassar College with the intention of studying a social science in addition to physics, and chose political science over economics after my second semester of introductory economics. At the very least, I was always cognizant of the political issues that arose over the course of the year and was to a certain extent thinking of my role as a physics student in light of politics.
Despite our interest in politics, Drew and I both entered sophomore year with the mindset that we were physics students first and political scientists as a supplement. In my sophomore year I took modern physics, E&M, advanced E&M, and planetary science, whereas my political science course list only included two introductory courses and a basic polling analysis course.
Drew had a similar schedule, delving into more advanced physics classes and only slowing discovering the route his political science education would follow. The summer after sophomore year, we both had the opportunity to research in labs at our respective schools. Coincidentally, we both worked in optics labs. I attempted to reconstruct images from diffraction patterns, whereas Drew studied the properties of organic semiconductors. We’ve been able to share our experiences with each other, and have realized that our respective summers helped us learn a very important part of our identities as physics students: laboratory science is probably not for us in the long run.
That being said, I want to make it clear that lab work has not been a negative experience: I was fortunate in that summer job, and I’m lucky to be able to do it throughout the school year as well. If anything, my passion for physics and science is even stronger as a result. However, I’ve realized that I want to work on science issues in a greater societal context, and that I want to be in a setting where I’m constantly communicating my ideas with other people. I also want to be able to work with a broad range of scientific areas, the benefits of which I spread to as many people as possible.
More broadly, as I’ve deepened in my political science studies, I’ve realized that I need to work to create change at a communal and societal level. Drew has shared a very similar narrative of his experience, and talking with each other reinforced what we had begun to suspect; That perhaps our futures lie in the world of science policy.
Our process might seem to imply that student needs to study social science to become interested in and be prepared to do science policy. One of the main goals we have in writing this article is to dispel this assumption. Drew and I are not unique; we have talked to peers who are not thrilled by a career in research or academia, but would still love to be involved in the science community.
Although there are many great careers in support of traditional research organizations, industries, or scientific societies, we believe that science students, and physics students in particular, should understand policy involvement as a viable option. A policy career does not require a political science background, nor does a physics background limit a student’s potential to work in policy fields not explicitly connected to physics.
Some political issues are inherently tied to the science community. Climate change, genetic engineering, space exploration, and wireless communications are all concerns in which scientists have played key roles. It is important that scientists be involved in shaping the policies that best improve and accelerate the growth of these fields.
From federal appropriations, to executive agency planning, to lobbying, the science community needs advocates who can shape favorable policies, and the government needs scientists who can provide rigorous and objective analysis of the many problems this country faces. Who better than a scientist to help develop policies relating to clean water regulations, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, or research grants?
Drew’s committee staff is filled with PhD scientists who are essential to helping Congressmen and Congresswomen fight for the best possible solutions to all the problems above and more. In addition to the House Science Committee, many staffers on the Hill have science backgrounds. Recently, I met with a policy analyst in the office of Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), who told me that about half of the 15 staffers in the office hold PhDs.
It is an especially exciting time to be a physicist in DC. The last two Secretaries of Energy, Steven Chu and Ernie Moniz, are physicists who have actively shaped major administrative decisions. President Obama relied on Moniz in the recent Iran deal to break down the complex scientific information crucial to negotiations. Ash Carter, the recently appointed Secretary of Defense, is also a physicist. Though his job may not involve science as explicitly, his rigorous approach to policy—a huge benefit to the Obama administration—is often credited to his physics background. John Holdren, another physicist, is the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is President Obama’s closest science adviser, a key figure in influencing the President’s initiatives in issues like STEM education and climate change.
While Rush Holt’s retirement leaves Bill Foster (D-IL) as the only physicist in Congress, there are many ways for physicists to contribute to the Congressional process. Holt now runs AAAS, an organization that sponsors a fellowship program to put PhD scientists into the world of science policy.
