Studying physics can so busy and stressful that deciding what you should do after graduating is probably the last thing on any student’s mind. Here to help you work out what to do next are four careers experts, who took part in a Physics World Live panel discussion earlier this year. They all studied physics or engineering – and have thought long and hard about the career opportunities available for physics graduates.

The four experts are:

• Crystal Bailey, director of programmes and inclusive practices at the American Physical Society (APS);
• Tamara Clelford, a physics consultant working in aerospace and currently leading a review of the Chartered Physicist standard at the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World;
• Araceli Venegas-Gomez, chief executive and founder of quantum education company QURECA;
• Tushna Commissariat, features editor of Physics World, who edits the annual Physics World Careers and APS Careers guides.

The career options for physicists are wide but can also seem overwhelming – so what advice do you have for people starting out on their career journey today?

Crystal Bailey: Finding a fulfilling career means trying to find something that matches your values. I don’t just mean what you’re interested in or what you like – but who you are as a person. So the first step always starts with self-assessment and self exploration, exploring what it is you really want from your life.

Do you want a job that has good work–life balance? Do you want something with a flexible schedule? Or do you want to make money? Making money is a very righteous and noble thing to want to do it – there’s nothing wrong with that. But when I give careers talks and ask the audience if they’ve asked themselves those questions, almost nobody raises their hand.

So I encourage you to reflect on a time when you’ve been really happy and fulfilled. I don’t just mean were you doing, say, a quantum-mechanics problem, but were you with other people? Were you alone? Were you doing something with your hands, building something? Or was it something theoretical? You need to understand what will be a good match for you.

After you’ve done that self-assessment and understand what you need, I advise you do “informational interviews”, which basically involves getting in touch with somebody – online or in person – to ask them what they do day-to-day. What advice do they have? Where’s their sector going?

You’ll get real insider knowledge and, more importantly, it’ll help you build your network – especially if you follow-up, say, every six months to thank them for advice and update them of your situation. It’ll keep that relationship fresh and serve you later when you’re actually looking for jobs in a more targeted way.

Tamara Clelford: You need to understand what it is you enjoy. Are you a leader or do you like to be managed? Do you prefer to be told what to do? Do you like working in a team or working alone? Are you theoretical or more experimental? Do you prefer research or the real world? Maybe you just want to work with, say, aeroplanes, which is a perfectly valid reason to do so.

You also need to ask yourself where you want to work. Do you want to work in a big company, a medium-sized firm, or a small start up? I began in a large defence company, where I could easily switch jobs if something wasn’t the right fit. But in a big firm you often get taken off work as priorities change, so I now work for myself, which is fabulous.

Araceli Venegas-Gomez: The hardest thing is finding out what you like. Your long-term goal might be to get rich or have your own company. Once you work that out, you’ll need a short-term plan. It’ll probably change but having a plan is a great start. Then ask yourself: are you good at it? That self-assessment – understanding your skills and talents – is really important.

Next, find out what companies are there. Create a LinkedIn profile. Talk to people. Expand your network. Go to careers events. Do mock interviews – maybe not for your dream job but to help you learn how to do them. Learn how to do a CV and apply for jobs. Use all the resources available to you.

Tushna Commissariat: My advice is don’t leave your job search until just before you graduate. Start looking at internships and summer jobs as early as you can. I recall interviewing one physicist who sent an e-mail to NASA and got an internship at the age of 15. But on the other hand, remember that even if you land your perfect job, it might not work out, and it’s always okay to change your mind.

What is the number one skill – over and above technical knowledge – that physicists have that will help them in their career?

Crystal Bailey: Physicists often go into well-paid jobs that have “engineering” in the title, working alongside other STEM graduates. In fact, physicists have many of the same scientific and technical skills that make engineers and computer scientists so attractive to employers. But what sets physicists apart is a confidence that they can teach themselves whatever they need to know to go to the next step.

It’s a kind of “intellectual fearlessness” that is part of being a physicist. You’re used to marching up to the edge of what is known about the universe and taking that next step over to discover new knowledge. You might not know the answer, but you know you can teach yourself how to find the answer – or find somebody who can help you get there.

Tamara Clelford: It might not help us narrow down where we want to work, but physicists are capable of solving a huge range of problems. We can root around a problem, look for its fundamental aspects, and use mathematical and experimental skills to solve it. Whether it’s a hardware problem, a software problem or the need to derive an equation, we can do all that.

