Education
For Science and Technical Careers
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New Master's Degrees
Jesse H. Ausubel, Program Director
Professional
Master's Degrees Promise Quicker Entry Into Jobs
Jean Kumagia
Although the need to reform graduate education in the sciences has been widely debated for much of this decade, actual changes have been slow to occur. Given the shortage of research jobs for PhD scientists, much of the attention has focused on making the doctoral degree more "practical . But a few reform-minded schools are instead recasting the master's degree- typically either a stepping stone to the PhD or a consolation prize for students who drop out of doctorate programs-as a respectable diploma in its own right. Comparable to an MBA or a law degree, but with a technical component, these new professional master's degrees are intended to prepare students for careers outside of academia-managing industrial research projects, for example, or dealing with intellectual property rights, or working as a liaison between a company's R&D and business operations.
There are now about 50 professional master's degree programs in science and mathematics in the US, according to Sheila Tobias a longtime advocate of science education reform and currently an adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is funding the startup of such programs at five universities. This new breed of master's tends to be in an emerging or interdisciplinary field, such as biotechnology, says Tobias, or it may apply scientific training to some nontechnical application, such as financial mathematics.
Four of the Sloan-funded schools will offer degrees in physics or physics-related disciplines: the University of Southern California's physics for business applications program; the University of Arizona's applied and industrial physics program; Michigan State University's program in physics applications; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental monitoring program. USC and Wisconsin will enroll their first students this M, MSU and Arizona the following year.
From school
to work
While few would argue that the PhD is still the degree of choice for
the professoriat, there is growing recognition that it is not the most
appropriate or the most efficient path to many nonacademic jobs. That's
the message being sent by both employers and students. University of
Arizona physicist Michael Shupe says the impetus to revise the master's
program in his department came from alumni. "In some years, close to
half of our graduates go directly into industry," says Shupe. "They
know what it's like to work there, and they've encouraged us to go in
this direction."
Boosters of the professional master's degree say the two-year programs will groom students to become research managers in industry, as well as at national labs and government agencies. "What we've been hearing is that there's a tremendous demand for people who not only are technically proficient, but can plan and manage a project, particularly with a commercial orientation," says Tim Olsen, who is coordinating the Wisconsin program.
Indeed, a common complaint from business employers is that PhDs fresh out of school have trouble adapting to a corporate environment, says Hans Bozler, a physicist at USC. "It just doesn't occur to them that they were hired to make money for the company." One way to get students thinking about the bottom line is through internships' an important component of the professional master's curriculum. Students at Arizona, for example, could be placed with a company in Tucson's burgeoning optics industry, and Shupe expects many graduates to end up at the same companies where they intern.
MSU's professional master's is designed for "people who aren't interested in spending their lives doing basic research but who want to do a bit more physics and are impatient to get into the industrial world at a high level," says Phillip Duxbury, who is overseeing the new physics degree. The curriculum offers two concentrations: One introduces the characterization and fabrication techniques used commercial R&D labs, and the other focuses on computation. In addition, Students will take a ten-weekend workshop on business fundamentals, such as accounting and patent law.
The idea behind the Wisconsin program is to familiarize students with remote sensing technology, and then show them how to apply those techniques to environmental problems in transportation, land use, and other areas, explains Olsen. Many places are seeking that kind of expertise, from satellite manufacturers, to developers of image processing software, to utility companies, he adds. In fact, two companies have already expressed an interest in hiring graduates, although the first class won't enroll until this fall.
At USC, a pair of courses, in complex systems and computational methods in physics, have been specifically developed for the new master's curriculum, which also includes course work in the business school. Bozler says that in designing the new degree, "We asked [employers], 'Well, why do you hire physicists?'The answer was their ability to organize disparate information and develop models of all sorts, and to do something that's predictive with those models." Bozler hopes that a few of the professional master's students will go on to the PhD. "The biggest concern [among faculty] was that we not do anything to jeopardize our PhD program," by siphoning off students or resources, Bozler says. "I think we were able to convince them that it's not a zero-sum game, that this could actually increase the flow of good students through the department."
Hopes and hurdles
Recruiting students to the new, untested programs may take some doing.
The drastic drop-off in physics bachelor's degree recipients in recent
years means there is already fierce competition for students among the
existing graduate programs. "They're trying to snap up every undergrad
they can," notes Bozler. "They're thinking in terms of staffing their
own PhD programs, and not thinking too much about alternatives." The
new programs are therefore looking to draw students from other disciplines,
"who may not have thought of applied physics as a career," says Arizona's
Shupe.
It's also not clear who will pay for tuition. Law and business schools expect their students to shoulder the cost of their educations, but will science students, who traditionally enjoy full support, do the same? At USC, Michigan State, and Arizona, the first few classes will be offered teaching assistantships, until - some other kind of support-corporate-funded grants, for instance--can be worked out. The Wisconsin pro-gram plans to recruit midcareer professionals, who may be in a better position to pay, or whose employers may foot the bill.
As Duxbury sees it, the professional master's will ultimately be judged by "what kind of jobs the students get and how quickly they move up, how happy they are with those jobs, and how happy their employers are with them." In the longer term, Tobias hopes that "by supplying industry with such versatile people, they'll say, 'We want more people like that.' It's the reverse of the usual demand-supply equation. That's my theory at least, and only time will tell."
This article appeared in the magazine Physics Today, June 1999, Volume 52, Number 6, Pages 54-55.
