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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I've actually been warned against their physics department for grad school. The other rumour I heard is that Harvard is even worse (for physics grad students). Tons of toxic behaviour like sabotaging labmates in the name of competition and advisors holding onto students for like a year after they should have graduated to pump out that last paper from them.

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Physics and bio departments tend to be the most toxic. Students have no BATNA.

Actually, I've heard that chemistry departments are a standout in terms of abuse and that seems true just from the students I've talked to at my institution. There's like this weird old school attitude of "this is the way we've always done it" so I'm going to pass you through the flames too. Add that to the motivation of "if I can just get through this then I can get a cushy pharma job".

Come to think of it, the news stories I remember (just off the top of my head) of advisors pushing their students to the point of suicide were chem. advisors.

Chemistry leads the pack in toxicity. See E.J. Corey. Physics is pretty okay these days on average, though I've heard of a few icky groups.

I'm a bit surprised to hear it put this way. Aren't physics students usually welcome in finance as quants?

(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment.

(2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true.

(3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs.

Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the CS route, but most aren't. You need to do basic programming to do physics, but not industry-grade software engineering.

Most employed programmers can't do "industry grade engineering". Physics grad students are plenty capable, with a boot camp if needed.

It's not a hard set of skills for physics grad students to pick up, but it's a bit more than a boot camp. Most of the deep stuff is there. There's a lot of shallow stuff at this point, though.

Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).

There are definitely unpleasant quant shops. But there are pleasant ones, too. Interviewing with shops is like asking people to dance. If you stop after the first rejection, you're doing it wrong.

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