As physicists, we have the ability to upskill, to improve and to solve whatever problem we want

Tamara Clelford

If we’re not an expert in a particular area, we know we can go and get the relevant expertise. As physicists, we know where our limits are. We’re not going to make stuff up to sound better than we are. We have the ability to upskill, to improve and to solve whatever problem we want.

Araceli Venegas-Gomez: As physicists, we have a multidisciplinarity that we often don’t realize we have. If you’re, say, a marine engineer, you’re going to work in marine engineering. But as a physicist, you can work anywhere there’s a job for you. What’s more, physicists don’t only solve problems; we also want to know why they exist. It might take us a bit longer to find a solution, but we look at it in a way that engineers might not.

Tushna Commissariat: One of the brilliant things about physicists is that they’re absolutely confident that they can come in and fix a problem. You see physicists going into biology and saying “Oh cancer, I can do that”. There are physicists who’ve gone into politics and into sport. I’ve even seen physicists improving nappies for babies.

At the same time, there’s almost a joy in failure: if something doesn’t work or goes wrong, it means something exciting and interesting is about to happen. I remember Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who was then director-general of CERN, saying it’ll be more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs boson because it would have meant the Standard Model of particle physics is broken – which would open up a wealth of possibilities.

What do you know today that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?

Crystal Bailey: When I went to grad school, I liked physics and thought “I’m good at it and I want to keep doing physics”. But I didn’t really having a clear reason for staying in academia. I was just doing what I thought was expected of me and didn’t even want a career in academia. So I wish I had had more of a sense of ownership and a little more confidence about my career.

Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do something

Crystal Bailey

The key message is: don’t doubt yourself. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do something. It’s your life – and what you want is the most important thing. I just wish I had been given a little more encouragement and a little more confidence to go in new directions.

Tamara Clelford: In life, your priorities change and it’s very difficult to project into the future. At any particular time, you have certain experience and knowledge, on which you make the best decision you can make. But if, in five or 10 years’ time, you realize things aren’t working, then change and do something else. Trust your instincts – and change when you need to change.

Araceli Venegas-Gomez: I wish I’d known at the start of my career that everything’s going to be okay and there’s no need to panic. If you’re doing a PhD and you don’t finish it, that’s fine – I don’t think I’ve ever met a single physicist who’s ended up jobless. There are millions of options so remind yourself that everything is going to be okay.

Tushna Commissariat: When you’re studying, it’s easy to feel you’re in a kind of bubble universe of exams, practicals or labs. Set backs can feel like the end of the world when they really aren’t: your marks on a particular test won’t determine your entire future. Remember that you gain so many useful skills while studying, whether it’s working with other people or doing outreach work, which might seem a waste of time but are great for your CV.

• This article is based on the 9 April 2025 Physics World Live event, which you can watch on demand here.
• For more information, check out Physics World Jobs, the Physics World Careers guide, and the careers services offered by the Institute of Physics.

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What skills do you use every day in your job?

I’m thankful every day that my physics background helps me quickly understand information – even outside my areas of expertise – and fit it into the larger puzzle of what’s valuable and/or critical for our company, business, products, team and technology. I also believe it’s under-appreciated how difficult it is to communicate clearly – especially on technical topics or across large teams – and the challenge scales with the size of the team. Crafting clear communication is therefore something that I try to give extra time and attention to myself. I also encourage the wider team to follow that example and do themselves as they develop our technology and products.

What do you like best and least about your job?

The best thing for me is that every day, every task and action, no matter how small, helps bit-by-bit to build a world that is safer and more secure against the backdrop of dramatic changes in autonomy. What’s also great are the remarkable people I work with – on my team and across the company. They’re dedicated, intelligent, and each exemplary in their own unique ways. My least favourite part of the job is PowerPoint, which to me is the least effective and most time-consuming means of communicating ever created. In the business world, however, you have to accept and accommodate your customers’ preferences – and that means using PowerPoint.

What do you know today, that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

I wish I’d known that anyone who believes a hardware start-up will only take three or four years to develop a product has to be kidding. But jokes aside, I believe that learning things is often more valuable than knowing things – and the past 11 years have been an amazing journey of learning. If I had a time machine would I go back and tweak what I did early on? Absolutely! But would I hand myself a cheat-sheet that let me skip all the learning? Absolutely not!

