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Wellness Wednesday for September 28, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I feel pretty unsecure about the future. I immensely regret my Physics degree, probably the biggest regret. All the areas interesting to me (astro and nuclear) are dead end and becoming more and more computational so I will probably end up as a programmer, which I found easy to understand but one of the most boring profession in existence (heresy, I know), or I can pursue some experimental condensed matter specialization and trying to find work in material science, better than programming. In other words, I was fascinated with the idea of Physics and with studying Physics but hate all the profession I am qualified for.

TLDR: I wish I had done Medical School as my mother wished.

one of the most boring profession in existence

Elaborate? Programming is very varied. People are different, but while I can see a physics grad disliking copypaste webdev stuff, most physics people I know find something like neural net interpretability or datastructures or programming language design interesting? (not really specific suggestions just illustrating)

Also, a physics degree is good evidence that you're very smart and capable of doing complex work, and a variety of employers that pay well look for physics grads (although often for coders).

Programming is very varied. People are different, but while I can see a physics grad disliking copypaste webdev stuff

Yes, I think this may be one of my dislike: copypaste numerical data analysis algorithms until you get a semblance of a plot without really understanding the software. Maybe I should self study some real Computer Science and Software Engineering.

a variety of employers that pay well look for physics grads

I hope. Threads on reddit or other specialist forums do not seem to share the same enthusiasm but maybe there's a self selection bias with people online being more prone to be unemployed or in some kind of hardship.

My experience a decade ago was that Physics grads were second only to CS grads in hiring for programmers. (Math would probably have gotten second place if there were more of them.)

Reddit career advise is just horrible. 95% of what you read is written by either total losers or students who are just repeating doomer shit they heard from the aforementioned losers.