Drew and I did not know much about AAAS or its fellows program until we attended its conference back in April of 2015. There, we learned that there is a robust community of scientists entering the Hill every year. We’ve gotten to meet several of them this summer, and most report tremendous learning through working on Capitol Hill or in Executive Agency offices.
The AAAS fellowship has been specifically crafted for PhD scientists who have not committed to academic research. The fellowship permits them to try policy for a year, without commitment at the end if they don’t like it. An AAAS fellowship is not required for a career in science policy, but it is certainly a good option.
DREW: While political science certainly made us more knowledgeable and aware of opportunities, someone studying only physics already has many of the skills necessary for policy work. The benefit of a physics education is not restricted to understanding the relationship between Maxwell’s equations. A degree in physics proves that a candidate has the perseverance and confidence to work through difficult challenges, a characteristic invaluable in the policy world. Very often, policy workers must jump head first into complicated documents and legislation, attend hearings to listen to expert witnesses, and be comfortable working at an advanced level on a wide variety of topics. A physics degree is preparation for exactly this.
Physicists’ problem-solving skills also supply a head start when jumping into policy. Physics as a field is built around breaking a huge, seemingly unmanageable problem—like the movement of a complicated system—into smaller, solvable ones—like describing systems with a Lagrangian. Experience with this can help a policy worker approach a completely overwhelming topic—say, the Affordable Care Act, which includes 20 000 pages of documents and falls into jurisdictions ranging from interstate commerce to scientific research—and compartmentalize it into approachable sections.
Physics immersion eliminates any fear of technical language, and this can make you valuable on the Hill. Whereas staffers with political science or law backgrounds may be comfortable with legislative procedure, the concept of “bandwidth” or “nuclear fission” might be totally foreign. Much technical language will already be familiar to a physics student. More important than already having a technical vocabulary is the confidence that technical topics can be learned. If one can understand nuclear fission without getting scared by complex language, then most topics remain approachable.
ELIAS: Although most physics majors have the tools to be successful in the political world, there are skills that a physics background might not provide. Physicists practice communicating their ideas in the context of conferences and research presentations, but communications in the political arena are different. The public often criticizes the academic community for being self-serving. Whether or not this image is accurate, in politics it is necessary to work with, be comfortable with, and often make large sacrifices for another person in order to achieve goals for the greater community. It is important to effectively and succinctly express the most important details in the best context possible. All parts of an argument do not get the same consideration, and the way arguments are presented heavily influences the way that others will perceive them.
Congressional Librarian Judy Schneider spoke at the AAAS conference and stressed that in Washington, “facts are all relative.” For many scientists, this concept is challenging because we are not used to data and results being malleable in the hands of others. The science community prefers to consider that our best explanation for a phenomenon may be incomplete, and that it could and will change as more experiments go on. The world of politics requires instant gratification, and it is the role of the science policy expert to reconcile the languages of the two communities.
Scientists may also be loath to accept no end goal in the near or distant future, other than to “form a more perfect union.” Congress brings together hundreds of people with competing visions of how to make the country better. No single voice can or will win, and there is no one direction in which Congress will move. In some ways, the people who work in Congress are there to make sure that the institution itself continues to function. We must always remember that Congress was there before we began working for it, and that it will continue long after our individual work is done.
DREW: By sharing our experiences, Elias and I gained a well-rounded view of political committee work. It is eye opening to see the amount of legwork that goes on out of public view. I could go so far as to say that the real work in Congress is done in back rooms by people in their 20s and 30s, and that the version of Congress CSPAN presents is simply a formality.
This is one of the greatest appeals of this work for me. If one aims to affect the legislation that changes our world, from research funding to infrastructure regulations, becoming part of the massive congressional machine is a great way to do it.
Our experience on the Hill has shown us that policy work is not often credited, but knowing that we were able to contribute to society as a whole was well worth it. Students who can succeed in physics can certainly succeed in policy, provided that they are willing to push themselves to work hard at something new.