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When Werner Heisenberg travelled to Helgoland in June 1925, he surely couldn’t have imagined that more than 300 researchers would make the same journey exactly a century later. But his development of the principles of quantum mechanics on the tiny North Sea island proved so significant that the crème de la crème of quantum physics, including four Nobel laureates, attended a five-day conference on Helgoland in June to mark the centenary of his breakthrough.

Just as Heisenberg had done, delegates travelled to the German archipelago by boat, leading one person to joke that if the ferry from Hamburg were to sink, “that’s basically quantum theory scuppered for a generation”. Fortunately, the vessel survived the four-hour trip up the river Elbe and 50 km out to sea – despite strong winds almost leading to a last-minute cancellation. The physicists returned in one piece too, meaning the future of quantum physics is safe.

These days Helgoland is a thriving tourist destination, offering beaches, bird-watching and boating, along with cafes, restaurants and shops selling luxury goods (the island benefits from being duty-free). But even 100 years ago it was a popular resort, especially for hay-fever sufferers like Heisenberg, who took a leave of absence from his post-doc under Max Born in Göttingen to seek refuge from a particularly bad bout of the illness on the windy and largely pollen-free island.

More than five years in the making, Helgoland 2025 was organized by Florian Marquardt and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Yale University quantum physicist Jack Harris, who said he was “very happy” with how the meeting turned out. As well as the quartet of Nobel laureates – Alain Aspect, Serge Haroche, David Wineland and Anton Zeilinger – there were many eager and enthusiastic early-career physicists who will be the future stars of quantum physics.

Questioning the foundations

When quantum physics began 100 years ago, only a handful of people were involved in the field. As well as Heisenberg and Born, there were the likes of Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and Pascual Jordan. If WhatsApp had existed back then, the protagonists would have fitted into their own small group chat (perhaps called “The Quantum Apprentices”). But these days quantum physics is a far bigger endeavour.

Helgoland 2025 covered everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing

With 31 lectures, five panel debates and more than 100 posters, Helgoland 2025 had sessions covering everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and quantum information to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing. In fact, Harris said in an after-dinner speech on the conference’s opening night in Hamburg that he and the organizing team could easily have “filled two or three solid programmes with people from whom we would have loved to hear”.

Harris’s big idea was to bring together theorists working on the foundational aspects of quantum mechanics with researchers applying those principles to quantum computing, sensing and communications. “[I hoped they] would enjoy talking to each other on an equal footing,” he told me after the meeting. “These topics have a lot of overlap, but that overlap isn’t always well-represented at conferences devoted to one or the other.”

In terms of foundational questions, speakers covered issues such as entanglement, superposition, non-locality, the meaning of measurement and the nature of information, particles, quantum states and randomness. Nicholas Gisin from the University of Geneva said physics is, at heart, all about extracting information from nature. Renato Renner from ETH Zurich discussed how to treat observers in quantum physics. Zeilinger argued that quantum states are states of knowledge – but, if so, do they exist only when measured?

Italian theorist and author Carlo Rovelli, who was constantly surrounded in the coffee breaks, gave a lecture on loop quantum gravity as a solution to marrying quantum physics with general relativity. In a talk on quantizing space–time, Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton discussed information loss and black holes, saying that a “white” black hole the size of a bacterium would be as hot as the Sun and emit so much light we could see it with the naked eye.

Markus Aspelmeyer from the University of Vienna spoke about creating non-classical (i.e. quantum) sources of gravity in table-top experiments and tackled the prospect of gravitationally induced entanglement. Jun Ye from the University of Colorado, Boulder, talked about improving atomic clocks for fundamental physics. Bill Unruh from the University of British Columbia discussed the nature of particles, concluding that: “A particle is what a particle detector detects”.

It almost came as a relief when Gemma de les Coves from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona flashed up a slide joking : “I do not understand quantum mechanics.”

Applying quantum ideas

Discussing foundational topics might seem self-indulgent given the burgeoning (and financially lucrative) applications of quantum physics. But those basic questions are not only intriguing in their own right – they also help to attract newcomers into quantum physics. What’s more, practical matters like quantum computing, code breaking and signal detection are not just technical and engineering endeavours. “They hinge on our ability to understand those foundational questions,” says Harris.

In fact, plenty of practical applications were discussed at Helgoland. As Michelle Simmons from the University of New South Wales pointed out, the last 25 years have been a “golden age” for experimental quantum physics. “We now have the tools that allow us to manipulate the world at the very smallest length scales,” she said on the Physics World Weekly podcast. “We’re able for the first time to try and control quantum states and see if we can use them for different types of information encoding or for sensing.”

One presenter discussing applications was Jian-Wei Pan from the University of Science and Technology of China, who spoke about quantum computing and quantum communication across space, which relies on sustaining quantum entanglement over long distances and times. David Moore from Yale discussed some amazing practical experiments his group is doing using levitated, trapped silica microspheres as quantum sensors to detect what he called the “invisible” universe – neutrinos and perhaps even dark matter.

Nergis Mavalvala from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, reminded us that gravitational-wave detectors, such as LIGO, rely on quantum physics to tackle the problem of “shot noise”, which otherwise limits their performance. Nathalie de Leon from Princeton University, who admitted on the final day she was going a bit “stir crazy” on the island, discussed quantum sensing with diamond.

Outside influences

Helgoland 2025 proved that quantum physicists have much to shout about, but also highlighted the many challenges still lying in store. How can we move from systems with just a few quantum bits to hundreds or thousands? How can quantum error correction help make noisy quantum systems reliable? What will we do with an exponential speed-up in computing? Is there a clear border between quantum and classical physics – and, if so, where is it?

By cooping participants together on an island with such strong historical associations, Harris hopes that Helgoland 2025 will have catalysed new thinking. “I got to meet a lot of people I had always wanted to meet and re-connect with folks I’d been out of touch with for a long time,” he said. “I had wonderful conversations that I don’t think would have happened anywhere else. It is these kinds of person-to-person connections that often make the biggest impact.”

Occasionally, though, the outside world did encroach on the meeting. To a round of applause, Rovelli said that physicists must keep working with Russian scientists, and warned of the dangers of demonizing others. Pan, who had to give his talk on a pre-recorded video, said it was “with much regret” that he was prevented from travelling to Helgoland from China. There were a few rumbles about the conference being sponsored in part by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office.

Quantum physicists would also do well to find out more about the philosophy of science. Questions like the role of the observer, the nature of measurement, and the meaning of non-locality are central to quantum physics but are philosophical as much as scientific. Even knowing the philosophy relevant to the early years of quantum physics is important. As Elise Crull from the City University of New York said: “Physicists ignore this early philosophy at their peril”.

Towards the next century

The conference ended with a debate, chaired by Tracy Northup from the University of Innsbruck, on the next 100 years of quantum physics, where panellists agreed that the field’s ongoing mysteries are what will sustain it. “When we teach quantum mechanics, we should not be hiding the open problems, which are what interest students,” said Lorenzo Maccone from the University of Pavia in Italy. “They enjoy hearing there’s no consensus on, say the Wigner’s friend paradox. They seem engaged [and it shows] physics is not something dead.”

The importance of global links in science was underlined too. “Big advances usually come from international collaboration or friendly competition,” said panellist Gerd Leuchs from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. “We should do everything we can to keep up collaboration. Scientists aren’t better people but they share a common language. Maintaining links across borders dampens violence.”

Leuchs also reminded the audience of the importance of scientists admitting they aren’t always right. “Scientists are often viewed as being arrogant, but we love to be proved wrong and we should teach people to enjoy being wrong,” he said. “If you want to be successful as a scientist, you have to be willing to change your mind. This is something that can be useful in the rest of society.”

I’ll leave the final word to Max Lock – a postdoc from the Technical University of Vienna – who is part of a new generation of quantum physicists who have grown up with the weird but entirely self-consistent world of quantum physics. Reflecting on what happened at Helgoland, Lock said he was struck most by the contrast between what was being celebrated and the celebration itself.

“Heisenberg was an audacious 23-year-old whose insight spurred on a community of young and revolutionary thinkers,” he remarked. “With the utmost respect for the many years of experience and achievements that we saw on the stage, I’m quite sure that if there’s another revolution around the corner, it’ll come from the young members of the audience who are ready to turn the world upside down again.”

• Tracy Northup and Michelle Simmons appear alongside fellow quantum physicist Peter Zoller on the 19 June 2025 episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast

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